So, yesterday I showed you some of the data comparing expected parental contributions for Early Childhood Education (ECE) and PSE, and how much more we ask of younger, poorer parents compared to older, generally wealthier ones.

This is frankly somewhat perverse.  Parents of children in ECE are usually at quite an early stage in their careers, and have little in the way of cash reserves.  They are often brand-new homeowners, or saving up to buy their first house or condo.  And then we ask them to shell out thousands of dollars – often over 20% of their disposable income – to put their kids in ECE.  In contrast, parents sending their kids to university tend to be older, more financially stable, and they also have the luxury of nearly two decades to plan and save for their children’s education.  Basically: why put so much burden on a section of the population that can’t pay, and so little on a population that can?

There are a few reasons for this.  One, it’s a generational politics thing.  If anyone can be counted on to vote, it’s the over-45’s, so politicians looking to attract votes at election time naturally find ways to create subsidies that appeal to this constituency (the on-going farce of the Ontario government providing grants to PSE students from “needy” families making $175,000 per year or more would be an example of this).

Two, it’s a lack of policy and coordination.  ECE and PSE are always run by different ministries, and each ministry develops policies around contribution rates without reference to the other.  But in some ways that’s just a symptom of a larger political issue; namely, that many people don’t frame ECE as a form of education, but rather as “babycare”.  Under that framing, ECE is a benefit to the parent, not the student, and that justifies the higher costs.

A third possible rationale is that for PSE, parents split contributions with their kids, so the lower amount makes sense because the total contribution is about the same.  That’s true on the face of it, but doesn’t work in terms of our comparison.  Our study looked at expected contributions specifically towards fees, and those are simply lower at the PSE level.  There’s just a lower ceiling on costs in PSE.

But here’s a little thought experiment.  Imagine you were designing a system to help parents financially throughout their parenting careers.  Is there any way you would front-end the highest costs?  No.  In fact, you’d likely do the opposite and give the larger subsidies to the younger, less affluent and less housing-secure.

Why can’t we do this?  Basically, it’s because we don’t design programs to help people across their life-courses.  We don’t think about how to trade-off benefits across programs that people will use across their lives.  We probably should – it would be kind of cool if some government could just yank some money from its PSE budget and transfer it to help parents with ECE costs; but that’s not the way bureaucracies work.  Budgets are based on what bureaucracies do, not on how citizens and clients live their lives.

So there’s no simple way to equalize expected parental contributions.  One way to at least alleviate some of the pressure would be for governments to let parents of children in ECE pay their costs over a number of years (something I wrote about back here).  For reasons of optics, you’d probably want to call it an extended payment plan rather than a “childcare loan”, but at least it would allow parents a bit of breathing room.

More ambitiously, one could imagine allocating parents a big pool of notional money at the time their child is born – imagine a mega-Canada Learning Bond – that they could use for any type of non-formal education.  Want to use it up for ECE?  Knock yourself out, but be prepared to pay more in net terms come time for college or university (presumably, loans would still be available for PSE students to cover basic costs).  Conversely, if you’re prepared to suck up big costs when your child is young, you’ll have more money left over to reduce costs for PSE.

Generally, I’m not a big believer in the Trudeau Liberal concept of a “squeezed middle class” (see Stephen Gordon’s columns in the National Post for more on that), but if any part of the population meets that definition, it’s young parents, particularly in Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia.  If we want to think about helping that squeezed middle, we might want to think more about how to help that segment of the population, rather than giving yet more benefits to families earning over $100,000 as their kids go off to PSE.