The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [22]
The laws of supply and demand take hold in the opposite direction, eliminating the pressure for preschool programs to keep prices low as they discover that they can increase fees without losing pupils. A full-day program in a prekindergarten offered by the Chicago public school district costs $6,500 a year—more than the cost of a year’s tuition at the University of Illinois.73 High? Yes, but that hasn’t deterred parents: At just one Chicago public school, there are ninety-five kids on a waiting list for twenty slots. That situation is fairly typical. According to one study, the annual cost for a four-year-old to attend a child care center in an urban area is more than double the price of college tuition in fifteen states.74 And so today’s middle-class families simply spend and spend, stretching their budgets to give their child the fundamentals of a modern education.
The Promise of Public Education
The solution here is pretty obvious: Extend the scope of public education. If Americans generally believe that educational programs should begin at age three, why should public education wait to kick in at age five or six? The decision about how old children should be when they start school was made more than a century ago, when views about the learning capacity of young children were very different. The absence of publicly funded preschool is an anachronism, one that could easily be remedied. A host of politicians, including 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore and Congressman Richard Gephardt, have proposed publicly funded, universal preschool.75 We agree—it is high time.
At this point, the reader might expect us to join the chorus calling for taxpayer-funded day care as well. Unlike preschool, the primary mission of most day-care programs is not to educate children but to provide surrogate child care when parents are at work. For more than two decades, women’s groups, labor unions, and liberal politicians have been pressing the government to foot the bill for day care. Blocked by conservatives, advocates of free day care have had little success, but that hasn’t stopped the clamor.
It is time for a hard look at this sacred cow. How much help would subsidized day care really offer to middle-class families? It would certainly be a big help for poorer families whose paychecks can barely cover even low-quality child care. But what about the average two-parent middle-class family? Government-sponsored day care would ease the immediate cost pressures on some families, but the long-term financial implications are more complex. Unlike the money that the government spends on public safety or education, which benefit every child, subsidized day care benefits only some kids—those whose parents both work outside the home. Day-care subsidies offer no help for families with a stay-at-home mother. In fact, such subsidies would make financial life more difficult for these families, because they would create yet another comparative disadvantage for single-income families trying to compete in the marketplace. Every dollar spent to subsidize the price of day care frees up a dollar for the two-income family to spend in the bidding wars for housing, tuition, and everything else that families are competing for—widening the gap between single- and dual-income families. Any subsidy that benefits working parents without providing a similar benefit to single-income families pushes the stay-at-home mother