bruce-church (http://bruce-church.myopenid.com/) has left a new comment on your post "Lutheran Seminary Fraud: Students Are Bankrupting ...":
Throughout the interview, Rev. Herb Mueller never said anything about bringing the price of seminary education down so more non-calling congregations could actually afford to call a candidate without monstrous student loan bills. He instead blamed the unaffordability factor on the rising cost of health insurance and benefits.
He did mention that the LCMS should work more with congregations to get them ready to call a pastor, and also pastors should be willing to accept calls where they will need a part-time job to make ends meet.
He did mention that in the past that seminary recruiters did include non-calling congregations in their figures to make it seem as though there were hundreds of long-term unfilled vacancies, and said it was not exactly dishonest to do so, but it wasn't exactly telling the whole truth, either.
I wonder whether, without that bit of misinformation, all the building projects at the seminaries would have been started. Surely that disinformation prematurely shut down any talk of merging the seminaries into one campus, or at least two campuses with one administration, and now those seminaries are as costly as ever with fewer students than ever, too.
He said that LCMS's World Relief (Harrison's old outfit) did help seminary students who didn't receive calls in the past, like the 13 Ft. Wayne students last year for some time.
He mentioned that back in 1939 his father didn't receive a call for two years due to the bad economy then. I say that all those kind of stories are quaint but irrelevant since back then the students weren't greatly indebted by the colleges and seminaries to the federal government. So they could go back to their towns or farms and wait for a long delayed call, and it was no great loss to them. Synod officials should not gauge their conduct by antiquated standards.
----
Issues Etc: The Shortage of Pastoral Calls in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod
Interviewee: Pastor Herb Mueller, First Vice President of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod
http://issuesetc.org/podcast/828083111H1S1.mp3
