Breaking down the costs of high-quality early education in Massachusetts

Any family in Massachusetts who has or had young children knows that the cost to put their children in child care is high – often, prohibitively high. In fact, for Massachusetts families, the average annual child care tuition for having two children in center-based care (one infant and one 4-year-old) is $43,118. 

At the same time, the professionals who make up the Commonwealth’s early childhood education workforce make poverty wages; the average hourly wage is just $18.30 in Massachusetts. This dissonance between how much care costs parents and how much educators are paid begs the question: why does high-quality early childhood education cost so much, if educators make so little?

To answer this question, Neighborhood Villages set out to study what it costs to offer high-quality early education. To understand how we can make child care more affordable for families and raise the wages of educators, we first need to know what goes into providing high-quality care and why it costs what it does.

Our new report, High-Quality Early Childhood Education: Opening the Books on its True Costs, unpacks what goes into offering high-quality early learning — from teacher wages, to core operating expenses, to wraparound services for families. Through offering a high-level summary of recent cost-of-care data published by the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care and placing it in conversation with case studies that reflect the budgets of real Massachusetts providers, the report highlights the essential program expenses that comprise the high costs of providing high-quality early childhood education to children. 

What’s In the Report

High-Quality Early Childhood Education: Opening the Books on its True Costs analyzes the recently published cost estimation studies commissioned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and undertaken by the Center for Early Learning Funding Equity (CELFE), which provide insights into what a daily per-child cost is for providing early education and care. The report then presents the results of a series of case studies undertaken by Neighborhood Villages that illustrate the financial constraints that providers currently operate under — and how labor and operating costs are reflected in early childhood education programming, child care center operations, and administrative decision making.

What We Found

The summary below offers a glimpse of what we uncovered.

I. Center for Early Learning Funding Equity (CELFE) Cost Estimation Study

In its report, CELFE produced cost estimates of daily rates for the cost of care by age, setting, and geographic region in the Commonwealth, including cost based on what providers’ currently spend on care and what daily costs would be if elements of higher quality care - such as increased wages - were included in programming. 

Annualizing CELFE’s results, Neighborhood Villages estimates that, if early educators were paid fair wages and providers were staffed to quality capacity, an annual cost of high-quality care per child ranges from $16,417 per year for a preschooler in center-based care in Western Massachusetts to up to $49,916 per year for an infant in center-based care in Metro Boston. 

II. Neighborhood Villages Case Study Series

To examine what costs go into providing high-quality care, Neighborhood Villages conducted in-depth interviews with center-based providers across Massachusetts. We found that:  

• Providers participating in the Neighborhood Villages’ study who serve high-poverty[1] populations have higher levels of per-child spending as compared to providers who serve low-poverty populations.

  • The current average per-child spending among programs that serve a high-poverty population is $20,426.

  • The current average per-child spending among programs that serve low-poverty populations is $17,267.

• Providers have not reached the level of comprehensive programming they aim for, given financial constraints. There is a gap for all providers between what they are currently spending and what they would like to spend (to account for desired quality services and a $26/hour wage floor).

• The aspirational average per-child total expenses, accounting for desired quality services and a $26/hour wage floor across all programs would be $23,889.

• The aspirational average per-child total expenses for providers serving high-poverty populations, when accounting for desired quality services and a $26/hour wage floor would be $28,016.

• Apart from higher wages, the most commonly desired service that providers said they would like to be able to offer was behavioral and early relational health training for teachers.

• There are numerous other expenses that go into high-quality education and care and there are many services that programs would like to offer if they had sufficient financial resources to do so. These include professional services for therapies, including occupational, speech, and physical. They also include socio-emotional support services, like a dedicated social worker. Unfortunately, many providers are challenged to balance their budgets with revenue from tuition as is.

Despite important recent increases in public investment for early education in Massachusetts, the gap between funding and the true needs of our children and providers persist. Both CELFE’s cost estimation studies and Neighborhood Villages case study series reveal that the cost of providing high-quality care far exceeds both what families are currently paying for care and what most providers are currently able to spend on operating their programs. In short, families cannot afford to cover the true cost of high-quality care for their children. Rather, a substantial commitment of additional public funds is required to bridge the gap.