Entry Costs and the Supply of Public School Teachers Forthcoming in Education Finance & Policy

This paper examines the impact of entry costs on the likelihood that recent college graduates become public school teachers. I combine Barron’s ratings of college selectivity, data on the types of teacher certification programs offered by colleges, and NELS data that tracks members of the high school class of 1988 into college and into the workforce. Restricting the sample to individuals who were not considering teaching careers when they were high school seniors, I estimate the marginal effect of the availability of undergraduate teacher certification programs on the likelihood that these individuals become teachers. The results suggest that graduates from highly selective colleges are very sensitive to entry costs related to the number of years of schooling required for certification, while graduates from less selective colleges are not marginally influenced by these costs.