Failing to Master Divinity: How Institutional Type, Financial Debt, Community Acceptance, and Gender Affect Seminary Graduates’ Career Choices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seminaries, as both educational and religious organizations, have the goal of training religious leaders. In this article, I analyze the factors associated with the breakdown of this process, i.e. when a seminarian does not want to be in a religious career. I offer four reasons for this breakdown: institutional type, financial strain, community acceptance, and gender. Drawing on recent survey data of 3015 American and Canadian seminarians graduating with the Master of Divinity degree from 136 seminaries from the Association of Theological Schools, I interpret results from multilevel logistic regressions testing five hypotheses. I find that Master of Divinity graduates who attend a university-affiliated seminary are less likely to want to be in a religious career, while those who feel more accepted within the seminary community are more likely. Educational debt has no effect. Most importantly, gender has profound effects on the choice to enter a religious career.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".