Closing the Gender Gap: 20 Top Teacher Ed Colleges for Men
Traditionally, most teachers and teacher education students have been women. However, an increasing number of male college students are enrolling in teacher education classes and choosing education as a major. Some teacher education departments are now seeing graduating classes where men are actually the majority.
One organization focused on this issue is MenTeach.org, a non-profit dedicated to increasing the number of men in the field of education. Founded by Bryan Nelson in 1979, they offer numerous free online resources for teachers, as well as forums for educators to connect and share ideas. Their research report “Importance of Men Teachers: And Reasons Why There Are So Few” is one of the most well known resources on the topic.
We decided to take a closer look and find the colleges with the highest number and percentage of men graduating with education degrees – divided into two separate lists.
Percentages of Male Teachers in the States
The National Education Association (NEA) has another rating system of interest to men entering teacher education programs. NEA’s report Rankings of the States 2012 and Estimates of School Statistics 2013, indicates that, in 2012, nearly one-fourth of the teachers in U.S. public schools were men.
According to the report, the states with the highest percentage of male teachers included Kansas with 33.1%, Oregon with 30.9%, Vermont with 30.2%, and Alaska with 30%. The states that had the lowest percentage of male teachers were Virginia with 17.5%, Mississippi with 17.9%, and Louisiana and South Carolina with 18.4% each.
Trends We Found
Interestingly, our two school lists indicated that men are more likely to major in education and related undergraduate teacher preparation programs when they are enrolled in a state college. There are some interesting regional trends as well. For example, Midwestern schools dominate the results of our highest numbers of male education graduates list, with Illinois and Indiana having multiple schools on this list with a significant number of male graduates.
For our list of highest percentage of male education graduates, southern universities dominate taking seven of ten spots on our list; Virginia alone has three institutions represented. Yet southern states have the lowest percentages of male teachers – Virginia with the lowest percentage of all states. Perhaps the south will catch up with the states with the highest percentages sooner than later!
On both lists, nearly every geographical region of the United States has at least one institution included in our rankings, but west coast universities are notably absent.
Our Methodology
To come up with these top 10 lists, we reviewed the results of several third party rankings of teacher education colleges, and combined them with an analysis of student demographics based on data from the US Department of Education. Our final rankings represent a combination of these factors. Here are our sources:
- U.S. News & World Report’s 2013 annual rankings of over 270 national colleges and universities, which rates everything from the university’s reputation to GRE scores to faculty resources. (Some schools in our lists did not have a national rank; we included their U.S. News & World Report regional rank (e.g., north, south, midwest, etc.).
- The 2013 National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) Teacher Prep Review, which rates teacher education schools based on 18 standards that cover how the school selects its students, how the courses prepare teachers to work in different subject areas, the number of practice teaching opportunities, and institutional outcomes.
- The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which is managed by the National Center for Education Statistics (US Department of Education), and provides a huge amount of data on individual colleges and universities. We looked specifically at their 2012 statistics concerning the number and percentages of male and female graduates in teacher education majors from different universities across the United States.
Top 10 Producers of Male Teachers
Top 10 Education Schools Where Men Aren’t Outnumbered