Teach For America does not pay for your certification or master's degree, however, there are different benefits available to corps members to help pay for the coursework that you must take in order to teach in your region.

Many regions have relationships with local universities that offer reduced tuition for corps members.

In some regions, you can qualify for tuition exemption based on the fact that you're a teacher.

Teacher certification costs widely vary across regions, so we recommend that you compare regions with our Explore tool to get a better understanding of what expenses to expect. Costs can include fees for licensing, as well as tuition for required coursework.

You should expect to pay for some, if not all, of your teacher certification expenses, though some regions may offer discounted tuition rates through their university partner and/or other financial benefits.

Teach For America corps members do not receive a salary during pre-service. Corps members are not employees of Teach For America and thus are not paid a salary by Teach for America.  However, all incoming corps members receive a stipend to offset some of the costs of onboarding and transitioning into the corps. Learn more about available financial support here.

Teach For America doesn't specifically offer loan cancellation or forgiveness to corps members. As a nonprofit organization with limited funds, we unfortunately don't have the resources to forgive the student loans of all of our corps members. However, some school districts and programs offer loan cancellation to teachers who serve a number of years in a school district.

Several of our regions have established partnerships with universities to facilitate your work toward a master's degree during your two-year commitment. These programs vary from site to site and year to year. Some may be offered at reduced cost.

Keep in mind that because of these programs change frequently, we encourage you to avoid selecting regions solely based on these partnerships. We ask that you remain flexible as to where you are willing to teach so that we can best meet the needs of students.

Connect with your regional team to obtain a letter that details the work you completed during your time at Pre-Service. You can email your region directly via their regional page.

You can learn more about the schedule and location of Pre-Service training on the Summer Training Schedule page.

During the summer, all corps members engage with our Pre-Service experience. The aim of this period of time is to develop corps members as teacher leaders and we focus our training on 4 domains: rigorous instruction, classroom learning environment, relationships, and learning.

It's very difficult to predict in advance what you will be qualified to teach in a given placement community. Your eligibility to teach a certain subject or grade level is partly dependent on the specific requirements of a state, school district, and university partner. Unfortunately, these requirements are quite complex and change often, so we do not have a requirements list available for applicants.

Corps members teach in one of Teach For America's regional placement communities. Learn more about where corps members teach.