bruce-church (https://bruce-church.myopenid.com/) has left a new comment on your post "Bloated Hours, Bloated Costs at Lutheran Seminarie...":
At Concordia St. Louis they now have a food services infrastructure upgrade that started on 18 March. They are also turning the lower floor of a dormitory into a food bank and resell it shop.
Let me translate that for you. The seminary is admitting that they have so few residential 4-year M Div students left that they now convert dormitory space for other purposes. They are also saying that their students are so poor due to high tuition costs that they need a first class food pantry and Good Will-type donation center/resell it shop. Another point is that their M Div program is so bloated that many take 5 years to complete it, and in order to wile away that amount of time and pay for it all, most students are now married, and dormitories are not suitable for couples and families.
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GJ - The students fund the seminary costs with their student loans and high tuition because the synod offerings give almost nothing to the seminaries.
St. Louis and Mequon both spent millions on their campus facilities to make them more attractive to the people studying there. Both schools have declined in enrollment since then.
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LPC has left a new comment on your post "Re-Gentrifying Our Lady of Sorrows (Concordia, St....":
Bruce,
Don't these Sin-nods have money? Why do not they just fund these students specially the deserving ones? Why does it always have to be that you pay up or else, no education?
LPC
5 comments:
The professors that were laid off a couple years ago to make ends meet are probably ruing the fact that the seminary is now proceeding on a multi-million dollar construction project:
Phase One of latest construction project at Concordia St. Louis:
http://phaseone.csl.edu/
Main Page:
http://www.csl.edu/
"...the synod offerings give almost nothing to the seminaries."
I would wager that 98% of LCMS laymen are not aware of that fact, nor of the fact that seminary graduates have at least $20,000 in student loans (or more if they begin seminary with tens of thousands of dollars in undergraduate student loans).
You would think that seminary support would count as obligatory missions support. Wouldn't it be wonderful if LCMS seminary grads with no calls, but also with no debt, could be used to plant new churches.
Where does the offering plate money go? Does it go to support half-baked, ineffective Church Growth programs? Where is the "Growth" in knowledge of the Lutheran confessions among the laity. I don't get it.
Are the goals outlined in "It's Time!" and in the Koinonia Project mere wishful thinking? Are the people at the highest levels of the LCMS paying attention to insightful reflections such as yours?
Autocrats run the various synods to take care of themselves, their families, and their friends. If you doubt it, follow their doctrine or lack of doctrine over time. Time is the key. Most people do not connect the points over gaps in time. They tend to forget or fail to see the patterns.
Professor Sauer of Ft. Wayne says that the St. Louis seminary purposely competes for second career students, or else St. Louis would close. President Dale Meyer, President of Concordia Sem, St. Louis, says that student tuition pays for 40% of the budget, which is a very high percentage for a higher education school.
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Talking about the Seminaries
by Paul Sauer, January 14, 2010, p. 7:
http://www.lutheranforum.org/blogs/Talking_about_the_Seminaries/
Whereas before second-career students or those with limited academic potential would have gone to Ft. Wayne, now Ft. Wayne’s academic reputation was beginning to rival St. Louis’s. St. Louis, recognizing that they now had to compete for second-career students with families to survive, built a hole neighborhood of family houses for their students and welcomed students without the foundation in biblical languages through an ever-growing intensive summer language class.
Talking about the Seminaries
by Paul Sauer — January 14, 2010
http://www.lutheranforum.org/blogs/Talking_about_the_Seminaries/
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How Many Seminaries? by Dale A. Meyer, President, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Concordia Journal, Summer 2009, p. 228
http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/FeedEnclosure/csl-public.1572099114.01572099121.2724955894/enclosure.pdf
excerpt: Foundations help both seminaries reach about 60% of needed annual revenue. The rest comes from tuition income after student aid is given, unrestricted bequests, auxiliary enterprises, and from endowments, though the recesion dried that up.
More on the first-class food pantry the sem students need to keep from going hungry:
http://concordiastl.com/HWTH/news
excerpt: relocation of the Seminary’s Food Bank out of the basement in Loeber Hall and into renovated space within the Wartburg-Koburg Student Commons. The Seminary’s Food Bank supplies students and their families with free food and personal items in quantities based on the size of the family. The replacement walk-in freezer will be large enough to accommodate frozen foods used by the dining hall kitchen staff as well as donations of frozen meats and vegetables made available to families through the Food Bank. Display cases will initially be installed in the existing Food Bank, then relocated to the Wartburg-Koburg Student Commons when renovation work is complete. An additional benefit of replacing the existing equipment is that the new unit will be more energy-efficient, and reduce annual maintenance costs over the obsolete unit it replaces.
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