Cheaper, Faster, Better
Advantages of University-Based Teacher Preparation
Where do Texas teachers come from? You may assume they come from universities. This has not been completely true for nearly four decades, and for the last 10 years it has been increasingly untrue. In 2023–2024 and 2024-2025, fewer than 20% of new Texas teachers came through university teacher preparation. More than half entered teaching without certificates from any source.
Maybe you are thinking “good riddance.” You may have heard that education students have low test scores, that teacher training is hoop jumping, that it costs too much, that alternative certification is cheaper and faster, that we need more research on how various pathways into teaching really differ, or that the teaching certificate is a useless piece of paper.
These points are wrong. The cheapest, fastest, best way to become a teacher is through an undergraduate university program. I say this based on two decades spent studying Texas education data. I also say it based on more than two decades’ personal experience overseeing university programs to prepare science and mathematics teachers. Texas students will face diminished opportunities and achieve lower education outcomes for themselves, and the state, unless we rapidly do what it takes to get increasing numbers of new Texas teachers from Texas’ university programs.
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How did we manage to get to the point where less than 20% of Texas’ new teachers are coming from universities? The laws and rules that led to this go back more than 40 years. 1984: HB72 allowed alternative teacher certification motivated by secondary math and science teacher shortages. 2002: The State Board for Educator Certification (SBEC) started giving permission to for-profit entities to prepare teachers. Within a few years, web-based certificates from for-profit companies became the largest source of Texas teachers. 2015: the state permitted districts to exempt themselves from the requirement of hiring certified teachers as Districts of Innovation. The number of districts requesting this exemption grew slowly until after the pandemic, when it exploded. The net result: in 23-24 and 24-25 more than half of new teachers were uncertified, less than 20% came from universities and less than 15% came from alternative certification. 2025: partly motivated by the desire to stem the flow of uncertified teachers, HB2 provided $4 billion/year for teacher raises, dialed back on school district permission to hire teachers without certificates, and created a PREP allotment to support university students obtaining certification and partially compensate universities for their costs.
Therefore it seems that universities are back in a good place, that Texas recognizes the problems created by allowing uncertified teachers to enter, and put enormous financial resources behind the effort to turn the situation around. Yet two large problems remain. The first – somewhat curiously – is that the state is mainly emphasizing the most expensive and time-consuming way of becoming a teacher at universities (Residency). If universities were to produce teachers only through the method the state most recommends, and limited themselves to the numbers the state has budgeted to support, then universities would be preparing many times fewer teachers than they do now. The second problem is that universities are showing no sign of gearing up to prepare more teachers with or without state incentives.
Texas has a problem if universities do not quickly manage to increase the number of teachers they prepare because earning a teaching certificate as part of an undergraduate degree is the cheapest, fastest, and best way into the profession.
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Cheaper
Becoming a teacher through a Texas university is the cheapest way to obtain a teaching certificate for undergraduates who obtain the certificate as part of their four-year degree. Teachers must have an undergraduate degree. If the certificate is part of the coursework for a student’s first degree, they pay nothing beyond what they would pay anyway, and they may even come out financially ahead because of scholarships or loan forgiveness.
This works well not only for people planning to teach elementary school, but also in programs for secondary teachers like UTeach—which I helped found in 1997 and have run since—that provide streamlined degree plans within science majors so that students avoid added time and cost. This is one reason UTeach spread to 12 universities across Texas and more than 50 across the country.
Does society as a whole assume an unreasonable financial burden for students who obtain teaching certificates at universities? No. Although future teachers do receive a lot of individualized attention and have small classes as they finish, the costs are not out of line, say, with costs of providing upper-division laboratory courses in the sciences for science majors.
If someone who has already graduated from college wants to teach later in life, alternative certification is less expensive than returning to a university for additional instruction, and teaching without a certificate is even less expensive than that. However there are quality tradeoffs I discuss below.
Faster
Obtaining a teaching certificate through a university as part of a first degree is the fastest way for an individual to become a teacher. The student graduates with a first degree and a teaching certificate at the same time. They can start teaching with a standard certificate right after graduation.
Again, the story is different for someone who wants to enter teaching later in life after college. Alternative certification and teaching without a certificate are faster than returning to a university, but again there are quality tradeoffs to consider.
Better
Universities have spent decades learning how to fit preparation for teaching into a limited number of impactful courses. Texas has requirements for every certification area, which may be daunting in their detail but make sense. Learning to teach means practicing teaching in real classrooms under the guidance of experienced teachers. The state requires it and all programs do it. Learning to teach means learning principles of learning and how to apply them. The state requires it, programs do it, and the state tests it. Learning to teach means learning what you will teach. The state requires it, programs do it, and the state tests it.
If you go out into public schools and measure which certified teachers do the best on average, the ones who came through university pathways come out on top. There are two ways to measure this. The first is that they stay in teaching somewhat longer. The second is that their students learn more. The Texas Educator Preparation Pathways Study compared university-prepared teachers to those from alternative certification. A recent peer-reviewed article backs this up. Students in every subject, grade level, or subgroup learn more from university-certified teachers than from alternatively certified teachers.
The quality comparison is even stronger when university-prepared teachers are compared with teachers who did not obtain a certificate. Beyond the Tipping Point shows that uncertified teachers leave at much higher rates than those who got certificates either through universities or from web-based alternative certification, and students of uncertified teachers learn less than those of university-prepared teachers, particularly in traditional public high schools. This should not be surprising. Administrators say that teachers who are unprepared and uncertified are overwhelmed by the job.
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With HB2 of 2025 Texas took the most difficult and important step it could to retain good teachers and recruit new ones. The state devoted $4 billion a year to a mixture of seniority- and merit-based raises. This strengthens the argument that young people should obtain a teaching certificate and gives universities a powerful recruiting tool.
Will universities manage to prepare enough new teachers to meet the challenge of HB2 and stave off shortages as uncertified teachers are phased out? Signs are not encouraging. Universities are in the midst of fierce public debate about many issues, but preparation of teachers is not one of them. The attention of upper administration is elsewhere. Faculty directly involved with teacher preparation are being pressed harder to build out new Residency pathways than to boost numbers in traditional programs. This risks cutting numbers further.
In the midst of so many arguments about the value of university education, universities need to hold on to the recognition that preparing teachers is uniquely their responsibility and something they do uniquely well. Foundations and donors can provide targeted support to help university programs get back on their feet, and state agencies can continue to be attentive to shaping regulations so that universities do not end up spending more time on paperwork than on future teachers.
Universities can prepare new teachers cheaper, faster, better than anyone else. Texas desperately needs new certified teachers. Somehow we have to put these things together and solve the problem.