Report From Forward Analytics Confirms Child Care Can Cost More Than College Tuition

Wednesday, October 4th, 2023 -- 12:00 PM

(Madison Lammert, Appleton Post-Crescent) Concurring with other recent reports, Forward Analytics found child care can cost more than college tuition.

According to Madison Lammert with Appleton Post-Crescent, parents of college students have more time to save for their children's college, typically have well-established careers and help through scholarships and loans, said Forward Analytics' deputy director and the report's lead author, Kevin Dospoy. It's a different story for parents needing child care.

"Typically when people start a family, they're at the earliest end of their working life, (so) they're making the least amount of money that they're going to make in their career, and they are now going to have to pay the most expensive bill that they may ever have to pay (child care)," Dospoy said, also adding that there are fewer cost-relief options for child care than college.

This steep cost burden shapes families' decisions, including when, or even if, families have more children and what shifts they can work. In addition to high costs, Wisconsinites face another child care hurdle: It's hard to find.

This is largely because the number of Wisconsin's child care workers, which determines how many children a child care program can serve due to staff-to-child ratio requirements, decreased by 44% from 2010 to 2021, the report said.

The approximate 4% decline in the number of children in Wisconsin younger than 6 with all parents in the workforce during this same timeframe is no match for the large supply drop.

"Wisconsin is getting older, fewer people are having kids and when they do have kids they are having kids later, and fewer families are moving here with kids," Dospoy said. "So, we kind of expected the number of kids in need to decline, but the number of child care workers declined by four times that amount in the same time period."

Between 2015 and 2021, accessing child care has become more challenging for the majority of Wisconsin, with Northeast Wisconsin seeing the largest decline in availability, the report found.

The areas of Wisconsin with the worst child care access, defined as having the most children younger than 6 per child care worker, are the Marathon County area, followed by the majority of rural Southern Wisconsin and some of central Wisconsin.

Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.