Drop-outs

I have exchanged a couple of emails recently with an old friend from bible college who lives out in LA, teaching college speech classes and trying his hand at acting on the side. When I told him that I was no longer employed by a church and really didn't expect to be employed by one again in the future, it launched a discussion about the "ministry drop-out" phenomena. My friend remembers hearing in a bible college class once that 80% of graduates from our particular college would not be working in ministry within 7 years after graduating. We both chuckle about being a part of that statistic -- him lasting one year and me something like 3.

Of those friends from college who I would deem my closest, I can only think of 2 currently employed by a church or working under the broad heading of "ministry". Heck, there is a significant percentage of those friends who not only have little use for their degree but hardly even still subscribe to the theology that motivated them to attend bible college in the first place.

This all kind of perplexes me, and I've yet to identify what I think the root of all of this is. I know why I no longer work in some sort of evangelical ministerial capacity, but the reasons for others are not necessarily the same. It doesn't seem fair to pinpoint the school itself as the root cause, yet it would seem plausible that it plays a factor. Modern American Churches themselves obviously have their hand in it as well. But the answer to cumulative riddle of all of these ministry/Evangelical Christianity "drop-outs" still eludes me.