Teach for America places recent graduates, grad students and professionals in underserved urban or rural public schools for two-year teaching stints, and it received a record number of 48,000 applications for this fall. The organization selected 5,200 applicants to be teachers — 77 percent graduated this spring, 6 percent of them graduate students and 17 percent professionals.
Last year, the organization received 46,000 applications and had an acceptance rate of 12 percent. In 2008, it was just over 24,700 applications with an acceptance rate of nearly 15 percent.
Since 2008, Teach for America has compiled a “top contributors list” to rank schools of similar size by the number of students who are accepted into the program. This year, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor had the highest number of students selected, with 119. For medium-sized schools, Harvard led the pack with 66 placements. And for small schools with fewer than 2,999 undergraduates, Spelman College had 36 placements.
Several Washington-area schools were also near the top of the lists: University of Virginia with 66, University of Maryland with 56, Georgetown University with 54, Johns Hopkins and Howard universities with 25 each, and American University with 22.
The incoming teachers have an average GPA of 3.6 and all of them have held some sort of leadership position in college, according to Teach for America. Twenty-two percent are the first in their family to earn a college degree, nearly a third received Pell Grants and more than a third are racial minorities.
Here are the full rankings:
Large universities with more than 10,000 undergraduates
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, 119
University of California-Berkeley, 89
University of Texas at Austin, 87
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 80
University of Florida, 75
University of Southern California, 75
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 70
University of Virginia, 66
University of Washington-Seattle, 62
University of California-Los Angeles, 61
University of Maryland-College Park, 56
Pennsylvania State University-University Park, 55
The Ohio State University, 54
University of Pennsylvania, 53
University of Georgia, 50
Cornell University, 49
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 48
Boston University, 46
University of California-Santa Barbara, 42
Syracuse University, 41
Medium-size schools with 3,000 to 9,999 undergrads
Harvard University, 66
Boston College, 56
Georgetown University, 54
Duke University, 53
Brown University, 49
Northwestern University, 49
Vanderbilt University, 47
Yale University, 41
Stanford University, 39
Emory University, 37
Columbia University in the City of New York, 36
Dartmouth College, 29
Tulane University, 28
Howard University, 25
Johns Hopkins University, 25
Tufts University, 25
University of Chicago, 24
Princeton University, 23
American University, 22
Washington University in St. Louis, 22
Small schools with fewer than 2,999 undergrads
Spelman College, 36
Wellesley College, 24
Barnard College, 21
Amherst College, 18
Claremont McKenna College, 17
College of the Holy Cross, 17
DePauw University, 16
Colby College, 15
Trinity College (Connecticut), 15
Wesleyan University, 15
Colorado College, 14
Morehouse College, 14
Mount Holyoke College, 14
Pomona College, 14
Smith College, 14
Williams College, 14
Bates College, 13
University of Puget Sound, 13
Check out Campus Overload every day for college news from around the country. You can also reach Jenna on Facebook and Twitter.
