The childcare industry is collapsing. San Diego has only half the number of childcare spots that it needs, and yet more preschools are closing than are opening. Preschool tuition has become exorbitant, and yet preschool teacher remains one of the lowest-paid professions and most child care centers lose money or barely break even. Fewer and fewer families can afford preschool, and somehow there are not nearly enough of these expensive spots to go around. How can all of these things be true? It’s because childcare in America has been left almost entirely to the private market, so the small, finite number of families at any preschool must bear all of the costs of running a labor-intensive, brick-and-mortar business in a time of skyrocketing wages, rent, and supplies.
In 2013, soon after we first opened Aspen Leaf, we charged $1045/month for a full-time preschool spot. Looking at job listings from that year time, the market rate in San Diego for a preschool teacher with the right credits and one year’s experience was around $8/hour, and most preschools did not offer any form of health insurance at the time. Teacher pay is by far the largest expense for any childcare center or preschool, but in that time, rent and other major expenses have also doubled.
Today, in 2024, the rise in teacher pay and addition of full benefits (which are now standard) means compensation for a similar teacher has more than tripled in ten years. Despite this, preschool teachers are still among the lowest paid profession, and continue to be paid less than their K-12 counterparts, who themselves are undervalued and underpaid. And because of exorbitant housing costs and general inflation, teachers have left the field in droves or have at least moved away from expensive cities like San Diego, exacerbating a teacher shortage that was already bad.
Nearly all preschools (including Aspen Leaf) receive zero public funding or support. So every increase in wages, rent, and expenses has to be met solely by increasing tuition. In many areas, the amount it would cost to simply run a preschool at break-even exceeds the amount families in the area could afford to pay, and so preschools and childcare centers have closed, resulting in vast “child care deserts” in middle income and rural areas.
These are macro problems. Unfortunately neither the country nor our state are anywhere close to the macro solution–treating childcare and early childhood education as a public good and subsidizing it like we do K-12. Even California’s ambitious Universal Transitional Kindergarten plan leaves out private preschools entirely, sending funds only to school districts, even though funding pre-K in both public schools and private preschools would help meet the need for spots and prevent more critical childcare centers from closing. And so we continue to do our best–paying our teachers as much as we can and knowing it’s not enough, and keeping tuition as low as possible while knowing it costs families too much.