You may have heard that Martin Luther College (MLC) is facing the challenge of having lost license eligibility for newly enrolled students entering teacher training programs. How did this happen?

Well, it’s not because we somehow were producing poor candidates for the teaching ministry. In 2025, The Wall Street Journal ranked MLC number one in the nation among all colleges and universities in preparing students for their chosen careers. That also fits with Money magazine listing MLC as “4.5 stars”—putting the school in its rankings among the top 100 colleges/universities in the country.

Yet, using a math analogy, while we are getting the “right answer” (strong teacher graduates), we are struggling to “show our work” with the kind of concrete evidence that the Minnesota Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB) requires.

Understand that MLC remains a fully accredited college, granting accredited degrees to our graduates. Our teacher candidates also graduate with ministry certification and are eligible for calls into the teaching ministry. What is at issue is whether our teacher graduates are also eligible to apply to be licensed by the state of Minnesota. Such licensure is an important objective evaluation on MLC’s teaching training programs, and it becomes especially important when graduates find themselves in a location where there are no WELS schools. Public schools typically require licensure.

Realize that for the next three years our students who began when their program was still license eligible will continue to be license eligible when they graduate. Our concern is restoring license eligibility for incoming education students before they graduate so they too will be license eligible.

Our commitment is to do all we can to have license eligibility restored before any of this fall’s incoming students are anywhere near graduation.

We are taking multiple steps so that, under God’s blessing, we reach that goal. We have provided more partners to work together on licensure by appointing a professor to a new position of assistant provost for assessment and excellence as well as reorganizing our entire licensure leadership team. We have also hired experienced consultants who have helped other colleges and universities give clear evidence that they are meeting the Minnesota state standards for teacher preparation.

Our goal is to spend this academic year strengthening how we evaluate our teacher preparation programs and continuing to improve them. Then we will apply to have our programs reinstated as license eligible. Even though PELSB rules state that a college must wait three years to reapply, PELSB representatives have repeatedly made it clear that colleges can submit a variance for that process to commence much sooner. Our commitment is to do all we can to have license eligibility restored before any of this fall’s incoming students are anywhere near graduation.

In all of this, we trust God knows how to bring us through this in a way that will make MLC even stronger as the WELS college of ministry.

Read more(opens in new tab) and look for future updates.