You Know Who's *Not* Struggling to Find a Job?
The unemployment rate for special education teachers is 1.0%
In recent weeks there’s been a flurry of stories about how recent college graduates are struggling to find jobs.
The WSJ, AP, and Business Insider have all covered this story. Kevin Roose at The New York Times noted that this issue, “appears to be fueled, at least in part, by rapid advances in A.I. capabilities.”
In his new Substack, Derek Thompson wrote this week that, “the labor market for recent grads hasn’t been this relatively weak in many decades.” What he called the “new grad gap” just set a modern record.
But you know who’s NOT struggling to find a job? Teachers, especially special education teachers.
The New York Fed tracks a range of employment outcomes by college major, and, on average, education majors are doing quite well when it comes to finding a job. You can peruse the full data, or here are the top five highest and lowest unemployment rates by major:
Highest unemployment rates by college major, Feb 2025
Anthropology, 9.4%
Physics, 7.8%
Computer engineering, 7.5%
Commercial art and graphic design, 7.2%
Sociology, 6.7%
Lowest unemployment rates by college major, Feb 2025
Special education, 1.0%
Civil engineering, 1.0%
Animal and plant sciences, 1.0%
Construction services, 0.7%
Nutrition sciences, 0.4%
Other education degrees also look pretty good on this measure: The unemployment rate for early childhood majors came in at 1.3% and the rate for elementary education majors stood at 1.8%. All of these were well below the national average unemployment rate for recent college graduates (5.8% as of this data).
Will this always be the case? Maybe? Probably? As a human-centered activity, teaching will be more immune from any AI displacements that affect other parts of the economy. That’s especially true for working with students with special needs or advanced specialty areas like math or science. Mike Petrilli made the argument recently in The 74 that education could actually benefit from an AI-driven “job apocalypse.”
I’ve made similar points in the past. There are certainly some downsides to becoming a teacher (compensation being a big one!), but people who want to go into teaching generally have an easier time finding a job in their chosen field than people in other fields do.
Special education teacher here. Of course it is. Because nobody wants to be one anymore. It is hard, often thankless work. Not uncommon- new special education teachers lasting less than six months in the job. It’s a job with high burnout, a high degree of skill and education and low remuneration for education required. It’s a calling. Not something your average college graduate is going to be good at.
It warms my heart that animal/plant sciences and sociology (!) ranks ahead of computer engineering. All the takes in the past 20 years of "ditch the humanities, everyone needs to learn coding!" was dumb back then and is even moreso now.