Raising the Bar or Locking the Door? The Effects of Increasing GPA Admission Requirements on Teacher Preparation

Recently, policymakers have called for increased grade point average (GPA) requirements and many state education agencies are implementing "highly selective criteria" for teacher preparation program admission. These changes attempt to increase the quality of future teachers despite the inconclusive research base for such practices. Using a large sample, we examine who would be denied admission to a teacher preparation program and to the teaching profession if admission criterion had been increased. We perform descriptive and inferential analyses to determine if particular groups of students were negatively impacted by increased GPA criteria. Findings suggest that not only would it reduce the number of high quality teachers, but students of color and male students would be negatively impacted to a much greater degree. Moreover, increasing the GPA admission criterion to 2.75 resulted in no improvements in six outcomes examined, and increasing it to 3.0 resulted in mixed outcomes. Thus, policies to increase GPA for admittance to teacher preparation programs have the potential to dramatically reduce the number of future teachers with no consistent positive impact on the profession and, instead, would likely hurt the very students these policies are designed to help.