What do Georgia, Oklahoma, Vermont, and West Virginia have in common?
Despite the wide range of geography, politics, and demographics between these four states, they share a specific statewide policy in common: each has a universal prekindergarten system currently in place.
Over the past few decades, interest in prekindergarten enrollment among economists and education researchers has grown. Randomized controlled trials of high-quality prekindergarten programs conducted in the 1960s and 1970s have shown positive long-term outcomes for labor market earnings, health, and criminal justice involvement.
Researchers like Nobel Prize Winner James Heckman and Leading Economic Development Economist Timothy Bartik have used these findings to estimate the long-term economic benefits of investing in early childhood education, coming to the conclusion that early childhood is one of the best times to invest in education.
According to prekindergarten enrollment data compiled by U.S. News and World Report, Ohio is currently #37 in the country for prekindergarten enrollment, behind states like Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and New Mexico.
In April, my firm Scioto Analysis released a cost-benefit analysis we conducted on universal pre-kindergarten. In this analysis, we used results from a study conducted by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy to estimate what the benefits of a universal prekindergarten program would be for Ohio.
We estimated that increased lifetime earnings, reductions in criminal justice costs, and savings in special education would produce about $3.80 in benefits for every $1 of costs of the program.
Universal prekindergarten would not be a small investment for the state. According to 2023 American Community Survey data, Ohio has about 650,000 children under age 5. This means expanding prekindergarten to children age 4 would mean offering it to about 130,000 children and expanding it further would mean providing it to even more. Covering everyone would cost more than a billion dollars.
It is easy to get scared off by sticker shock by programs like this, but policymakers should take into account the impact this spending has on local economies. These funds will go toward paying prekindergarten teachers, who then have resources they can spend in the economy.
They also compare similarly to spending on vouchers for private schools, which often function as a windfall for parents already sending their children to private school rather than an incentive for children to enroll in high-quality programs.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic led to a nationwide reduction in workforce due to early retirements, layoffs, and untimely deaths, workforce has dominated so many of our state and local economic development conversations.
Investment in early childhood education is a strategy to build today’s education workforce and tomorrow’s broader workforce. As Timothy Bartik shares in his book “Investing in Kids,” high-quality universal early childhood education programs have returns to local wages that are on the scale of high-quality tax incentive programs for businesses.
A state that wants to build its long-term workforce needs to look to training people across all years of life. That means investment in postsecondary and technical education, K-12, but crucially early childhood.
Tomorrow’s workforce depends on decisions made, or not made, by policymakers today.
This commentary first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal.