20,000 preschool teachers just got offered a free education

Ingrid Henlon is passionate about her job as a preschool teacher in Hartford, Conn., showing up at 7:30 a.m. each day to greet (sometimes crying students) and staying late when necessary to meet with parents. Despite that devotion, Henlon, 48, has to take a second job to make ends meet.

It is an unfortunate conundrum for those like Henlon who are working in early childhood education: Parents pay a lot, teachers get paid little.

“To be honest, at this moment, I’m not even managing, it’s like paycheck to paycheck,” she said. In addition to making car and rent payments on her roughly $42,000 salary, Henlon has more than $6,000 in student debt, that “doesn’t seem like it will ever finish.”

Henlon incurred that debt as part of her journey towards achieving her dream of earning a bachelor’s degree. She had cobbled together some scholarship money through a state program, but it wasn’t always available and so when she graduated in 2013, Henlon was left with some debt.

‘To be honest, at this moment, I’m not even managing, it’s like paycheck to paycheck.’

She had hoped the credential would also come with a raise, which might have made it easier to put a dent in the loans. But she later learned that wouldn’t be possible because the state-funded center where she’s worked for 27 years was short on funds.

Now one company is trying to make a dent in the problem. Bright Horizons, a firm that serves more than 100,000 children through child-care centers — many of them employer-based — in the U.S. and overseas, announced Wednesday that it would pay for an associate’s or bachelor’s degree for any of its employees.

Many of its 20,000 teachers wanted to further their education, said Stephen Kramer, chief executive at Bright Horizons. But many weren’t in the “optimal situation” to take advantage of the company’s existing tuition-reimbursement program. They couldn’t afford the up-front costs and, as non-traditional students with full-time jobs, they struggled to find a program that met their needs.

The benefit comes as some cities and states are upping the education requirements for preschool teachers and early childhood educators. In the past, a certification might have been enough to qualify them for the work, increasingly states and municipalities are requiring associate’s and bachelor’s degrees because that’s what research indicates works best for kids.

The push is part of a broader movement to both improve the quality of education for students and raise the profile of educators in the field, said Barbara Gault, the executive director of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a Washington, D.C. tank.

“It is a strategy for valuing early childhood teachers more, by thinking of them really as teachers, rather than how we often view them as low-paid unskilled labor,” Gault said.

Others agree with the initiative by companies such as Bright Horizons. “While we want this workforce to be able to advance their qualifications, placing the onus upon the individuals is really unreasonable, particularly given their economic status and the pay that’s involved,” said Lea Austin, the co-director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California-Berkeley.

But the effort hasn’t been without controversy. Critics worry that the rules could deter educators from the field and place education requirements on teachers that are costly to fulfill, even as the pay remains relatively low.

Graduates with a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education earn $39,000 annually on average, according to a 2015 report from Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce. That’s the lowest of any major.

Increased public funding for early childhood education would help to make the market work better, she added. “It’s a really big conundrum that a lot of people are trying to wrestle with right now,” Gault said. “In child care you need highly educated people, but the market isn’t really set up to pay the teachers what they deserve.”

In the meantime, the Bright Horizons program aims to help teachers cope with that conundrum and, given the company’s size, Kramer said he’s hopeful the decision will spark a change in the industry by nudging other child care providers to take similar steps.

But Bright Horizons’ choice of educational partners raises questions as to whether the teachers will get a valuable education that they can take beyond the confines of the company, said Kevin Kinser, the head of the education policy studies program at Pennsylvania State University.

Child care requires highly educated people, but the market isn’t set up to pay teachers what they deserve.

Bright Horizons will only pay for workers to get a degree at four schools. Three out of the four are for-profit colleges — a sector that’s been accused over the past several years of delivering poor outcomes to students.

One of the company’s educational partners, Ashford University and its parent company, Bridgepoint Education, was sued by California’s attorney general last year over claims the school misled prospective students about costs. Former students filed a class-action against another one of Bright Horizon’s partners, Walden University, in 2016, alleging the school misled students about the time and money required to complete their degrees.

Ashford University and Walden University were not immediately available for comment. But Anna Davison, Bridgepoint’s vice president of corporate communications and investor relations, told the Los Angeles Times last year that company will “vigorously defend this case.” A Walden University spokesperson told NBC News: “As demonstrated by a recent Gallup survey, our graduates fare well comparatively, and are more likely to cite their degree as a factor in both promotion and salary increase than a nationally representative sample of graduate degree-level holders.”

All of that makes Kinser wonder whether the Bright Horizon teachers will be getting a credential “that’s going to actually be useful to them beyond serving the purposes of the company,” which can now say it has more educated teachers in its employ.

Bright Horizon’s Kramer said the company “curated” the schools based on several different criteria, including the ability to offer bachelor’s and associate’s degrees nationally online and whether they were accredited or working towards gaining accreditation from the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s Higher Education Program.

The company also made an agreement with the schools that would allow students from the Bright Horizons program to fulfill their externship hours at Bright Horizons, which would make it easier for the students to complete that requirement.

“We had a very rigorous screening process,” Kramer said. “Obviously there were many schools that were interested in partnering with Bright Horizons on this program.”

For-profit colleges have historically partnered with employers offering subsidized or free tuition to their students, Kinser said, but the controversy surrounding the companies has left them largely absent from the tuition reimbursement programs announced to much fanfare, by companies like McDonald’s MCD, +0.60%   in recent months.

Bright Horizons will only pay for workers to get a degree at four schools. Three out of those four are for-profit colleges.

The boost in initiatives, like the one at Bright Horizons, is one response to a tight labor market where luring talent can be difficult. Kramer acknowledges that he believes the program will help the company recruit and retain teachers. In part, that’s by design; teachers must stay at the company for another 18 months after finishing their course work.

The program may also help to lure customers, who appreciate the additional education being provided to the teachers working with their kids. Since announcing the program, Kramer said it’s been well-received by both parents whose kids attend their centers and employers who use Bright Horizons to provide child-care services for their workers.

The initiative benefits Bright Horizons in another way too. It’s provided using EdAssist, a division of the company that other firms can use to administer their own tuition reimbursement program. The company expects thousands of teachers to take advantage of the initiative.

In the first few days after an internal announcement, the program is already “the little buzz around the place,” said Sara Vanderhoof, a 46-year-old teacher working at a Bright Horizons facility in Flanders, N.J.

Vanderhoof said she’d been discussing the idea of pursuing a bachelor’s degree with her husband for some time, but she’d put the idea on hold because of finances. Vanderhoof’s said her reaction upon first hearing Bright Horizons would offer the program was, “Oh my God.”

Now she’s eager to get started on her bachelor’s degree. She set up an appointment with an adviser from the program, but it’s not for another few weeks. “In my mind, I’m wishing she’d call tomorrow because I’m so psyched about this.”