Top 5 Seminaries by Enrollment: Data & Trends

According to the latest statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), there are just over three million graduate students in the United States. Nearly 75,000 of these students (2%) are enrolled in a seminary, which is a type of graduate school that offers primarily theological degrees.¹ That number may not seem like a lot, but the percentage of medical and law enrollees is only slightly higher (3% and 3.6%, respectively).

In this article, we’ll take a deeper look at graduate theological education in the United States, including a short guide to seminaries, the largest schools, and recent trends.

A short guide to seminaries

The number & types of seminaries

In the United States, there are currently 245 seminaries accredited by the Commission on Accrediting of The Association of Theological Schools (ATS).² Below you can see a graphical breakdown of members by what ATS calls an institution’s “ecclesial family”: evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic/Orthodox, and Jewish.³

Source: ATS Data Visualization Tool

A majority of US seminaries (57%) are freestanding, which means they are not embedded within an undergraduate institution. The remaining schools that are connected to another institution typically operate as the graduate theological school of a Christian university, or as a school of divinity or department of theology within a comprehensive university. The two largest examples of such embedded schools are Liberty Theological Seminary and Talbot School of Theology, which are connected to Liberty University and Biola University, respectively.

Seminary degree options

The flagship degree at most seminaries is the master of divinity (MDiv), which provides training focused on leadership or service in church and other ministry settings.

ATS also approves a wide variety of master of arts (MA) or similarly named degrees (nearly 250 different options) that allow students to focus on a particular discipline, such as Christian education or leadership.

The final type of master’s-level degree offered at seminaries is a master of theology (ThM) or master of sacred theology (STM), both of which are designed for students who have already completed a theological degree (usually an MDiv) and want more in-depth training, often in preparation for doctoral studies.

At the doctoral level, there are three main categories of programs that somewhat mirror what’s offered at the master’s level. First, the doctor of ministry (DMin) provides advanced training for leadership and service in churches and other ministry settings.

For those who would like advanced training for more specific areas of service, many seminaries offer a variety of doctor of discipline degrees, with the most common being the doctor of education (EdD), doctor of educational ministry (DEdMin), and doctor of intercultural studies (DICS).

Finally, some seminaries offer advanced training for teaching and research through a doctor of philosophy (PhD) or doctor of theology (ThD) program.

How seminary enrollment is tracked

There are two metrics commonly used to describe student enrollment at seminaries. The first is headcount, which refers to the number of students enrolled at any given time (1 student = 1 headcount). As noted at the beginning of this article, total headcount was just under 75,000 students for the 2024–2025 academic year.

The other way to describe student enrollment is full-time equivalency (FTE), which ATS calculates by dividing the total number of credit hours taken at a school by twelve. So a seminary with a hundred students who are all studying full-time (twelve credit hours per semester) would thus have an FTE that is also a hundred. But a school with a hundred students who are primarily studying part-time would have a much lower FTE.

Here’s an enrollment summary from the 2024–2025 academic year for the seminaries enrolling at least a thousand students.

ATS 2024–2025 Annual Data Tables

The top 5 largest seminaries

Here is a more detailed look at the top five seminaries based on headcount.⁴ I’ve purposely limited the information provided to ease readability, but more datapoints about each institution can be found on its website or on the ATS website.

1. Liberty Theological Seminary

• Location: Lynchburg, VA
• Founded: 1973
• Religious affiliation: Evangelical Protestant (Baptist)
• 2024 headcount: 6,168
• Headcount change since 2019: +17%

Liberty provides Logos to its students through a Logos for Education partnership.

2. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

• Location: Louisville, KY
• Founded: 1859
• Religious affiliation: Evangelical Protestant (Southern Baptist)
• 2024 headcount: 3,371
• Headcount change since 2019: +1%

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary provides Logos to its students through a Logos for Education partnership.

3. Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

• Location: Kansas City, MO
• Founded: 1957
• Religious affiliation: Evangelical Protestant (Southern Baptist)
• 2024 headcount: 2,909
• Headcount change since 2019: +28%

4. Dallas Theological Seminary

• Location: Dallas, TX
• Founded: 1924
• Religious affiliation: Evangelical Protestant (non-denominational)
• 2024 headcount: 2,609
• Headcount change since 2019: +8%

Dallas Theological Seminary provides Logos to its students through a Logos for Education partnership.

5. Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

• Location: Fort Worth, TX
• Founded: 1908
• Religious affiliation: Evangelical Protestant (Southern Baptist)
• 2024 headcount: 2,278
• Headcount change since 2019: -8%

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary provides Logos to its students through a Logos for Education partnership.

5 recent seminary trends

Trends in five areas highlight some impactful seminary shifts that have occurred over the past two decades.⁵

1. Online education

Ten years ago, only about 30 percent of seminary students took one or more classes through distance education options (online or in person at an off-campus location). Today, that number is closer to 70 percent, with the vast majority of “distance” students studying online.

The pandemic certainly contributed to this shift, but many seminaries had already begun moving toward more online options after ATS changed its accreditation standards in 2013 to allow entire degrees to be completed online. Currently, only twenty-six ATS member schools in the United States offer courses only in person on their campus.

2. Shorter master of divinity (MDiv) programs

From the establishment of the earliest American seminaries over two hundred years ago through the beginning of the twenty-first century, the preferred model for robust ministry preparation was a three-year program of graduate study following the completion of an undergraduate degree.⁶ The earliest accreditation guidelines (1936) stipulated that this credential—which eventually became known as the master of divinity (MDiv)—should require a minimum of three years of training consisting of at least two semesters each year.

Though a strict credit-hour requirement was never codified, the widespread interpretation of the guideline led to most seminaries offering an MDiv requiring a minimum of ninety credit hours. This remained the standard length of the MDiv until the late-twentieth century, when seminaries began to re-interpret the accreditation guideline to allow for programs requiring as few as seventy-two credit hours. ATS eventually updated its standards in 2010 to explicitly establish that lower threshold as the minimum permissible length for an MDiv.⁷ Now about two-thirds of ATS member schools offer an MDiv requiring fewer than ninety credit hours.

The push toward shorter MDiv programs has almost certainly been an effort designed primarily to stem the steep decline in that program’s overall enrollment over the past two decades. In 2005, American seminaries collectively enrolled just over 32,000 MDiv students. Twenty years later, that number had dropped to 24,633, the lowest MDiv enrollment since 1991, when there were eighty fewer member schools in the United States.

3. Increased enrollment in master of arts programs

As the number of MDiv students has decreased, enrollment in master of arts (MA) programs has skyrocketed. Specifically, there are nearly eight thousand more MA students than a decade ago, with these students comprising about 37 percent of total seminary enrollment in the United States.

There are several reasons for this growth, but a primary contributor is that the sheer number of available programs has grown significantly. Many seminaries have added new programs to their existing MA offerings in areas such as counseling and intercultural studies. There has also been a dramatic increase in the number of schools that have begun to offer MA programs for ministry preparation.⁸ As a result, for the first time in the ATS’s history, the number of MA students across all member schools surpassed the number of MDiv students in 2022.

4. Student diversity

Compared to twenty years ago, the current group of seminary enrollees is substantially more diverse. Although white students still comprise a majority of all seminary enrollees (56%), that percentage is considerably smaller than in 2003 (75%) or 2013 (68%).

Contributing to this growth in non-white enrollment is the fact that the combined population of Asian and Hispanic students has more than doubled over the last two decades.⁹

5. A concentration of enrollment in large evangelical seminaries

The average headcount at seminaries in the United States is 303 students, but what’s interesting is that more than 75 percent of seminaries (191) have an enrollment below that figure. That’s because 45 percent of students are enrolled in the sixteen schools listed in this article that have a headcount of more than one thousand. In other words, nearly half of all student enrollment is concentrated in just 7 percent of seminaries, all of which are evangelical Protestant.

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