WHO CHOOSES TO TEACH (AND WHY)

Decisions of college students determine who is prepared to teach. Anal ysis of a college cohort from the early 1980s indicates that graduates completing teacher training have roughly the same distribution of cog nitive skills as all entrants into college. Yet, since college graduat es are a select group, potential teachers fall low both in the overall graduate distribution and in the distribution by gender and race. Tea cher training completion is significantly lowered by state requirement s for courses and teacher tests, even though their effect on teacher p erformance is unclear. Surprisingly, participation in teacher training is not significantly affected by relative teacher earnings (JEL 12).