What can you do with a secondary education degree?
Where secondary education graduates actually work, and how exposed those jobs are to AI. Built from ACS 2020-2024 5-year PUMS: 9,601 people whose bachelor's degree is in this field, aged 22-64.
Secondary education leads to secondary teaching for about a quarter of graduates, with a large group in lower grades. About 25 in 100 people with a secondary teacher education degree work as secondary school teachers, and another 17 in 100 teach elementary or middle school. Roughly 6 in 100 are education administrators, such as school principals and 2 in 100 teach special education.
A large share, about 32 in 100, works in roles we do not score, led by postsecondary teaching at about 2 in 100, with managers and chief executives together at about 3 in 100. The sibling degrees elementary education and special education send graduates to many of the same classrooms. The figures come from Census data on about 9,600 people with this degree, matched to the occupation pages on this site, and they cover about 68% of graduates.
How exposed are secondary education jobs to AI?
Secondary education graduates mostly teach, and our research rates teaching Safe or AI-resistant. Secondary school teachers score about 75 out of 100 on structural exposure, because preparation and grading overlap with real AI tools, but those tools produce reviewed feedback, not autonomous grading, and none of the tools we reviewed handles live classroom management. Most states require a teaching license.
About one in six graduates teaches elementary or middle school instead, and about one in three work in roles we do not score, so our confidence is medium.
These figures cover the 68% of secondary education graduates who work in occupations we score. The other 32% work in roles we do not cover (largest: Postsecondary Teachers; Other Managers; Other Teachers and Instructors). Signal 01 averages each job's own structural exposure, weighted by how many graduates work there; it describes tasks, not whether jobs will disappear.
Where secondary education graduates actually work
These 8 occupations account for 56% of secondary education graduates. The rest are spread across many smaller occupations, each under 1%. Graduates often work outside the field.
Careers next door to secondary education, least exposed first
Curated related careers of the main occupations above, ranked by structural exposure (lowest first), so you can see which neighboring routes are less and more exposed.
What the research says about AI and secondary education graduates
The Census Bureau working paper (September 2026) rates secondary teacher education among its lower-exposure majors, with a 2024 employment result above the average major's and an earnings result level with it. The Dallas Fed also names education among the least-exposed fields, and the paper's sharpest declines are in software-related degrees. The studies disagree about how much of any graduate weakness is due to AI.
Read the full evidence review: what the studies say about AI and graduate jobs →
Degrees whose graduates work in similar jobs
How this page was built
Graduate shares come from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS 2020-2024 5-year PUMS), field of degree "Secondary Teacher Education" (code 2309), weighted to the population. Each occupation we cover is scored with the numbers already published on its own page on this site, then averaged by graduate share. Occupations without a page are shown but never scored. Graduates aged 22-64 are included, so the mix reflects the whole working-age group, not only recent graduates. Sources: www2.census.gov, www.bls.gov. This page is general information, not career or educational advice.