Public school options start at age five for most kids, with kindergarten. President Joe Biden wants to change that by including universal preschool in his Build Back Better plan. The Build Back Better bill that passed the House includes $109 billion to fund full-day, universal preschool for six years, and it could be a game-changer—especially for parents and primary caregivers of young children, who are too often kept out of the paid labor force by high child care costs. That, in turn, could have widespread benefits to the economy.

Under the Biden plan, preschool would be voluntary—parents who wanted to keep their kids home could absolutely do so—and parents would have a choice of programs including public schools, Head Start programs, and private child care providers. But, according to the White House, the plan would “enable states to expand access to free preschool for more than six million children per year and increase the quality of preschool for many more children already enrolled.” (That “enable states to” part is important: Republican-controlled states would likely opt out of the program, denying their kids the opportunity.)

Researchers at Penn Wharton estimate that, if every state opted in, an additional 900,000 children would likely be in preschool, out of three million who currently don’t go to preschool at all. That would be great for those children and for their long-term impact on the economy; as the White House notes, “research shows that every $1 invested in high-quality early childhood care and education can yield $3 to $7 over the long-run, as they do better in school, are more likely to graduate high-school and college, and earn more as adults.” But it would also have an important and immediate economic impact: Parents of young children, especially women who are often kept out of the paid workforce by high childcare costs, could start applying for jobs. 

“If we were to increase our labor force attachment, especially of women and caregivers, this would have a significant effect on U.S. economic growth,” Heather Boushey, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in October.

Dartmouth College economist Elizabeth Cascio has found that, as public schools began offering kindergarten in the latter half of the 20th century, 40% of single mothers of five-year-olds with no younger children entered the workforce. More recently, when Washington, D.C., began offering universal preschool, labor force participation among women with at least one child under five jumped from around 65% to over 76%. (Universal preschool programs instituted in Georgia and Oklahoma in the 1990s didn’t have significant effects on women’s employment.)

Millions of women left the labor force during the coronavirus pandemic, many of them because of increased caregiving duties at home. Full economic recovery means making it possible for the women who left to go back to paying work, but the pandemic’s effects on women also highlight the way that caregiving duties are a key factor keeping many mothers of young children out of the labor force even in non-pandemic times. Women routinely cite the high cost of child care as a factor keeping them at home—but that in turn exacerbates inequality, because women lose years of experience and income growth and contributions to programs like Social Security. Expanding early childhood education is a key way to get women into the workforce, which strengthens the economy and women’s financial security alike.