Shorting the Shorties

Normally, I find stories about the preschool admissions rat-race even more annoying (if that's possible) than Kevin finds stories about increasingly competitive college admissions.

But this WaPo article on the increasing scarcity of high-quality preschool spaces in the D.C. Metro Area is actually pretty good*. The author is focusing on a real concern: The population of kids in the D.C. Metro Area is growing, in part due to immigration, and parents, increasingly aware of the educational benefits of preschool, are more likely to send their children to preschool. But the supply of quality preschool programs isn't growing as rapidly. This means it's harder for parents to find quality preschool programs for their children, because there simply aren't enough spaces to meet demand. It's difficult for preschool programs to expand, because of a lack of both facilities, due to rapid growth and still-tight real estate markets in D.C., and qualified teachers.

Yet the underlying problem here is the economics of preschool itself. Running a high-quality preschool is not particularly lucrative. The margins are low. Many centers barely break even. Ability to raise prices in response to increased demand is limited because of limits on the amount most parents can pay: Affluent families can pay preschool tuitions in excess of what most private colleges charge, but working and middle class parents are already pretty strapped financially, so they are forced to choose lower quality care rather than paying more.

Ironically, while federal, state, and local governments provide a lot of support for K-12 and higher education, government aid for education is hardest to come by at time in children's lives--early childhood and preschool years--when parents may be least likely to make educational investments themselves. Parents of young children tend to be younger and earlier in their careers (and in the case of women, more likely to be working only part time) than parents of older children--meaning they have less ability to pay for education than when their children are older. Further, research shows that investments in early learning have lots of positive externalities--reductions in public education remediation and special ed costs, prevention of future crime and welfare dependency--that parents don't take into account when making choices about preschool.

These market conditions are classic rationales for increased government intervention and investment in helping parents provide high-quality early learning opportunities for their children. Yet only Georgia and Oklahoma now have universal pre-k statewide, and Head Start and childcare subsidies are chronically underfunded. As we're seeing in California right now, critics of increased preschool investments often argue that providing greater government funding for preschool will exacerbate the shortage of preschool spaces. But, while this may be true in the short run, particularly if policymakers guarantee publicly-supported programs are high-quality (as they should), in the long run increased government support may be the only way to ensure an adequate supply of quality preschool--both for families that need assistance and those that are able to pay the full cost.

*(One gripe: The author conflates preschool and child care in several instances, a serious, but unfortunately all too common, error in both media coverage and policy debates about early childhood education.)

Additional Thought: The difficulty many parents face finding affordable, quality preschool for their children in the D.C. area makes stuff like this even harder to swallow. (Disc: I'm on Appletree's board.)