The academic impacts of pre-kindergarten programming for children are a matter of unsettled science, with some research finding a positive impact, some a negative, and much showing the fade out of all impacts by third grade or soon thereafter. A new working paper by researchers from Brown and Yale adds to this literature by examining a universal preschool program in New Haven, Connecticut. But it also looks at a less-studied question: What about the economic impacts of this pre-K program? Specifically, how much workforce support does readily-accessible childcare provide for parents?
The New Haven program was established in the mid-1990s. Its current iteration, dating to 2003, includes separate programming for three-year-olds (PK3) and four-year-olds (PK4). It is free of charge, operates mostly in New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) elementary buildings, and is available to all Connecticut residents via open enrollment. The structure includes 6.5 hours of educational curricula, as well as wraparound care starting at 7:30 a.m. and ending at 5:30 p.m. five days per week during the school year. Both PK3 and PK4 are oversubscribed each year, so seats are assigned by lottery.
The researchers started with all applications submitted between 2003 through 2022, including full data from students’ applications, the administrative rules and student priorities used to process the applications, and school placement outcomes. They observed 18,795 applications from 16,037 individuals. Just under 42 percent of applicants were Black, and 28.5 percent were Hispanic. Forty-eight percent applied to PK4, and 52 percent to PK3. The median household income of applicants was $59,708. And just over 26 percent of applicants ultimately enrolled their children in a pre-K program each year on average.
The report’s findings on academic outcomes focus on standardized test scores for students in grades three through eight, chronic absenteeism, and grade retention. To do that, all pre-K applicants were linked with NHPS records to track their academic outcomes over time. Those who went on to attend public schools anywhere in Connecticut were linked to enrollment and outcome records by the Connecticut State Department of Education. These data cover the years 2006 through 2022. A majority of pre-K applicants were tracked through middle school, many into high school and beyond.
All academic outcome impacts were null or slightly negative, with enrolled and non-enrolled pre-K applicants showing no statistically significant difference in outcomes. This was true across the board. The researchers surmise that these findings are likely due to a combination of rapid effect fadeout and parents of non-enrolled children finding other pre-K programming of similar quality.
The impacts on parental income, however, are another story. Workforce data came from the Connecticut Department of Labor, linked to parental records submitted during the pre-K application process. These were further linked to Connecticut Unemployment Insurance records and ultimately cover the years 1999 through 2022. All earnings figures were reported in terms of 2015 dollars. Administrative data were supplemented by parental survey responses from 840 pre-K applicants. It’s a small number, considering the time span of the analysis, but is positive in that they have responses from applicants in every year, even if the earliest years are more sparsely covered.
The researchers find that enrollment in the pre-K program increased childcare coverage by eleven hours per week, on average. As a result, parents of pre-K enrollees worked an average of twelve more hours per week, and their earnings increased by 21.7 percent in the year following application, as compared to parents who applied but did not enroll their children. Both administrative and survey data showed high baseline rates of labor force participation among applicants and little evidence that children’s enrollment raised these rates further. Put simply: Most parents applying for the pre-K spots were already working and looking to pre-K for support to continue, rather than trying to use pre-K to get into the labor force.
As a labor market policy, New Haven’s pre-K program is a boon. It’s pricey, yes—$15,500 per child per year (in 2015 dollars)—but each dollar of net government expenditure on this program yielded $5.51 in after-tax benefits for families, almost entirely from parents’ earnings gains, which persist for at least six years after the end of pre-K. The researchers note that this is a large return on investment compared to other labor market policies they examined. As an education policy, the picture is far less rosy. For each dollar of net government spending, education benefits were only $0.46 to $1.32. Even children’s health interventions analyzed by other researchers (such as expanding affordable health insurance for children) have been shown to generate better education returns than that.
In the end, these and other findings suggest that the academic dimension of pre-K programs may be best ignored as a value proposition (or simply accepted as having null value long-term) in favor of their workforce dimension. That doesn’t mean a lowering of quality or shuttering of programs, but simply an admission, hard as it may be, that accessible pre-K is a work support for grown-ups rather than a kindergarten training ground for kiddos. It certainly seems that working families in New Haven view them as such, and the families who were able to access pre-K placement took full advantage of the opportunity. Such a change in mindset could allow new versions of pre-K—perhaps more connected to business than to schools—and new funding sources than the public school/government-funded model that currently predominates.
SOURCE: John Eric Humphries et al., “Parents’ Earnings and the Returns to Universal Pre-Kindergarten,” NBER Working Papers (October 2024).
