When I was part of the team building a new campus of my state's flagship university, we talked a great deal about our students who were parents.
State funding formulas based on scale meant that it would be decades before we could actually provide on-campus care. And we knew that our students who were parents would struggle to stay in school without high quality childcare.
There were so many state building formulas that assumed conventional, residential students, not the population of first-gen and non-traditional-aged students that we actually served. Eighteen percent of all undergraduates are parents; on our campus, the percentage was much higher when we opened.
We scheduled longer class sessions that met only two days a week instead of the standard three-days-a-week schedule so that students could pay for fewer days of childcare and better schedule their jobs. When the state insisted that we schedule our classroom five days a week for maximum "utilization" of space, we pointed to how many classes met late into the evenings four days a week, when classrooms on other campuses were empty.
We argued for more parking spaces than the state formula allowed, knowing that public transportation could not work for students who did daily circuits of childcare dropoff, classes, jobs off campus, childcare pickup, and then evening classes while older siblings cared for the little ones because so few childcares stayed open after 6:00.
We knew that all of this was little more than a bandaid for students who needed reliable, affordable childcare to stay in school.
And we also knew that children's wellbeing should never depend upon such piecemeal peripheral gestures.
Thus, it's been encouraging to follow the development of universal childcare in New Mexico. The state has committed to funding a range of childcare options (home care, childcare centers, religious settings, after school programs, and others) for children from birth to age 13, regardless of family income.
In New Mexico, family income no longer determines which children watch movies on a parents' phone in the back of college classrooms when parents can't afford alternatives, and which children can settle into quality childcare for the day.
Unlike the market-driven childcare in other states, childcare workers in New Mexico earn higher wages and may qualify for benefits, because a stable workforce is also essential for quality childcare and because the work is of such high social value.
No childcare provider in New Mexico is required to accept children participating in the state project, so wealthier parents are still assured of access to places that will enroll children only like their own.
Yet statewide universal childcare is a solid, basic gesture toward equity. I'm hoping that more states are watching.
