COLUMBUS – The number of newly awarded bachelor’s degrees in education has dropped by more than one-fourth in Ohio since the 2003-04 school year, challenging the state’s reputation as a fount of new teachers.
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Given the historical surplus, that might be OK, except that the prospective new teachers aren’t seeking degrees in the specialties in which they’re needed most. That leaves school districts scrambling for teachers each year, especially in middle- and high-school math and science, plus foreign languages, physical education and other areas.
In 2003-04, Ohio’s public and private, nonprofit colleges and universities awarded 55,207 bachelor’s degrees, and 6,759 of them, or 12.2 percent, were in education. By 2014-15, the number of bachelor’s degrees had risen to 69,592 but only 4,983 were in education, shrinking the share of education degrees to 7.3 percent.
Tom Lasley, who retired as the dean of the University of Dayton’s education school and serves on the board of the National Council on Teacher Quality, said the reasons aren’t complicated: Many of today’s debt-conscious students don’t think a teacher’s salary offers a good enough return on investment for the average student debt of $30,000; many still think there are too many teachers, even though jobs in the hard-to-fill specialties are going unfilled; and the pressures of high-stakes testing and controversy over the role of teachers make the job feel low-status.