Challenges with early care and education (ECE) enrollment and staffing are not new, but the COVID-19 pandemic added fuel to the fire. Even in an economic upswing, child care is expensive and hard to find.
Because ECE programs cannot afford robust wages, there is a high level of worker turnover. ECE businesses are also particularly vulnerable to economic downturns. During the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic, federal relief dollars were essential in staving off mass closures.
In these profiles, we provide data on the status of ECE programs in 2024. While they largely avoided closure, programs lost substantial numbers of staff, and enrollment dropped sharply. The return to already precarious pre-pandemic levels has been a struggle. Moreover, programs are fighting to recover just as California is implementing a major innovation: universal transitional kindergarten (TK) for four-year-olds. While it is unclear how much TK is driving the current state of affairs, it is undeniable that ECE programs are struggling: in child care centers, enrollment of all age groups lags behind pre-pandemic levels. Large FCC providers—those serving up to 14 children—have likewise seen a decline in preschool-age enrollment.
While TK expansion ostensibly represents an addition to California’s ECE options, in practice, it is reconfiguring California’s market for early care and education. As we demonstrate, most ECE programs are dependent on serving TK-age children but will likely need to pivot to serving children age three and younger to stay afloat. So far, California has invested in launching TK without parallel investments in the rest of the mixed-delivery ECE system. Individual ECE programs are left to figure out a stable mix of age groups for enrollment (including by moving away from TK-age children). As a consequence, California’s goal of achieving mixed-delivery universal prekindergarten is largely hollow: only TK is universal; all other forms of early care and education remain underfunded and unstable.
Going into 2025, California faces a state budget deficit but may still have the opportunity to shore up its shaky ECE investments. Subsidy reimbursement rate reform is already in motion: the legislature has promised to pay subsidies that better align with the cost of providing care. Implementing a new funding model could help bring programs with public funding closer to stability, yet many programs don’t receive public funding and will not benefit from rate reform. Across the state, ECE programs need support to pivot towards serving younger children. Such assistance could include empowering counties with ongoing resources for coordination, technical assistance, and worker retraining.
About the data: To report on the status of ECE programs, we draw on survey data collected from 2020 to 2024 through the California Early Care and Education Workforce Study. We assembled a representative set of child care centers and FCC educators in 2020, many of whom returned to participate in follow-on surveys in 2023 and 2024. Data from each year are weighted to account for shifts in response rate by region and program type.
Child Care Center Key Findings
- Enrollment fell in all age groups during the pandemic and had only partially rebounded by Spring 2024. Head Start and Title 5 sites experienced the heaviest impact: on average, sites served 20 fewer children age four to five in 2024 compared to pre-pandemic.
- Most directors see increasing enrollment for three-year-olds as the best strategy as four-year-olds enroll in TK. Many center teachers would be open to teaching three-year-olds, but very few want to teach infants and toddlers.
- Directors and teaching staff agree that economic concerns like educator pay and cost of living are the top drivers of turnover. We estimate 40-percent turnover of lead teachers and 50-percent turnover of assistants in the 2023-2024 school year.
Family Child Care Key Findings
- FCC educators have small group sizes that have not changed much on average; however, we do find evidence of a shift among large FCC educators: average enrollment for four- and five-year-olds decreased from four to three children. A similar decline occurred in enrollment of three-year-olds.
- Some FCC providers feel the loss of four-year-old enrollment deeply, both in their revenue and in their interactions with younger children.
- Large FCC providers frequently work with an assistant, but the share of providers with a paid assistant fell from 58 percent in 2020 to 43 percent in 2024. About one in five FCC educators had a vacant assistant position at the time of our survey.
Suggested Citation
Powell, A., Muruvi, W., Copeman Petig, A., & Austin, L.J.E. (2025). 2024 Profiles of California Early Care and Education Programs: Enrollment and Staffing Trends. Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, University of California, Berkeley. https://cscce.berkeley.edu/publications/data-snapshot/california-program-profiles-2024
Acknowledgements
This report was generously supported with funding from the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Blue Shield of California Foundation, and First 5 California. The views presented herein are those of the authors and may not reflect the views of the report’s funders or those acknowledged for lending their expertise or providing input.
Editor: Deborah Mecham
