The share of college students majoring in education has plummeted over the past 50 years:
Needless to say, you don't need a degree in education to become a teacher. Most teachers have degrees in English or history or some other subject. Still.
24 thoughts on “Raw data: Degrees in education”
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Just a guess, but I suspect this is merely a reflection of women pursuing a far greater variety of degrees than they did several decades ago, when teaching was one of the few careers considered as options.
My thought exactly.
Back in 2012, I did an article about the fact that of the 186,000 people who were credentialed as new teachers, only 77,000 of them got new jobs.
Ed schools routinely overproduced ed majors for many years. They might have quit doing so, which would cause a decrease in production without affecting supply.
As you note (and thanks for doing so!) most high school academic teachers go through some other degree. So the way to check that would be to see how many secondary ed credentials are produced each year, which is an entirely different metric.
Worth remembering, too, that the largest consumer of elementary school teachers, California, didn't even offer an education major for nearly 60 years and although they changed the law back in 2017, I don't think any college has yet started offering an ed degree. Pretty sure the state still bans secondary subject majors from getting an ed major.
I wonder about the metric shown in the chart--if more people are going to college, so the number of degrees has increased a lot faster than the population, then the drop in percentage shown may be partly an artifact of that population factor.
I think what would be relevant would be to see the number of Ed degrees per capita (i.e., as a percentage of total population), and also the number of Ed degrees per school-age children (i.e., K-12).
Why would you get a degree that is only good for teaching if you can get a degree that has broader applicability and likely more interesting course work.
Bingo. I taught high school for two years, but my degree was math.
I taught college-level math for several years. Your job was much harder than mine.
True, you do not need a degree in education to become a teacher. But you do need a teaching credential. If you have a BA or BS, you can get the credential by getting a no thesis masters degree in education! So I wonder if there is a source to show the number of those granted each year.
Also, with respect. the majority of teachers do not have degrees in English or history or some other subject. Does he mean degrees other than education degrees? What is Kevin's source for that statement?
"Also, with respect. the majority of teachers do not have degrees in English or history or some other subject. "
The majority of high school teachers do not have degrees in education. They might have a degree in english ed or math ed but those aren't overseen by the education school.
Now, given that elementary school teachers teach far,far fewer students than high school teachers, the elementary school teachers majoring in ed may be numerically higher. But even a lot of elementary school teachers major in something else. As I mentioned, California didn't even offer an education degree for 60 years or so.
The fact is you can get a degree in anything to teach. It's the credential program and (most importantly) the credential test past that determines what you teach. I have a degree in english but credentials in english, history, and math. I mostly teach math.
In my home state, to remain in the teaching force you need to earn a master's degree. I wonder what the trend is like for master's degrees in education?
My wife said F'K it when California required an extra year equivalent to a masters degree. She popped two more kids and enjoyed being a mom till the last was in school full time. Then worked for the IRS till they asked her to lie on TV. Then she started working for CPA. She took the Becker prep course and won a Sells award. The CPA association did not like that so many women were top test scorers that they added a calculus requirement. Ha that didn't work.
She taught accounting a a JC and worked as a CPA. She hid her talents under a bushel.
"Most teachers have degrees in English or history or some other subject."
I guess ti depends on what level. My wife is an elementary school teacher and the vast majority of her colleagues have education degrees.
I suspect it's a matter of more people getting bachelor's degrees while demand for schoolteachers is not rising. What's the absolute number of education degrees, as opposed to percentage?
Edit: Looking at the chart again, I notice that the big decline came in the 1970s as the baby boomers were leaving school and being replaced with the smaller Gen X.
Worth more than just tangential mention, what people need in order to teach in public schools varies incredibly between states. In PA the requirements have been tight enough that you almost have to have an ED degree to teach in public schools. We had a very few dual majors but the extra coursework and practice teaching usually meant either taking longer to graduate, which is expensive and bad for university metrics, or giving up income that helped cover costs. And there weren't many programs available to qualify graduates with other degrees within a year or year and a half-- it was very hard to do in a reasonable time. CA sounds incredibly different, but I think the rest of the Northeast is much more like PA.
I agree with Ken Rhodes about the explosion of college graduates affecting the proportion of degrees in ED.
But also, the fairly steep drop 1970-1985 and the longer, slower slide 1990-2018 look offhand like they'd track very well against the declining size of birth cohorts over that time. Again heavily localized outside of some Sunbelt localities and probably, I'd guess, most strongly felt where certification requirements have been stiffest. We were hearing about, and trying to work around, a declining college-age population in-state since probably 2005 or maybe earlier, but the cohorts have been shrinking since the baby boom.
You absolutely do not need an ED degree to teach in PA schools. Every state offers credential programs for post-baccalaureate work. What you may mean is the *credential* program has to be run by the ed schools, but I'm pretty sure PA has alternate credential programs as well.
We tried several times to work out a post-baccalaureate credentialing track for our majors, pairing with a nearby college that had that kind of program on their books (it was really the only one in a several-county radius that even nodded toward post-bacc certification). We couldn't do it because of the pre-reqs their program needed. It may be different in the eastern quarter of the state where there's more competition for student headcount among more colleges, and probably much more teacher turnover.
But-- while you're surely right that there's no *formal requirement* for an ED degree, there is a long menu of required subjects that have to be on your transcript and the courses that meet them are offered within the schools of ED. Students could dual-major, but only if they were very, very good at pre-planning their programs. We had several of those. But they had to start out in ED in order to get their required courses in at the right times.
Things may have changed, because I was last involved in this almost 10 years ago and both teacher hiring and student interest in ED certification have cratered. The cratering started almost right after the 2008 crash, though, so maybe not. Bureaucracies aren't generally known for their responsiveness to changing trends, and the state legislature tends to be even slower, so I doubt that the situation is likely to have loosened up in any significant way.
So that's why I said you "almost have to have an ED degree."
If you are teaching a secondary ed subject, the credential test requirements are substantively more demanding and generally these aren't referred to as "education degrees". They're usually referred to as either [Subject] Education or "Secondary Education-[Subject]".
In Pennsylvania they may be under the ed school, I dunno, but they still wouldn't be counted as "education majors". If you major in math education, you aren't counted as an education major.
And a lot of people don't decide to be a teacher until after graduating. They go back to school for the credential. Those aren't counted as ed majors, either.
Whenever the discussion is about "education majors" they are referring to people who got a BA in education without a subject specialization, and if they are teaching they are overwhelmingly elementary school and special ed.
But I agree that the courses that are needed for the credential are all in the ed school.
Public School teachers have been under attack for the past 35 years.
Even if I wanted to teach, I'd want a more flexible degree.
Considering there's a coin-flip chance the Department of Education will be repurposed into a collection agency for for-profit religious indoctrination centers, and even if it isn't, the people pushing that keep trying to throw struggle sessions for you, having options is a good thing.
I just read that an Oklahoma has just approved the first religious charter school (Catholic). That isn’t constitutional but the fact that our Supreme Court is dominated by rightwing Catholics or people who were brought up in that world, I wouldn’t count on them upholding our right to not fund other people’s religions. I just wish some Muslim group or maybe Scientologists would have the guts to propose their own voucher school just to see how the religious right reacts.
I remember a few decades back California voted for vouchers for religious schools. Then the Wiccans said if it passed they would open their own schools…..
When was the last time you were in a school? That only applies to high school teachers. Middle and primary teachers have degrees in education, padded with one or two content courses.
Not since 2002 and No Child Left Behind. Middle school teachers have to have single subject credentials.
https://d2qrgk75cp62ej.cloudfront.net/sites/main/files/file-attachments/psl-f092_nclb_teachers_new_to_the_profession.pdf
You don't need any content courses to become a teacher. I'm qualified in three academic subjects. You just have to pass a difficult credential test. The pedagogy requirements are what you can't get out of.
We don’t have a national system. There are fifty different education systems in the US run by the states which have different requirements. Some are common to most states because they are tied to federal funding or requirements but states have a lot of power to run their systems. Here in NC we might soon have a really wild one if the Republican running for State Superintendent Michelle Morrow wins. She’s an extremist nut. For starters a group she worked for claims Obama is Hitler’s descendant.
"There are fifty different education systems in the US run by the states which have different requirements"
Yes, absolutely. Blanket statements about certification patterns and requirements across the country necessarily won't encompass them all. And that's a blanket statement.