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Quick Facts

  • St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary (SVOTS) is a graduate professional school chartered and approved by the Board of Regents for and on behalf of the Education Department of the State of New York. 
  • SVOTS is incorporated in the State of New York as a non-profit organization, in accordance with section 501 (c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of the United States.
  • SVOTS offers the M.Div., M.A., Th.M., and D.Min. degrees and has been an accredited member of the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada (ATS) since 1973.
  • St Vladimir’s Online School of Theology is an accessible extension of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. We offer non-degree online courses for the public, lay ministers, and clergy. Our non-credit courses are taught by the dynamic faculty of St Vladimir’s Seminary. 
  • Currently, 97 students are enrolled at St Vladimir’s Seminary. Students represent different Orthodox Church jurisdictions and come from many countries around the globe. 
  • St Vladimir's Seminary employs 9 full-time and 22 part-time faculty members. For the 2024-2025 academic year, the ratio of faculty to students is 1:3.
  • Administrators, faculty, and staff at SVOTS are committed to a model of teaching in service to the Church that is Christ-centered, student-focused, and education-driven.
  • Annual tuition at SVOTS is $13,000 per year. Costs of room and board vary for single students and married families.
  • Over the past five years, SVOTS has awarded an average of $600,000 annually in scholarship monies to students. 
  • SVOTS provides dormitory facilities for single men and women, and 35 apartment units and suites for married students and their families. 
  • Most faculty members reside on campus, thus building community life and offering accessibility to students.
  • SVOTS is located in the New York metropolitan area, near several Orthodox Christian archdiocesan centers and the largest concentration of Orthodox Christians in the United States.
  • SVOTS counts over 50 Orthodox hierarchs, 1,300 priests and deacons, and 1,000 laity (both women and men), among its alumni. Among the hierarchy are one patriarch, archbishops, bishops, and several metropolitans.
  • The Seminary's Board of Trustees is made up of bishops, clergy, and laity from several Orthodox Christian jurisdictions.
  • The majority of alumni who graduate from the M.Div. program at SVOTS are ordained to the Holy Orders.
  • Eight Eastern and Oriental Orthodox patriarchs worldwide have received honorary doctoral degrees from SVOTS.
  • SVOTS has a spacious library that holds over 200,000 volumes, and several rare books, for example, an original manuscript of Rachmaninoff's Vespers; an English New Testament printed in Rheims in 1582; and the Ostrog Bible, published in 1583 and the first book printed in the Cyrillic alphabet.
  • The Bibliovation open-source system (accessible from this URL: https://svots.bibliovation.com/) aids researchers worldwide interested in the Orthodox Christian faith. (Interested researchers do not need a St Vladimir’s email address to access the catalog to search the holdings. An institutional email address is only necessary for seminary community members, students, and faculty/staff, to log in to the catalog to access certain features of the catalog for their purposes.)
  • SVOTS is a founding member of the New York Area Theological Library Association (NYATLA), and participates in the METRO system for inter-library loans; the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC, URL: https://svots.bibliovation.com/) is available to the public through the seminary Web page: www.svots.edu.
  • St Vladimir's Seminary Press (SVS Press) has published more than 500 titles since its inception in the early 1960s. It is the largest publisher in the world of English-language materials on the Orthodox Christian faith: biblical studies, liturgical studies, patristics, iconography, and iconology, church history, Christian biography, hagiography, spirituality, and Christian ethics. The Press accounts for 29% of the Seminary’s gross annual revenue.
  • As of June 30, 2023, the SVOTS endowment amounts to $17M, of which $13.2M is permanently restricted, and $3.8M is temporarily restricted. 
  • SVOTS began the practice of independent certified audits of its financial records in 1963; 2023 marked 60 years of clean financial audits. Annual budgets are reviewed and approved by the members of a  pan-Orthodox Board of Trustees. 
  • Our annual reports on finances and the impact of St Vladimir’s Seminary may be downloaded in PDF format on our website.
  • SVOTS faculty serve the Church by outreach to the faithful-- presenting retreats, lectures, and seminars to edify and uplift our brothers and sisters in Christ.
  • SVOTS interacts with other Orthodox Christian seminaries, including the student-driven Orthodox Inter-Seminary Movement (OISM); an inter-Orthodox library consortium; alumni serving as faculty and staff at St Herman's Seminary (OCA), St Tikhon's Seminary (OCA), and Holy Trinity Seminary (ROCOR); and participation in collegial events, such as the annual basketball game with our sister school, St Tikhon's Seminary.