The Building and Sustaining the Child Care and Early Education Workforce (BASE) project aims to increase knowledge and understanding of the factors that drive staff member turnover in the child care and early education (CCEE) workforce and to build evidence about current initiatives to recruit, advance, and retain a stable and qualified CCEE workforce. This brief presents design considerations for cost studies of CCEE workforce development strategies.

Purpose

This brief is intended for policymakers, program administrators, researchers, and other stakeholders involved in workforce development and education. It describes how to inventory the resources required to implement a workforce development strategy and estimate the associated costs using the ingredients method—a widely adopted, mixed-methods approach tailored to education settings. The purpose of the brief is to help users understand key methodological considerations involved in cost study design and ensure accurate cost estimates to support effective decision-making and avoid unintended consequences in both local and broader contexts.

Key Findings

• Cost studies are valuable tools for understanding the feasibility, resource requirements, and potential savings of workforce development strategies in child care and early education.
• The ingredients method offers a structured, widely accepted approach for estimating costs in education settings, enhancing comparability and clarity across studies.
• To minimize burdens on respondents and researchers, cost studies can be designed to focus on key resources, use standardized prices, and be integrated with other data collection efforts.
• Accurate and context-sensitive cost estimates are essential for informing decision-making in policy and practice.
• Flexible and adaptive data collection strategies, such as those used in the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program Teacher Salary Increase Pilot evaluation, demonstrate how cost studies can be effectively implemented even in resource-constrained environments.