The Teach for America program will train and place more than 7,300 highly motivated teachers in our nation's neediest schools this year. National enrollment for the Teach for America is on the rise in most universities in the United States and it's possible that the tough job market is one of the key reasons for the increase in enrollment.
Teach For America is the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates of all academic majors and career interests who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools and become leaders in the effort to expand educational opportunity.
One university that is not seeing a rise in applications to the Teach for America program is Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Northeastern offers a co-op program to their students which gives them job experience prior to graduating. Most students already have jobs lined up before they graduated which leads to a lot less interest in the Teach for America program.
However, there is a notable rise in applications from prestigious schools like Princeton University. According to an article in The Daily Princetonian, there is a large surge of application for the early deadline. This is just one of several deadlines an applicant must meet in a very intense application process.
According to The Princetonian, last fall, 173 members of the Class of 2009 applied to TFA, and of those, 29 were accepted into the program — a 16.7 percent acceptance rate. That’s higher than the national average since roughly 4,100 — or 11.7 percent — of the 35,178 individuals who applied were accepted into the program.
Victor Wakefield, a recruitment director at Princeton, believes the growing interest in TFA can largely be attributed to a shift in the national mood, in addition to the difficult job market and other economic factors.
The Teach For America network, created in 1990, has grown to include 24,000 individuals. Currently, some 7,300 Teach For America corps members teach in 35 urban and rural areas profoundly affected by the achievement gap. They are working extraordinarily hard to ensure that their students achieve academic success despite the inequities they face.
For more information on the Teach for America program: http://www.teachforamerica.org
Written by Cheryl Phillips
Providence, RI
Exclusive to HULIQ.com
Materials from The Princetonian, Teach for America are used in this story.
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