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D.C.'s College Mandate For Child Care Workers Is Something To Cry About

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Ask many young, middle-class people about the biggest economic problems facing them, and it’s a good bet that both student debt and the cost of child care will come up. Yet the District of Columbia is on a regulatory campaign to exacerbate both.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that D.C. is “among the first in the nation” to require child care workers to get college degrees. By 2020, directors of child care centers will need to have a bachelor’s degree, and child care teachers an associate’s degree. This is a nonsensical policy that will have no winners save colleges that get to charge child care workers thousands of dollars to churn out those credentials.

First, the policy is burdensome for child care workers, who must put their lives on hold to get credentialed. The Post report tells the story of one woman who must rise at 4:15 a.m. every day, take the Metro across town, put in a full day’s work at the child care center, cross town on Metro again, and take classes until 9:15 p.m. before finally heading home. With routines like this, is it any wonder that older and part-time college students are more likely than not to drop out?

For the D.C. child care workers who do make it across the credential finish line, the financial return may not be worth it. According to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, the typical early childhood education major goes on to earn just $39,000 a year—the lowest of 137 majors studied. D.C. is requiring child care workers to take time out of their lives to go into debt pursuing expensive degrees with a low payoff. But that’s not even the best part!

Under these conditions, many child care workers may just decide to leave the profession. Many would-be care workers will avoid the sector altogether. The regulations will put a supply crunch on the District’s already-squeezed child care market. At $22,631 per year, D.C. families already face higher child care costs than any state in the nation. With these new requirements, it’s impossible to see that figure going anywhere but up.

Defenders of the D.C. policy point to research showing that birth through age 8 is a critical period for child development, and thus the people who care for children should know what they’re doing. But it’s a big leap from that uncontroversial finding to a college mandate for everyone who works with children. As Shoshana Weissmann writes at Opportunity Lives: “Should parents need college degrees to have kids? Hopefully D.C. won’t regulate that next.”

Perhaps there are real benefits to more education for child care workers. But those must be weighed against other considerations such as the cost of attaining college credentials, and whether there is a more efficient way to acquire the necessary skills than getting a two- or four-year college degree. These are debatable tradeoffs, but the D.C. government is presuming it knows how to make those decisions for all child care centers—and indeed, all families—in the District.

With the annual price of child care over $22,000, many D.C. families would opt for lower costs. Cheaper child care is possible: in Mississippi, care costs less than a quarter of what it does in the District. According to research published by the Mercatus Center, state and local regulations are a significant driver of child care costs. For instance, low mandated child-adult ratios at care centers are associated with higher prices, as are greater education requirements for care workers.

The District has more than 80 subchapters of regulation governing nearly every aspect of child care—right down to what kind of toilets centers must have. Subtracting from those, rather than adding, will free providers to innovate and produce better-quality care at lower costs.

Yet the capital of the free world has instead chosen to use the force of government to further a credentialing arms race that will make life difficult for child care workers and put a squeeze on working families with children. The D.C. government already has plenty of fires to put out. It should reverse this conflagration of its own making.