Demand for Campus Child Care Is Growing. Choosing How to Provide It Can Be Fraught.

When Yvonne Sherwood heard that the university-funded child care center she’d been sending her sons to for years was going to be replaced by a for-profit provider, she was outraged. The University of California at Santa Cruz graduate student had been more than satisfied with the campus’s Early Education Services, describing the teachers there as “like family.”

More importantly, she was worried she wouldn’t be able to afford the cost of the new center. “This is an issue for us about access,” Sherwood told The Chronicle. “If we do not have access to quality, affordable child care, then we do not have access to higher education as students with family.”

The need for campus child care is growing — and not just among instructors and graduate students. According to a 2014 study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, almost five-million undergraduates are parents. A 2011 report from the same policy group found that access to affordable child care is one of the most important factors in a student-parent’s decision to enroll at a college or university.

The decision to offer child care is complicated by questions of resources. Bright Horizons Family Solutions, the for-profit company tapped by Santa Cruz, opened its first campus center at Iowa State University in 1997. Now the company operates about 50 locations for universities and colleges, many of which were attracted by the notion of cost savings.

But several campuses have decided to cut ties with Bright Horizons in recent years, opting to manage child-care facilities on their own. In some cases those decisions have come in response to complaints about the quality of care — something on the minds of those in Santa Cruz who are upset with the new provider.

The debate at Santa Cruz raises an especially relevant question as the need for child care on campuses grows, yet funds remain scarce: Are institutions best equipped to run those services themselves?

Backlash at Santa Cruz

In March, Sherwood and her 8-year- old son joined dozens of other parents to march with the university’s Graduate Student Association in protest of the contract with Bright Horizons. The demonstrators had a laundry list of concerns: Some research has shown that, on average, for-profit centers have higher teacher-student ratios and higher employee-turnover rates. And in California, teachers at for-profit centers are subject to less-stringent education requirements from the state.

The cost of care will also increase significantly. At the current center, parents are charged on a sliding scale based on income — the average cost ranges from $200 to $900 per month — and they are eligible for Title V funding and subsidies from the state. At a Bright Horizons center, those subsidies would disappear, and prices would rise to market rates, which, in Santa Cruz, is about $1,000 per month.

These concerns are shared by more than the 40-some protesters who attended the March rally. As of Thursday, a petition opposing the contract with Bright Horizons had garnered 564 signatures from students, faculty, and other university community members.

Scott Hernandez-Jason, a university spokesman, said the institution plans to use some of the money it saved by contracting out the management of its child-care center to provide university subsidies for graduate-student parents. The amount it will offer has not yet been determined, he said.

In 2010, Santa Cruz stopped offering child care to faculty and staff, making it the only campus in the University of California system without that service and prompting the university to explore options for expanding to meet the need. According to Hernandez-Jason, the new center, which is expected to open in May 2020, will serve the children of faculty and staff as well as those of students.

But faculty members, whom the shift is supposed to help, have signaled their opposition to contracting out child care to a for-profit company. In 2015 the university’s committee on faculty welfare recommended that a separate, university-operated child-care center be established for the children of faculty and staff, and specifically determined a third-party operated center to be “unviable.”

Hernandez-Jason also said that parents will benefit from the expertise that a professional child-care provider like Bright Horizons brings to the table. But Bright Horizons wouldn’t be held to the same standards for quality as the current center. In California, a teacher at a for-profit center is required to have only half the early-childhood-education credits required of full teachers at nonprofit centers, and assistant teachers at for-profit centers aren’t required to have any.

Though Bright Horizons centers aren’t required to meet the same minimum standards as nonprofit centers, they either meet or exceed standards set by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, according to Ilene Serpa, the company’s vice president for communications.

Keeping It Local

Other universities, under similar pressures to meet the growing child-care needs of their faculty and staff, have rejected the for-profit option.

In 2012 the University of California at Berkeley decided to scrap its plans to transfer management of its child-care center to Bright Horizons following parent backlash. In 2015 Pennsylvania State University decided not to renew its contract with Bright Horizons, electing to bring its center under the management of the university.

When Boston University decided to expand its child care services, a task force was formed to explore the best option for doing that. It conducted internal surveys, held open “town hall” meetings, compared the strategies of other universities, and solicited input from students, faculty, and staff. Ultimately, the task force recommended that the university devote more funding to provide expanded services in-house.

Diane Tucker, vice president for human resources at the university, helped lead the task force. She said that the recommendation came down to quality of care, which she said is important to attract graduate-student parents and young faculty.

“We look at this as a recruitment and retention tool,” she said. “It’s an investment for the university because it’s an important benefit for our faculty, staff and graduate students, especially our mid-career faculty.”

But not every university administration has seen it that way. Cornell University’s child-care center has been managed by Bright Horizons for over a decade. In 2010, a faculty committee recommended that then-President David Skorton not renew Cornell’s contract with the for-profit child-care provider, citing low quality of care and 47 violations of New York State child-care regulations. Skorton rejected the recommendation, saying, in part, that although the center had started with “significant problems,” substantial improvements had been made starting that year.

Serpa echoed that point, saying that the Bright Horizons center at Cornell underwent “significant changes” in the first few years of operation and has seen subsequent improvements since.

Corporate Care or Community Care?

Sydney Van Morgan taught sociology at Cornell until 2014. During her tenure there she both enrolled her children in the Bright Horizons-operated Cornell Child Care Center and pulled them from it. She said that a for-profit company’s incentive to cut costs is inherently at odds with its ability to offer high-quality child care. She also said that Bright Horizons, which was bought in 2008 by the private equity giant Bain Capital, is a particularly hard sell for parents who want to see the maximum return on their tuition fees.

“It’s very odd that parents are paying tuition to put their children into these daycare centers, and that part of that tuition is going to the profit margin of Bain Capital, as opposed to being reinvested back into the center,” said Van Morgan, who once ran a Facebook page called “Campaign Against Corporate Childcare on Campus.”

In 2017 Kyle Parry, an assistant professor of art history and visual culture, wrote a letter urging Santa Cruz administrators to renege on the agreement with Bright Horizons in favor of expanding the current, university-run center. He told The Chronicle via email that he doesn’t buy the university’s rationale for making the switch, which he said very likely has more to do with shedding university liability for the children and eliminating the cost of staffing.

Parry has a 9-month old daughter, whom he does not plan on sending to the new Bright Horizons center at UCSC. It won’t be affordable, he said, and he doesn’t have faith that the holistic approach that defined the old child-care center will carry over.

But Parry also has a moral problem with the university supporting for-profit child-care initiatives.

“When public universities help advance the corporatization of early childhood education and care, they not only betray their essential social and educational missions, they also voice support for a world in which childhood is there to be mined rather than defended,” he wrote.

Switching to a for-profit center from a university-run center can also displace current employees, and lower pay combined with distant ownership can make it harder for companies like Bright Horizons to retain their teachers. Employees of the UCSC center will not be guaranteed jobs at the expanded center, and even if they are rehired, they will lose the significant benefits offered by the university to its employees.

“You can see their eyes fill when we talk about this transition, and the breaking of their relationships with our children, and the fear of losing their health benefits,” said Sherwood, the Santa Cruz graduate student and parent. “And when you come to see people as your community and as your family, that’s disheartening.”

Tucker, of Boston University, said that when the campus task force looked to compare strategies for child-care expansion at other universities, the field of peer institutions was split between outsourcing and devoting more resources to in-house services. At the end of the day, she said, it’s another difficult decision universities must make about how to allocate their limited funds, but she’s proud of the decision that BU made.

“We’re fortunate that we have leadership at the university who think it’s an important investment,” she said. “It certainly seems like not every university has been able to convince their administration that this is a worthwhile place to put resources.”

Liam Knox is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @liamhknox, or email him at liam.knox@chronicle.com.