Structural Effects of Professional Schools on Professional Socialization: The Case of Protestant Clergymen

This paper examines the structural effects of professional schools in the process of professional socialization. Fourteen hundred and fifty-one ministers who are relatively recent graduates of twenty-one Protestant seminaries constitute the sample. Seminaries are grouped into three types according to the modal ranking of the graduates of each seminary of four goals of theological education. These types are interpreted as approximating the major historic types of theology schools. A measure of each respondent's theological orientation is utilized as the socialization outcome (dependent variable). Blau's method for analyzing structural effects is used. Additional variables-parental socioeconomic status, denomination, respondent's preference for the school he attended, his peer group's orientation, and type of current ministry-are examined to test for spuriousness between seminary type and theological orientation. The data show that the structure of the schools is related to theological orientation in the predicted direction even when the additional variables are introduced into the analysis. The Scottish poet, Robert Burns, once concluded that the net effect of a university education was to turn the entering "bulls" into graduating "asses." Whether or not one agrees with this rather invidious appraisal of education, it is to be noted that Burns believed that educational institutions have a marked and detectable effect on their graduates. It is the purpose of this paper to report some of the findings of a larger research project (Carroll, 1970) investigating the effects on their graduates of one type of educational institution-Protestant theological seminaries. More specifically, the purpose is to examine the effects of different types of theological seminaries on the outcomes of professional socialization. A "structural effects"' design is used. THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS In their study of medical education, Merton et al. (1957:287) define professional socialization for the medical student as the processes through which [the medical student] develops his professional self, with its characteristic values, attitudes, knowledge and skills fusing these into a more or less consistent set of dispositions, which govern his behavior in a wide variety of professional (and extra-professional) situations. This definition is helpful in that it stresses that socialization into a profession is more than a cognitive process. To be sure, cognitive aspects -for example, transmission of the profession's specialized knowledge and skills-are an important part of socialization into a profession; however, agents of professional socialization are generally concerned also with the shaping of values and norms related to the practice of the profession. In short, they are concerned with the development of the recruit's professional self. As will be further emphasized in this paper, this is especially true of socialization into the ministry; however, it is also the case with other professions, as the following statement of a business educator indicates. Emphasizing that transmission of specific content was not the basic concern of business education, Kenneth * This paper is a revision of an earlier paper read at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, Georgia, April 1970. Appreciation is expressed to Professor Jeffrey Hadden of Tulane University for permission to use data gathered for the Danforth Study of Campus Ministries for secondary analysis in this study. ' The particular method of analysis used is that suggested by Peter Blau (1960). For similar concerns with "structural" or "compositional" effects with different strategies of analysis, see Davis et al. (1961), and Tannenbaum and Bachman (1968).