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Understanding how the United States pays for higher education may help us design and realize more adequate financing of child care and early education. Advocates, researchers, and public policymakers who participated in a meeting to explore higher education financing were unanimous in this conclusion.


We are nearing the end of the political, financial, and creative value of the second major historical stage of early care and education financing. We need a new conceptual, design, and advocacy framework.

Stage 1 of child care financing# had three mechanisms: parent fees, philanthropy, and bake sales. Philanthropy supported a few child care centers serving immigrant or low-income families, parent fees paid for nursery schools and the balance of work-related child care, and many programs struggled to supplement these limited resources with bake sales and similar efforts.
In Stage 2, where we have been since the 1960s, we added three new financing models:

- K-12 for early education funding;

- SF+QSA for ...