Heeding the call: seminary enrollment and the business cycle

Abstract

We examine a panel of divinity school enrollments to explore the motivations of prospective clergy considering post-graduate training in preparation for the ministry. Employing the fixed-effects within estimator allows us to see pecuniary motivations while controlling for the differences between types of divinity school and denomination. We find decisions by prospective clergy to enroll in seminary are responsive to changes in the business cycle as well as salaries. Our results reinforce the view that variation in opportunity costs associated with business cycles plays a significant role in the timing of human capital formation even for those with mostly nonmonetary motivations.

Notes

¹Bloom (1971) provides an extensive review of this research.

²Greenbaum (2004) employed a similar strategy.

³Individual schools may not have either maintained ATS membership or fully completed the annual ATS survey from which this data is collected in each year of the panel.

⁴While the denominations under this grouping may be quite different from each other, the small number of groups (6) and corresponding sample size (n = 52) did not warrant further disaggregation.

⁵For example, Catholic, Episcopalian and Methodist denominations.

⁶In essence, ρ captures the contribution to the change in R ² that would be expected had the individual group effects been explicitly included as dummy variables in OLS rather than removed using the within estimator.