After a four-year legal battle, onerous and unneeded regulations on day-care workers are going into effect in Washington, D.C. Center directors will have to have bachelor’s degrees, teachers to have associate’s degrees, and assistant teachers to have a child-development associate credential.
And so the country’s most expensive child care is about to get even more expensive.
A year of child care in Washington, D.C., already costs $24,378 on average, which is 79 percent of the median income for single parents and nearly twice as expensive as public-university tuition. One way to cut costs would be to make it easier for new workers to enter the field, thereby increasing the supply of child care.
But the D.C. government decided to make it harder instead. Proponents of the credential regulation say that academic research finds that early childhood care is important to lifetime outcomes and should therefore be provided by a professionalized workforce.
The law was challenged in court, but the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the regulation satisfied the rational-basis test for economic regulation. In part of the opinion, it said that even if portions of the credentialing are irrelevant to providing child care, it could still be required because “any adult who has been flummoxed by a two-year-old repeatedly asking ‘why’ can attest” that extraneous knowledge is sometimes useful.
As George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin wrote, the court’s reasoning was ridiculous — parents with no academic training have been handling inquisitive toddlers for millennia — but it was in line with current Supreme Court precedent on economic regulation. That such reasoning can be sufficient would suggest that it might be beneficial for the Court’s precedent to be reconsidered.
Legal issues aside, the economic problem with the new regulation is clear. Some parents might want their kids to only be cared for by people with college degrees, and some (probably most) might not care. Without this regulation, both options are available. The college-educated option comes at a higher price, because resources are not unlimited, and every worker does not have a college degree, but it’s available. With this regulation, the option of lower-priced day care by people without college degrees will disappear. An entire group of parents will either go unserved or be forced to pay extra for credentials they don’t care about, while day-care workers not meeting these requirements will be out of a job.
The choice is not between some people having college-educated care workers and everyone having college-educated care workers. It’s between more people having access to child care and fewer people having access to child care.
In the private sector, many businesses are dropping degree requirements for job applicants. Earlier this year, Maryland governor Larry Hogan announced that many state jobs would no longer require college degrees. That’s a move in the right direction.
In a tight labor market like the one we are currently experiencing, adding superfluous labor restrictions is especially self-destructive. And regardless of current labor-market conditions, it’s not the place of government to decide the level of education that private businesses should require from their job applicants.
Republicans should make D.C. an object lesson about Democratic promises of affordable child care: It’s not really what their agenda is about or will achieve. In this respect as in others, the Democrats are the party of scarcity.