Only 23% of K-12 educators are men, a share that has been declining for decades. Having more male teachers around could be beneficial for some boys’ experiences in school, and a meaningful role for those men who decide to teach.
While alternative pathways into teaching are expanding, traditional programs at colleges and universities—often culminating in a bachelor’s or master’s degree in education—are still much more common. But nationally, only 17% of bachelor’s degrees and 21% of master’s degrees in education go to men. Encouraging more men into these programs could be one way to increase the share of male teachers and understanding the differences in male share across institutions may shed some light on what attracts them.
In figure 1, we show the male share of education degrees at institutions across the United States. To filter out small outliers, we only include institutions that either awarded 50 or more education bachelor’s degrees, or 100 or more education master’s degrees in 2023. This accounts for around 80% of all degrees awarded nationally at both levels.
As you can see from figure 1, most institutions have a minority of male degree-earners, though there is some slight variation at both the bachelor’s and master’s level.
Figure 1
Data noteData used in this brief comes from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). IPEDS, from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), annually produces higher education-related surveys on a host of subjects, from finances and admissions to graduation and degree fields.
We use their 2023 completed data files, specifically the “Awards/degrees conferred by program (6-digit CIP code), award level, race/ethnicity, and gender: July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023” file. We first filter completions to those with Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) codes of the form 13.XXXX, following the education classification produced by NCES in their data tools and published data tables. We then group completions by award level (bachelor’s or master’s), and by unique institution. We include both first and second majors when aggregating degree completions.
Our institution-level estimates match those directly produced by NCES’s data tool but are slight over-estimates compared to published NCES data tables. We believe these discrepancies may reflect the timing of table construction (potentially prior to final revisions) or NCES editorial decisions in how data are presented.
If you’d like to work with the IPEDS data shown here without having to clean and format it yourself, the author provides the following Python package, genpeds, that downloads and cleans IPEDS data from the past forty years. For further information on genpeds, please visit the PyPi page and/or the GitHub repository.
Figure 2 shows the same data in a searchable table format.
Figure 2
Additionally, figure 3 ranks the 50 institutions awarding the largest number of master’s degrees in education (master’s programs are the dominant degree in the field). Schools are ordered by the share of education degrees going to male graduates. The top institution is the University of the People, a tuition-free online college based in Pasadena, followed closely by the University of Louisville. Both have male shares above 40%. Among the remaining schools, 25 report male shares between 20% and 30%, while the remainder fall between 12% and 20%.
Figure 3
For more information on men in higher ed, please visit our past research on the subject:
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