bruce-church (https://bruce-church.myopenid.com/) has left a new comment on your post "LCMS Seminary Cost Scandal: Fabulous Costs To Supp...":
Average LCMS seminary graduates owes $30 grand at least. 10% of seminary graduates owe over $50 grand.
The pastors must all be choosing the 30-year payoff option on their student loans (rather than the more common 10-year payoff), since a representative sample of LCMS pastors (between 1 and 30+ years of service) were asked how much student debt they still had to pay off, and the median figure was a whopping $18,100!
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The Pastor Debt Monster
http://steadfastlutherans.org/?p=24918
LCEF conducted a survey in 2011. This was a similar survey to one conducted in 2006. The respondents ranged from newly called workers to those having been in the ministry several (30+) years. This tends to “skew” the medians. The respondents were nearly equally divided into ranges of 0-10, 10- 19, 20-29 and 30+ years in the ministry, The median numbers for those in each category, for example, is not available. However a couple of things that jump out: The median level of outstanding STUDENT LOAN debt was $18.1K. On the surface, that doesn’t appear alarming. However this figure is 20% higher than reported in 2006. In addition, the number of workers that incurred student loan debt increased from 48% to 61%. Those reporting outstanding debt in excess of $50K increased from 4% in 2006 to 10% in 2011. An increase of 250%!....
Based on this data my guess that the average (not median) for my 2009 graduating class was at least $30k per student is probably accurate. That’s over $4 mil for the graduating class of CSL/CTSFW of 2009 alone.
