More Graduates with High Academic Scores Now Enter Teaching

A new study released today finds the academic caliber of new teachers, entering the profession with a bachelor’s degree, has risen substantially since the early 2000s.

The study’s authors use a variety of data sets to look at demographic and academic changes in the teaching profession and find that the average SAT scores of first-year teachers in 2008 was 8 percentile rank points higher than the average score among those who entered teaching in 2001. In fact, contrary to cohorts of new teachers in earlier years, the average SAT score of new teachers in 2008 exceeded that of college graduates entering other professions, and this is true for both college students with math and science majors as well as those with other majors.