Where Do They Come From and How Can We Find More? Recruiting Teacher Candidates During Lean Times

Abstract

Teacher preparation programs are facing an alarming drop in enrollments around the country. Our university, The State University of New York at Albany, has not been exempted from decreased enrollments. Low enrollments have led us to initiate direct attempts to recruit quality applicants to our master’s programs. As part of our overall recruiting plan, we created a survey of our applicants to determine how they discovered our programs and why they want to attend our programs so that we can better utilize our limited advertising resources. Survey results and implications for recruiting teacher candidates are discussed