Instead of College, Can We Talk About Daycare?

Let me say that I appreciate that Sanders has pushed the conversation to the left. No matter who the eventual Democratic nominee for the President is, the conversation has been better because he has been part of it. At the same time, I realized the other day that I am mad at him. Not for being in the race, but for pushing the conversation toward universal college education, and forcing Clinton to respond specifically to that.

As I have said before, I am not against universal college education. In fact, as a parent of a 6^th grader, I am likely to benefit from it. But what if the conversation had been pushed in a slightly different direction, or if Clinton had been able to set the direction herself?

She has long been an outspoken advocate for women and girls throughout the world. What if, instead of talking about universal college education, we were talking about universal daycare? What if we were talking about expanding Head Start and before and after school programs? What if instead of focusing on 18-22-year-olds, we focused on 0-4-year-olds?

Now I get, 18-22-year-olds can vote and 0-4-year-olds cannot. And the parents who would benefit the most from universal daycare are those who have the hardest time getting to vote in this country – not from apathy, but from actual voter suppression and schedules that do not allow for standing in line at a polling place. But think about it. What would our country stand to gain from investing in children?

In many places, daycare is as expensive as college tuition, and there are no federal grants or low-interest rate loans that can be taken out to pay for it. In fact, there is no such thing as a daycare loan. And parents who are paying for daycare are at the start of their careers, the time in their lives when they are least able to afford that kind of expense, unlike the parents of college-age kids who should be at the height of their earning power.

One of the big complaints about the burden of student debt is that it is forcing people to put off starting their own families because they cannot afford their student loan payments and daycare. But what if they did not have to pay for daycare? What if the calculation of “would it actually be cheaper for one parent (usually the mother) to leave the workforce” than to pay for daycare stopped being a calculation anyone had to make?

The poor mother who now works a dead-end job is still working a dead-end job, but now she can work and keep more of her paycheck, perhaps even get off other public assistance, because she no longer has the daycare bill.  Perhaps instead of working 3 jobs in order to pay the bills and daycare, she now only has to work one and can take advantage of a Pell Grant to take classes at the community college?

What if we decided that early childhood education was as important to us as post-secondary school education? What if there were before and after school programs that were open to all kids? Studies have shown that these kinds of programs cut down on crime. And while I would like to see more people in college, I would LOVE to see fewer kids in trouble with the law.

Would Clinton have proposed universal daycare on her own? I do not know, but it would not have been outside the possibility.

I am not saying student loan debt is not an issue, but should it really be a central issue in our Presidential debate when there are so many other consumer and educational issues out there? As often happens in politics, we are listening to a very vocal (and college-educated) group, instead of looking at those whose voices are often stolen from them. The most vulnerable among us are once again invisible in this national conversation.

I think it is great that we want Tammy to be able to go to college and not graduate deeply in debt. But I think it would be better if we decided that Tammy and Johnny should both graduate high school with a 12th-grade reading level. And early education is one of the biggest factors.