Science Discourse Instrument
Category: Teacher and Leader Development
Long-standing compositional disparities and more recent concerns about the health of the teaching profession highlight the need to increase our understanding of the pipeline into K–12 teaching. Leveraging data from 11.5 million college applicants from 2014–2025, we provide the most detailed description to date of who is interested in teaching in the United States. We document substantially lower interest among men, students of color, and high-achieving students. Comparing teaching to similar career paths, such as nursing or social work, we find that racial/ethnic disparities are far greater for teaching, but gender and academic achievement gaps are comparable or less severe. We also find evidence that students interested in teaching submit fewer applications, are less likely to apply to selective colleges, and tend to apply to colleges close to their home. Controlling for application behavior greatly attenuates the relationship between teaching interest and academic achievement, suggesting that ambition or a desire for prestige is a more salient predictor of who becomes a teacher than achievement. We find corroborating evidence from applicants' teacher-recommenders, who rate students interested in teaching as having lower intellectual promise and self-confidence, but greater concern for others. Finally, career interest in teaching and other lower-wage helping careers has declined by roughly 20% over the past decade, while nursing interest has exploded.
Keywords
Teachers, teacher pipeline, labor markets
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/4sj9-dp06
