Qualifications & Educational Support

★ PRIORITY FOCUS AREA

Policies and pathways that strengthen career pathways and access to degrees and credentials and provide consistent standards for educators to achieve higher education

Creating good jobs for the early care and education (ECE) workforce requires multiple integrated strategies. The National ECE Workforce Center recognizes this need and organizes its work around five essential policy areas, or key topics, identified by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) Early Childhood Workforce Index as being critical for supporting the ECE workforce and higher-quality services for children and families. Each of these policy areas directly impacts the ECE workforce’s ability to thrive, which in turn improves recruitment and retention of early educators, stabilizes services for families, supports small business and the economy, aids parents’ ability to work and seek out job training and education, and leads to improved outcomes for children and families.

Facilitating strong professional pathways and access to degrees and credentials are key elements for supporting career advancement and financial well-being. For example, early educators with a bachelor’s degree can earn as much as $17,000 more annually than their peers without a degree. What’s more, children who have access to well-prepared, skilled early educators have better social-emotional and cognitive outcomes.

Key challenges

In 2019, 48 percent of center-based educators and 39 percent of family child care (FCC) educators held an associate degree or higher. While many early educators look to deepen their knowledge and skills by pursuing additional education, they often describe facing barriers to advancing their qualifications due to the complexity of navigating higher education and professional development systems. This navigation can be especially challenging for individuals working full-time and balancing family responsibilities.

Furthermore, when it comes to how much educators should know about child development and developmentally appropriate teaching practices, these standards vary across states and tend to be shaped more by job setting (e.g., schools, centers, homes) and a program’s funding source (e.g., public pre-K, Child Care Development Fund, Head Start, private/family fees) than by workforce needs. We also lack consistency in educational requirements across states and ECE settings.

Promising approaches

When barriers to education are removed and resources are provided, more educators earn degrees and credentials. At an institutional level, this can include offering weekend, evening, and online instruction; integrating job-based coaching into coursework; and providing tailored advising that aligns with educator goals, backgrounds, and contexts.

In our research-to-practice brief, “Five Strategies for Supporting ECE Educators through Career Advancement,” we highlight three examples of promising approaches in action:

• City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) provides a comprehensive set of supports addressing barriers to academic success for students enrolled in a variety of associate degree programs. Evaluations show ASAP retains students at higher rates, moves through developmental coursework faster, and graduates students at rates more than double that of similar students not enrolled in ASAP.
• EDvance designed their BA in Early Childhood Studies with full-time early educators in mind. Courses are offered at convenient times, students have an advisor to help navigate degree requirements, and an earn-and-learn model allows students to earn college credit for paid employment. More than 90 percent of this program’s alumni are employed in the early childhood field a year after graduation.
• The Early Childhood Fellowship Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston offers bachelor’s degrees to early educators at no cost. Students receive a stipend each semester and comprehensive supports including specialized advising, mentoring, leadership development, and an earn-and-learn component for teaching experience courses. A rigorous evaluation of the program has shown that it leads to high GPAs, graduation rates, and ECE employment rates.

Additional system-level strategies for educational supports include providing compensation commensurate with the degree an educator attains, allowing community colleges to offer ECE-related bachelor’s degrees, and having clearly articulated career pathways with stackable credentials. Institutions of higher education can also create articulation agreements to define how they will recognize each other’s coursework. Finally, registered apprenticeship models aligned with educational pathways, can provide many supports in-service educators need for on-the-job learning.

Our work

To overcome key challenges in qualifications and educational support and contribute to promising approaches, our work is centered on the following aim: Early educators receive the support they need to advance their competencies and progress in the ECE field.

Through intensive, targeted, and universal approaches we are supporting states and communities to design and implement career lattices that identify qualifications and acknowledge and integrate work experience.

For a deeper dive into the status of qualifications and educational supports, including state progress in this space, see the Early Childhood Workforce Index chapter. For more resources to support your own efforts to improve access to qualifications and educational supports, see the section below.