The struggles lecturers face don’t stop when they get home. For many parenting lecturers, balancing family life with low pay and sporadic hours is a challenge.
Lecturers are in a precarious position when it comes to finding child care, said political science lecturer Tyson Roberts. Oftentimes, their scattered schedules make it difficult to access convenient day care for their kids.
“We can’t say at a child care center, ‘I only want to have my kid there from 10 to 2 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then from 4 to 6 on Wednesdays,’” Roberts said. “That’s a special challenge for mostly part-time lectures, especially during hours we’re actually in the classroom.”
Beyond scheduling constraints, lecturers’ incomes are often insufficient to cover child care costs. In Los Angeles, child care centers typically cost $1,000 per month for preschoolers, according to 2018 data from the California Department of Education. On average, lecturers at UCLA earn $3,359 per month, according to 2020 University of California payroll data, meaning approximately one-third of their salaries would go toward child care.
“Families themselves are paying way more than the percentage that they could afford to pay out of their pocket,” said education assistant professor Anna Markowitz. “People refer to it as a broken market.”
Without his wife’s income, Roberts would not have been able to afford child care for their two teenagers when they were younger, he said.
“I’m lucky that I have a spouse that’s earning enough to be able to pay for their day care,” Roberts added.
Although UCLA offers in-house child care for its faculty, lecturers often can’t reap the benefits of the resource because of high costs and enrollment policies.
The UCLA Early Care and Education centers make up a network of three centers – Krieger, Fernald and University Village – which care for more than 300 infants and toddlers. The centers operate as tools for retaining and recruiting staff and faculty, but for lecturers, the difficulty lies in affording and accessing centers like these.
The ECE centers’ monthly fees place high above LA averages for child care. Depending on parents’ affiliation with UCLA, current prices range from $1,750 to $1,945 for preschoolers – significantly higher than LA averages for children of the same age. Devin Dillon, superintendent of PreK-12 operations for UCLA PreK-12 Programs and Schools, said the ECE centers’ monthly fees are established according to the market rate of child care and preschools in the area.
Additionally, priority enrollment spots are doled out based on faculty members’ pay titles, with first choice given to professors and lecturers with security of employment. As a result, lecturers without security of employment find it harder to secure a spot for their child at the centers.
Education lecturer Willliam Purdy said the long waitlist at the ECE centers made it hard to access its services while he was raising his daughter as a graduate student at UCLA. Affording the ECE centers was also a challenge, he said, even though he lived in university housing with an on-site center.
Purdy’s family made do because his spouse stayed home to care for their daughter while Purdy worked. When their daughter was old enough, Purdy was able to send her to a local preschool, subsidizing the tuition costs with a stipend from his union.
Now, Purdy’s daughter is 11 years old and spends her days at school while her parents work. But even as a lecturer, Purdy said he would still struggle to find a suitable child care option if his daughter was not old enough to attend school and his spouse was not around to help.
“I don’t really know what I’d do, because I couldn’t afford child care,” he said. “It would be a scramble.”
Markowitz believes governmental support is needed to fix the broken child care market.
“There needs to be a public investment. (Child care is) something the private market struggles to do really well,” she said.
President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better framework attempts to ease the financial pressure on families through universal pre-K and an expansion of the child tax credit. As it stands, the plan proposes increased funding for child care centers, meaning more families could gain access to such services. The plan also proposes limiting many low- and middle-income families’ child care costs to at most 7% of their income.
In the meantime, the UC lecturers union recently secured a deal with the UC that provides more support for parenting lecturers. They can expect a full four weeks of paid family leave as well as salary increases that could help cover child care costs.
Despite these gains, many educators still face an uphill battle while trying to find adequate child care.
“It’s a tremendous burden on American families to have children, financially,” Purdy said.