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Education professors

Official title Education Teachers, Postsecondary (SOC 25-1081)

Also called Professor of education, Education postsec teacher, Teacher educator, Education faculty, Education lecturer

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 60,830 US education professors, with median pay of $75,350 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 63,330, in May 2011, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 560 from 1870, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for education professors: Online and hybrid program delivery, video-based observation platforms, 2010 to 2022.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 2.5% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Education professors: jobs and pay since 1870 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1081

Chicago

Future History. "Education professors: jobs and pay since 1870." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1081.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_25_1081, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Education professors: jobs and pay since 1870}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1081}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
1850187519001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Normal school preceptor / principal teacher (early normal school era)
Known then as Teachers college instructor / professor of education (teachers college era)
Known then as Education professor / professor of pedagogy (school-of-education university era)
Known then as Education professor / teacher educator (adjunct-shift era)
Known then as Education Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1081)
Known today as Education Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1081)
Projected to still be called Education Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1081)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
61K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$75,350
Est.

≈ $73,418 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1839

July 3, 1839: The first state-supported normal school in the United States opens in Lexington, Massachusetts, with three students and a single faculty member, Cyrus Peirce. Horace Mann had advocated for the school as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, modeled on the Prussian "ecole normale" model he encountered in Europe. The school was, from its first day, a place where the subject being taught was teaching itself -- making Peirce the first American practitioner of what the BLS now classifies as SOC 25-1081.

Beat · 1867

By 1867 there are 37 normal schools across the United States. The movement that started in New England has spread to the South and Midwest. Each school requires its own faculty of teacher educators -- people who can model good practice and instruct in pedagogy. The demand for normal school faculty is the first institutional driver of the occupation's employment growth.

Beat · 1944

The Servicemen's Readjustment Act (GI Bill), signed June 22, 1944, finances the college education of 238,000 teachers, among other occupational groups. By 1947 nearly half of all US college students are veterans. Teacher preparation programs expand rapidly to accommodate demand. The GI Bill is the largest single enrollment event in the history of American teacher education and the primary driver of the near-tripling of total postsecondary faculty from 236,000 in 1960 to 628,000 in 1975.

Beat · 1954

NCATE (National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education) is established, taking over accreditation responsibilities from AACTE. NCATE creates a national framework of program quality standards that teacher preparation faculty must now design their programs around and document their compliance with. For education faculty, NCATE (later CAEP, formed in 2013) is not just an external credential: it is the structural driver of the clinical supervision function that distinguishes 25-1081 from every other postsecondary teaching role.

Beat · 1987

By fall 1987, approximately 47% of postsecondary faculty hold contingent appointments (part-time adjunct or full-time non-tenure-track), up from a much smaller share in the 1960s. In education departments this shift is acute: the clinical supervision function requires flexible staffing for student teaching placements that span irregular school-year calendars, and adjunct supervisors became the structural solution many programs adopted. By 2021, the contingent share of all postsecondary faculty had risen to 68%.

Beat · 2010

Teacher preparation program enrollment begins a decade-long decline that will reduce national program enrollment by approximately 30% by 2020. The decline is driven by multiple factors: teacher pay stagnation, school funding cuts during the Great Recession, high-profile media coverage of teacher layoffs, and growing perception of difficult working conditions. For education faculty, this is the proximate employment headwind: fewer teacher candidates means fewer sections of methods courses, fewer student teaching cohorts to supervise, and ultimately fewer faculty positions.

Beat · 2013

CAEP (Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation) is formed from a merger of NCATE and TEAC, creating a unified national accreditation body for teacher preparation programs. CAEP's five standards require documented clinical experiences, candidate learning outcomes, and continuous program improvement. The clinical supervision requirement -- a faculty member must observe and evaluate each student teacher -- becomes the single most labor-intensive CAEP compliance obligation, structurally anchoring education faculty employment at a minimum headcount regardless of automation.

Beat · 2025

More than 5,000 teacher candidates have enrolled in "AI for Tomorrow's Teachers" professional development modules since early 2025, with 86% reporting growth in skills for teaching with AI (eSchool News, July 2025). For education faculty, this is the clearest marker of a role transformation: the faculty member who was formerly the authority on lesson planning and curriculum design is now simultaneously a practitioner using AI tools, a teacher of AI literacy to future teachers, and a quality-control evaluator of AI-generated materials that candidates submit. Teaching AI literacy to future teachers is the newest and most distinctively expert task in the 25-1081 role.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace education professors? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+2.5%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 25-1081 (Education teachers, postsecondary): 77.2 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 79.2 thousand in 2035, a change of +1.9 thousand (+2.5%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.2% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
44%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 25-1081.00 Education Teachers, Postsecondary. Shown: human-rated β = 0.44, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.19 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.69; GPT-4-rated β 0.488. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for education professors

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you herePrepare course materials for teacher education programs (syllabi, model lesson plans, differentiation matrices, assessment rubrics, curriculum mapping templates, and case-study handouts) using AI lesson-generation tools (MagicSchool AI, Brisk Teaching, Eduaide AI) to accelerate first-draft production, then applying pedagogical expertise to validate alignment with state teaching standards, CAEP program requirements, and culturally responsive teaching frameworks.

Prepare course materials for teacher education programs (syllabi, model lesson plans, differentiation matrices, assessment rubrics, curriculum mapping templates, and case-study handouts) using AI lesson-generation tools (MagicSchool AI, Brisk Teaching, Eduaide AI) to accelerate first-draft production, then applying pedagogical expertise to validate alignment with state teaching standards, CAEP program requirements, and culturally responsive teaching frameworks.[18],[19]

Where your edge is

Eduaide AI roots its outputs in 1,000+ peer-reviewed articles and built-in pedagogical frameworks (5E Inquiry, UDL, Backward Design, Gagné's Nine Events, Montessori), making it particularly well-suited for generating teacher-education course materials that must be grounded in research. Use it to draft the model lesson plans you then workshop with candidates in methods courses; use Brisk Teaching to turn an article or state standard into a differentiation scaffold in your Chrome browser in seconds. Your expert investment goes into validating cultural responsiveness, standards-alignment accuracy, and the pedagogical decisions behind each material, which AI cannot reliably make without domain-expert review.

AI is sitting alongside you hereEvaluate and grade teacher candidate assignments (lesson plan drafts, teaching philosophy statements, reflection journals, curriculum design projects, and case-analysis papers) using Gradescope AI-assisted answer grouping to cluster similar responses for efficient rubric application on large cohorts, then applying expert pedagogical judgment to evaluate the quality of candidates' reasoning about learning, differentiation, assessment design, and student needs.

Evaluate and grade teacher candidate assignments (lesson plan drafts, teaching philosophy statements, reflection journals, curriculum design projects, and case-analysis papers) using Gradescope AI-assisted answer grouping to cluster similar responses for efficient rubric application on large cohorts, then applying expert pedagogical judgment to evaluate the quality of candidates' reasoning about learning, differentiation, assessment design, and student needs.[20],[21]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Deploy Gradescope for all written assignments where you can define structured rubric criteria, teaching philosophy statements, lesson plan technical components (objective-activity-assessment alignment), and reflection journals with scored dimensions. Gradescope's answer grouping lets you apply a rubric decision once to a cluster of similar responses rather than grading individually: significant time savings on cohorts of many teacher candidates. Use Turnitin AI detection as a signal for closer review, not standalone evidence: the authentic voice and contextual specificity of a strong teaching philosophy statement is assessable by expert faculty in ways that AI detection cannot reliably confirm or deny. Reserve your expert engagement for the qualitatively hard judgments: does this candidate's lesson plan show evidence of understanding how assessment drives instruction, or just how to fill in a template?

AI is sitting alongside you hereConduct and publish original education research (designing studies on learning outcomes, teacher effectiveness, curriculum design, literacy development, inclusive education, and educational technology) using Elicit and Consensus for AI-assisted systematic literature review and evidence synthesis, NotebookLM for research-packet synthesis, and statistical software for data analysis, while maintaining that the research question, design, and interpretive contribution are the faculty member's intellectual core.

Conduct and publish original education research (designing studies on learning outcomes, teacher effectiveness, curriculum design, literacy development, inclusive education, and educational technology) using Elicit and Consensus for AI-assisted systematic literature review and evidence synthesis, NotebookLM for research-packet synthesis, and statistical software for data analysis, while maintaining that the research question, design, and interpretive contribution are the faculty member's intellectual core.[11],[14]

Where your edge is

Use Elicit to conduct structured literature extractions across ERIC, SSRN, and peer-reviewed education journals ("what does the evidence show about AI-integrated lesson planning in pre-service teacher education?"): it reads papers and extracts specific information rather than just returning titles, compressing a literature mapping to hours. Elicit and Consensus are both documented as tools used in actual education courses at the graduate level (PMC12642211, 2025). Keep the research question formulation, the study design decisions (whether to use a quasi-experimental design vs. qualitative case study, which measures have ecological validity in teacher education contexts), and the interpretive contribution as the human core: these are what tenure committees, AERA reviewers, and journal editors are evaluating.

Where education professors go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Education Administrators, Postsecondary

Education faculty who have served on CAEP accreditation self-study teams, led curriculum redesign committees, chaired department AI policy working groups, or managed student teacher placement programs have directly developed the skill set for associate dean, dean, or provost-track roles in colleges of education. The transition is common and the CRI increase reflects that postsecondary education administration (+7% BLS 2024-2034) is a growing and moderately AI-augmented field, with AI tools for enrollment analytics, program assessment dashboards, and accreditation documentation that administrators deploy. The faculty-to-administration path in education programs is particularly well-structured compared to other disciplines, with clear stepping-stones through department chair and assistant dean roles.

What you'd add
  • · CAEP accreditation self-study authorship: evidence-based documentation of program quality across all five CAEP standards; continuous improvement planning; site visit preparation
  • · Higher education budget management: faculty position planning, operating budget requests, grant overhead negotiation, and state appropriation advocacy for teacher preparation programs
  • · Enrollment management for teacher preparation: pipeline partnerships with K-12 districts, scholarship program design for teacher shortage areas, transfer articulation agreements with community colleges
  • · Title II federal reporting: Higher Education Act Title II reporting for teacher preparation programs (program completer pass rates, clinical experience hours, employer surveys) submitted to state education agencies
  • · Faculty recruitment, hiring, and retention: search committee leadership for education faculty positions; promotion and tenure facilitation; faculty development programming for AI integration in teaching
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of education professors changed since 1839?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Recitation, demonstration, and practice teaching (oral pedagogy era)

    The early normal school faculty had no instructional technology beyond a blackboard, chalk, and whatever texts they could assemble. Cyrus Peirce, the first faculty member of the Lexington Normal School, taught by demonstrating good teaching in real time and having student-teachers observe and imitate. Practice teaching -- sending students into model schools attached to the normal school -- was the only pedagogical tool available for clinical training. The faculty member's job was to embody the standard of good practice, articulate it in words, and watch candidates attempt to replicate it.

  • Textbooks, pedagogical journals, and standardized curricula (disciplinary formation era)

    As normal schools became teachers colleges and then schools of education within universities, education faculty acquired the tools of academic discipline formation: research journals (the Journal of Educational Psychology launched in 1910, the Journal of Teacher Education in 1950), textbooks that codified teaching method, and standardized curriculum frameworks. Faculty could now assign readings from Dewey, Thorndike, and Piaget rather than relying solely on demonstration. The founding of AACTE (American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education) in 1948 and NCATE (National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education) in 1954 gave faculty a formal accreditation framework that structured program curricula nationally for the first time.

  • Microteaching and video feedback (clinical practice technology era)

    Microteaching -- developed at Stanford University around 1963 by Dwight Allen and colleagues -- gave education faculty a new clinical tool: reduce the complexity of teaching to a short, focused lesson with a small group, record it on video, review and discuss the recording with the candidate, then reteach. Portable video cameras (the Sony CV-2000, first consumer VTR, launched in 1965) made recording practical for education programs. For education faculty, microteaching shifted clinical supervision from occasional observation of full classroom teaching to a high-frequency, footage-based coaching cycle. This was the first time technology created a feedback loop that operated faster than a semester-long student teaching placement.

    Effect on the work

    Microteaching did not reduce faculty demand -- it intensified the supervisory role by multiplying the number of coaching cycles per candidate per semester. Programs that adopted microteaching required faculty time for debriefing sessions that would not have existed under the traditional model.

  • Word processing, email, LMS platforms (productivity and course management era)

    The arrival of word processing eliminated the typewriter from course material production, which had been a real friction point for education faculty creating lesson plan templates, rubric banks, and curriculum frameworks. Email transformed the faculty-to-supervisor communication chain during student teaching placements: a cooperating teacher in a K-12 school could now send daily notes to the university supervisor without scheduling a call. Learning management systems (Blackboard launched in 1997; Moodle in 2002; Canvas in 2011) moved course materials, syllabus management, and assignment collection online, reducing paper logistics but adding platform management as a new faculty task. These tools raised faculty productivity in course administration without fundamentally changing the supervisory or instructional core of the work.

  • Online and hybrid program delivery, video-based observation platforms (remote supervision era)

    The shift to online teacher preparation programs -- accelerated by regional accreditation changes that permitted remote student teaching supervision -- created new demands on education faculty: managing asynchronous discussion boards, recording lecture videos, and supervising student teachers at K-12 placements scattered across wide geographic areas rather than concentrated near the university. GoReact (founded 2013, later acquired by Echo360) became a widely adopted platform for video-based clinical supervision: student teachers record lessons on a phone, upload to the platform, and faculty supervisors post time-stamped feedback without traveling to the school site. This compressed the logistics of clinical supervision significantly while maintaining the feedback function that is the core of the faculty role.

    Effect on the work

    Online delivery expanded the potential reach of education faculty -- programs could enroll student teachers in distant or rural placements -- but did not reduce headcount demand. Remote supervision still required one faculty supervisor per cohort of student teachers.

  • Generative AI for lesson planning, rubric generation, and literature synthesis (AI-augmented pedagogy era)

    The Federal Reserve's 2025 FEDS Notes study placed Education above average in language-model exposure, confirming that the text-heavy, template-driven nature of education course materials is unusually well-matched to what large language models produce. MagicSchool AI (launched 2022), Brisk Teaching, and Eduaide AI can generate complete, differentiated lesson plans, IEP accommodation scaffolds, culturally responsive curriculum variations, and rubric banks in minutes -- precisely the artifacts education faculty spend most of their preparation time creating and assigning. For education faculty, this creates both the largest augmentation surface of any recent technology era and the sharpest displacement risk to prep-task time. The countervailing force: AI tools for K-12 teachers have made AI literacy the fastest-growing required competency for teacher candidates, which has in turn made teaching AI literacy to future teachers a new irreducibly expert task for education faculty.

    Effect on the work

    Teacher preparation program enrollment, which had already declined roughly 30% nationally between 2010 and 2020, faces additional structural pressure as AI tools reduce the perceived complexity of lesson planning and curriculum design. However, the CAEP accreditation requirement for clinical supervision (human faculty observing and coaching student teachers) constrains how far programs can be automated. BLS projects modest employment growth for 25-1081 through 2034, suggesting the AI augmentation effect is expected to offset displacement rather than accelerate it.

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Education Teachers, Postsecondary employment and pay by year

On record since1839
Latest US employment60,830 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$75,350 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+2.5% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 33 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
1870560n/aEst., NCES Digest of Education Statistics 2022 Researched contextReport
19002,400n/aEst., NCES Digest of Education Statistics 2022 Researched contextReport
194014,700n/aEst., NCES Digest of Education Statistics 2022 Researched contextReport
195024,700n/aEst., NCES Digest of Education Statistics 2022 Researched contextReport
1971n/a$12,710Est., NCES Digest of Education Statistics 2021 Researched contextReport
197563,000n/aEst., IES Researched contextReport
1981n/a$23,302Est., NCES Digest of Education Statistics 2021 Researched contextReport
1991n/a$42,165Est., NCES Digest of Education Statistics 2021 Researched contextReport
200079,000n/aEst., NCES Digest of Education Statistics 2022 Researched contextReport
2001n/a$59,742Est., NCES Digest of Education Statistics 2021 Researched contextReport
200344,880$47,660BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
200447,710$49,530BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
200551,320$50,380BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
200653,470$52,800BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
200754,420$54,220BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
200855,880$56,400BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
200956,880$58,300BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
201061,450$59,140BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
201163,330$59,380BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
201262,920$59,350BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
201363,190$60,170BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
201459,980$59,720BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
201560,260$61,560BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
201658,850$62,520BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
201760,500$64,020BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
201860,930$64,780BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
201961,300$65,510BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
202057,560$65,440BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
202158,780$63,910BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
202258,280$66,930BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
202360,860$73,240BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
202459,090$72,090BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
202560,830$75,350BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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