Sharp Nationwide Enrollment Drop in Teacher Prep Programs Cause for Alarm

Declining enrollment in teacher prep courses is a harbinger of a crisis in America’s schools.

JULIA ALVAREZ, A 21-year-old senior at Michigan State University, is part of a disappearing demographic: those pursuing a career as an educator.

"Why I really want to become a teacher is because I want to go back and make my community better," says Alvarez, who grew up just east of Los Angeles. "But I was afraid of going into it because there were so many reasons not to."

Teacher preparation programs have experienced sharp enrollment declines over the last eight years in nearly every state across the country, a new analysis shows.

In Oklahoma, college and university programs designed to prepare educators for the classroom saw an 80% drop in enrollment since 2010 – just one of nine states where enrollment has nose-dived by more than half.

Coupled with low pay and historic levels of unrest among educators, the long, stubborn downward trend line has those responsible for building the next generation of teachers wondering whether the profession can overcome its sullied reputation.

"The minute I decided to do it, my mom was like, 'Are you sure?'" says Alvarez, whose mother worked in a school. "People were like, 'You don't get paid right. You don't get good benefits. It's long days and emotionally taxing.'"

"So there's a lot," she says. "Most of it comes down to there are just so many responsibilities and not enough time given."

Since 2010, enrollment in teacher preparation programs nationwide has declined by more than one-third, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress, meaning approximately 340,000 fewer students are enrolled in teacher preparation programs today.

Along with Oklahoma, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Illinois, Idaho, Indiana, New Mexico and Rhode Island all notched enrollment declines of 50%. And in nine states – California, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania – enrollment dropped by more than 10,000 students.

The declines are notable on their own, but even more so considering they occurred alongside increasing enrollment in bachelor's degree programs over the same time period.

"This is going to take a decade to turn around if we act now," says Bryan Duke, interim associate dean in the College of Education and Professional Studies at the University of Central Oklahoma, as well as the director of educator preparation.

Duke has seen Central Oklahoma's enrollment fall off a cliff since 2012, when the school enrolled about 1,800 students. Last year, it enrolled just 856, a 49% decrease.

"We have made it flat-out unattractive to be a teacher," he says. "That message is not going to change overnight."

Perhaps most alarming, when researchers disaggregated the enrollment data by race, they found that the number of black and Latino students enrolled in teacher preparation programs had decreased by 25%. The teacher workforce, in which 80% of educators are white, 9% are Latino and 7% are black, is already less racially diverse than the overall U.S. labor force, despite bring a profession in which the importance of teachers of color cannot be overstated.

Recent research has shown that for black children, having just one black teacher in elementary school are more likely to graduate and more likely to enroll in college. But teacher preparation programs enrolled nearly 15,000 fewer black students in 2018 than in 2010.

Mirroring the drops in enrollment, researchers also discovered a 28 percent decline in the number of students completing teacher preparation programs across the same years. Though the decline was less drastic than enrollment figures, and only four states experienced a drop in completions greater than 50% compared to nine that did with enrollment, the metric is an important indicator of the potential supply of new teachers.

Given the public outcry over low salaries, budgets stretched thin and the number of expectations heaped on teachers, the decline in enrollment isn't entirely unanticipated. In 2018, PDK's annual poll showed that 54 percent of adults said they wouldn't want their children becoming teachers and half of teachers themselves said they've considered quitting the profession in the last two years.

"Some of the broader context nationally is extremely relevant," says Lisette Partelow, the senior director of K-12 Strategic Initiatives at the Center American Progress and author of the report.

"There's been two years of teacher strikes and walkouts across the country and there's a lot of thinking about that and the state of teaching," she says. "There is a clear unrest in the career of teaching, especially in these low-pay states, including Oklahoma."

Indeed, Oklahoma, with the third-lowest average teacher salary in the country even after teachers there staged a historic, nine-day statewide strike in 2018 that bumped up pay by $6,000, has become the poster child for the crisis.