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.
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.
Being a special ed teacher is so, so difficult. Not speaking from experience, but I was a public school teacher in Mississippi for three and a half years. Talking to special ed teachers about their work was sobering. I wanna cry just thinking about it. Let’s put it this way, teaching algebra 1 in a low performing school (my teaching experience) is soul crushing. Your odds of true success are about as good as they would be for trying to teach 25 average middle schoolers calculus 2 simultaneously. Teaching special ed (from what I’ve heard) is like that times a billion. It’s like every day at work you’re instructed to make a square peg fit in a round hole. You know it will never happen, but your boss and all the parents of your students are unrealistically hopeful that just maybe, just once, just this time you’ll be able to do it. No one is mad at you when you can’t do it, but man, it hurts when you have to sugarcoat the truth to make it seem like kinda sorta it’s working or shoot straight and tell everyone learning at pace (or even at 1/4 pace) for their student just isn’t occurring. It also really hurts constantly thinking about what kind of future your students might have. Some have strong, supporting families but others aren’t so lucky. You wish you could help, but in all honesty, in most cases, there is almost nothing you can do to help your students have a better future. If someone reading this is a special ed teacher, please correct me if I’m wrong or if this is only rarely the case. It’s just the impression I got from talking to special ed teachers at my school.