By Rebecca Koenig for EdSurge    Feb 23, 2022

As consensus builds among many researchers, policy experts and elected officials that the U.S. should prioritize early childhood education, a key component of that agenda is getting more people trained to offer high-quality care and teaching to young kids. And that means encouraging colleges to recruit, prepare and graduate more early childhood educators.

But there’s a hitch: Some higher ed leaders are ambivalent about promoting pathways to jobs in early learning.

Even though there’s high demand for people to enter the profession, skeptics say that the career track doesn’t provide workers—mostly women, many of them women of color—with a living wage. So they argue that it’s not in the best interest of their students or their institutions to direct graduates to jobs in preschools and other early childhood programs.

This is playing out especially at community colleges, many of which traditionally offered entry-level certificates in early childhood education. Even as these institutions seek to meet local labor market demand for workers, their leaders increasingly are also concerned about how well students live after they graduate.

“Early childhood puts those things into tension. We need talented early childhood education workers, and community strength depends on talented early childhood education workers. On the other hand, average wages are $12 an hour,” says Josh Wyner, founder and executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute. “You’re not enabling economic mobility at $12 an hour. An individual probably doesn’t need to go to college to earn $12 an hour—that’s a low-wage job. How do they resolve that tension between economic development and individual mobility?”

Read the full article on the EdSurge website HERE.

TRiGroup’s Advice: Partner with your local community college. Take an interest in their courses and course progression and explore potential opportunities for their students to serve as interns in your programs.

Consider also implementing the CTE pathway in your high school related to “Education, Child Development, and Family Services.” (Here’s a link to the CTE standards.) There’s no better way to plan for the long term future than to grow your own local workforce.