A Policy Brief From EPIC

Pre-Service Penalties: Tuition, Time, and Workload Costs for Aspiring Teachers

August 2026

The financial tradeoffs associated with teaching are often framed as a “teacher pay penalty,” reflecting differences between teachers’ salaries and those of similarly educated professionals in other fields. However, aspiring teachers may begin accumulating added tuition, time, and workload costs long before entering the workforce due to the highly specialized coursework and clinical training the profession requires.

Our analyses use publicly available tuition rates, individual-level postsecondary records, and teacher certification data from the state of Michigan to estimate the extent of these additional costs that teachers incur while pursuing their undergraduate degrees. Specifically, we explore three key research questions:

1. Do future teachers complete more college credits throughout their undergraduate careers than their peers in other fields?
   We find that teachers complete an average of 159 college credits during their undergraduate education. This is 16% more than the average for college graduates who do not become teachers (137 credits) and 33% higher than the minimum required to graduate from most bachelor’s degree programs (120 credits).
2. How do these additional credit hours affect future teachers’ tuition costs, workloads, and time to degree?
   On average, future teachers incur about $5,500 more in tuition than all other bachelor’s degree-seeking students in the state, and $10,000 more than otherwise similar students at the same higher education institution. Teachers tend to enroll in slightly more credits per term—indicating a heavier workload—and take slightly longer to graduate than their peers on other career paths.
3. Do the added costs of becoming a teacher differ across certification areas or higher education institution types?
   We find that special education teachers face significantly larger tuition, time, credit, and workload penalties than elementary or secondary-level general education teachers. Teachers from private institutions also face a larger tuition penalty, but they experience a similar time penalty and somewhat smaller credit and workload penalties than their counterparts at public institutions.

Read the policy brief here.