When 22-year-old Brisa Hernandez was a little girl, she’d corral whoever or whatever she could—her cousins or even her stuffed animals—and presided over her “classroom” as a teacher. As she grew older, her interests broadened, but she still felt a pull toward teaching.
As an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Hernandez studied a broad number of disciplines, earning a degree this May in Social Welfare and Media Studies, with a concentration in media law and policy, and minors in public policy and education. The university didn’t have an education major when she enrolled, but Hernandez kept her options open.
In February of her junior year, she attended a lecture at the Berkley School of Education on diversity policies in education, where she met representatives of Teach For America, or TFA, the national nonprofit that trains and places high-achieving recent college graduates and others to teach in high-needs schools for at least two years. The encounter planted a seed.
“It made me realize that I wanted to be a teacher who would make an impact and create a safe environment for students that would allow them to explore the opportunities,” Hernandez said.
Shortly after graduation, the newly minted college graduate, with an impressive 3.75 GPA, became one of 2,000-plus incoming TFA corps members preparing to head up a K-12 classroom this fall. (The organization doesn’t have the exact numbers of its 2025 class yet.)
For Hernandez, that meant moving across the country from her hometown city of Pasco in eastern Washington state to Lawrence, Mass., where she’ll teach 8th grade English/language arts at Henry K. Oliver School, where most of the students are English learners who qualify for free lunch. Not everyone who knows Hernandez expressed support for her decision.
“Sometimes, people I tell are like, ‘Why are you going to go and pursue this education just to be a teacher?’” Hernandez said.
Bright, ambitious college graduates like Hernandez would seem to have many professional opportunities available to them, which is perhaps why teaching—with its less-than-average pay compared to other college graduates, high burnout rate, ever-increasing responsibilities, and other challenges—isn’t necessarily a popular choice.
Research has found that interest in the teaching profession among incoming college students and the number of prospective teachers earning a teaching license reached historic lows between 2010 and 2023. But for Teach For America, at least, recent data indicate a budding resurgence of interest.
This year, the number of applications from seniors in the 120-plus colleges and universities where the organization directly recruits increased by 21% from the 2023-24 school year, and by 28% from the 2022-23 school year, said Rachel Tennenbaum, a spokesperson for TFA.
TFA has been working to regain its footing in the teacher-preparation landscape after a turbulent few years. The nonprofit—which boasted a nearly 6,000-member class of incoming corps members in 2013—hit a low of about 1,600 incoming corps members in 2022 and has been trying to rebuild its ranks ever since.
Some experts suggest that, during tight labor markets, college graduates tend to gravitate to what they believe are safe career choices, like teaching. And right now, recent college graduates are facing one of the worst job markets in a decade; their unemployment rate this March stood at 5.8%, compared to the overall unemployment rate of 4%.
“TFA hit its peak during a time of economic uncertainty following the Great Recession of 2008, when the organization was able to offer reliable jobs to new college graduates,” Melissa Arnold Lyon, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Albany, told EdWeek in 2023.
But a downturn in the labor market isn’t the only explanation for the current rise in incoming TFA corps members, said representatives of the organization.
“What Teach For America offers, I think, is what folks are looking for right now, especially Gen Z: They’re looking for community. They’re looking for connection and the opportunity to be on the front lines of social change,” said Veronica Aguilar, the vice president of recruitment at TFA.
After all, Teach For America was built on the premise that getting some of the brightest young people to spent a couple years in the classroom will both improve student outcomes and produce civically minded leaders. Many TFA alumni have gone on to careers in politics or policy, or into school administration.
“People who go into teaching care about young people. They want to make a difference for the future. They see this as an issue of social justice and a way that they can contribute to creating a better society,” said Pam Grossman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, where each of its three graduate-level teacher-training programs saw increases in enrollment this past year.
Keeping diversity at the forefront of recruitment efforts
The desire to make such contributions feel particularly relevant now, said Aguilar.
“They [prospective TFA corps members] really do see this as an opportunity to solve the problem at hand,” she said. “And that’s what’s really exciting about this generation. I meet these individuals all the time, and they’re ready to roll up their sleeves and say, ‘What needs to get done, and how can I be a part of it?’”
As the diversity of the nation’s K-12 students continues to rise, so, too, does the demand for diverse teachers. TFA has worked to recruit college students of color and from low-income backgrounds, though some of its other work on diversity has attracted critics.
“We want individuals who have respect for diverse lived experiences,” Aguilar said.
Among TFA’s incoming 2024 corps, 60% came from low-income backgrounds, and over 40% were the first in their family to graduate from college. Also of note, TFA applications rose significantly this past year among students from Spelman College, a private, historically Black women’s liberal arts college in Atlanta.
TFA looks to tackle larger questions
Now, TFA—which recently brought on a new CEO—is looking to tackle broader questions about K-12 education, like how to make schools more relevant for today’s students. TFA’s Reinvention Lab is one vehicle to do so.
“At the Reinvention Lab, we’re obsessed with two problems: One is the fact that the education system was built and designed 150 years ago, in very different contexts for very different people than our current youth population. And the second problem is that we need more really high-quality talent in front of young people,” said Sunanna Chand, executive director, of TFA’s Reinvention Lab, which launched in 2020 and operates with a staff of seven employees.
Chand and her staff—and, by extension, TFA corps members—are grappling with some of these questions related to education’s future, researching issues that include absenteeism and college and career readiness.
“We’re asking ourselves: What are the human skills that young people need? And how do we develop those skills in young people? And what are the ways that teaching and learning needs to change in order to meet students’ needs—not only for their future economic lives, but their future lives as thriving adults,” Chand said.
The opportunity to grapple with and find solutions to these types of inquiries may appeal to mission-driven college graduates interested in making an immediate impact in their professional lives. It seems to have grabbed Hernandez’s attention.
“Every single person I’ve met in this organization so far shares my same passion and drive,” Hernandez said. “Everyone’s here for a purpose.”
