Childcare Center Closures Spark Backlash on Campus

On a Monday night in October, Smith College sent a notice that alarmed many employees: The college’s on-campus childcare center would close in June 2027. 

Despite Smith’s ongoing structural deficit, the decision was “not a budget-relieving” one, according to the email from Smith President Sarah Willie-LeBreton. Rather, the college had decided to reallocate resources from the Smith College Center for Early Childhood Education at Fort Hill—called Fort Hill for short—to fund a childcare subsidy for as many as 350 employees.

The backlash was swift: Faculty, staff, students and other community members who rely on the center for care bombarded college leaders with angry emails and rallied in support of Fort Hill, which has operated since 1926. Losing the center would leave families in Northampton, Mass., with fewer childcare options, which are already limited. 

Smith leaders listened. On Oct. 30—11 days after the closure was announced—the college changed course: Fort Hill will remain open through at least summer 2029, and the new childcare benefit will take effect as planned, Willie-LeBreton said in a follow-up email. That same day, Smith’s vice president for human resources—whom several sources credited with the original plan to shutter Fort Hill—resigned. 

“The deep concern, impassioned feedback, and thoughtful questions from across our campus and broader community clarified that more time is needed to fully explore options for the College to support faculty and staff childcare needs, particularly infant and toddler care,” a Smith spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed in an email. She declined to comment on the HR leader’s resignation. 

Fort Hill parents and employees expressed relief at the news, but the center’s still-uncertain future reflects a nationwide trend: Campus childcare options are dwindling. Since the early 2000s, the number of community colleges offering campus childcare has declined by 17 percent, said Jennifer Turner, a senior research associate at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. This year, the Trump administration cut funding for the Child Care Access Means Parents in School program, which provides four-year grants to colleges that offer on-campus childcare to low-income students. After announcing over the summer that it would fund 148 new CCAMPIS grants, the Department of Education awarded only 40 this fall, The Washington Post reported. 

Meanwhile, campus childcare centers are struggling to stay open as overhead and staffing costs rise and the supply of teachers shrinks. In 2021, Mount Holyoke College—like Smith, a Seven Sisters institution—also abruptly announced it would close its childcare center, only to reverse the decision days later. The University of California, Los Angeles, announced in August that it will close two of its childcare centers in June 2027, citing a budget deficit. Parkland College in Champaign, Ill., the University of Kansas and Bucks County Community College in Newton, Pa., made similar announcements this year. 

“At every type of institution—public four-years, community colleges, privates, HBCUs—there’s been a pretty steady decline [in childcare] across the past 20 years,” said Mark Huelsman, director of policy and advocacy at the Hope Center for Student Basic Needs at Temple University. Without it, student and faculty parents are “left in the lurch.” 

Childcare an ‘Easy Target’

Randi Garcia, a tenured professor of psychology and statistical and data science, has worked at Smith for over 10 years. She met her husband, government professor Brent Durbin, at convocation in 2017. The two welcomed a daughter in 2022, and childcare was immediately top of mind. Garcia and Durbin were both department chairs when they scored a spot at Fort Hill. 

“We need childcare that works well with our work life,” Garcia said. “So for us, it made a lot of sense to use the Smith-affiliated childcare center, where the hours lined up.”

Garcia and Durbin’s daughter is in a class of 19, which is one of two classes for preschoolers. In total, the center enrolls about 80 children, including eight coveted infant-care spots, which are essential for the area, Garcia said. 

“Northampton is already an infant-childcare desert,” she said. “The number of slots for infants is incredibly small … and Fort Hill is the largest provider of infant care in Northampton.”

Malka Coburn, who works in the infant classroom at Fort Hill, said demand for infant seats has been consistently high since she started teaching there 13 years ago, when she was a student at Smith. Demand for preschool seats has begun to rise again post-pandemic, she added. 

Affordable childcare is tough to find in Massachusetts, where infant childcare costs an average of $26,709 per year and preschool costs $17,939 for just one child, The Boston Globe reported. At Fort Hill, preschool tuition is listed at $9,145 to $23,100 per year, depending on how many days the child attends and for how long. Infant care costs between $17,910 and $31,925 per year. Smith employees receive a 25 percent discount on tuition for their first child and a 30 percent discount for all other children.

Though it may lower the price of childcare, Smith’s plan to swap the center for subsidies that employees can use regardless of where their child is enrolled doesn’t address the supply issue, Huelsman explained. 

“There’s just not a lot of options for families who see their day care closed or their childcare center closed,” he said. “You often have to get on a wait list for a year or more.” 

At Fort Hill, many of the parents are Smith employees, but other campus childcare centers cater primarily to student parents, who need flexible options like evening or drop-in care, Turner of the IWPR said. For students, access to childcare is essential to completing their degrees. Recent data shows that six years after starting at a community college, only 4.6 percent of student parents had earned a bachelor’s degree, compared with nearly 14 percent of nonparenting students, she said. 

But on-campus childcare centers are expensive to open and operate, Huelsman said, so they’re often the first to go when colleges struggle. 

“It’s not a deeply profit-seeking enterprise. Between licensing costs and staff ratios and overhead costs, childcare centers are quite expensive. On campus or otherwise, childcare centers … are often budgeted by schools as self-supporting auxiliary centers as opposed to core pieces of infrastructure,” he said. “And so when they are expensive or they quote-unquote ‘lose money,’ they tend to be easy targets for cuts.” 

Over the next few years, Smith leaders will talk with Fort Hill employees, parents and others to “collaborate on a long-term plan to address employee childcare needs,” the college spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed. Coburn said she’s not sure if her and her colleagues’ jobs are safe in the long run. The Fort Hill teachers’ union, UAW Local 2322, has been negotiating with Smith officials for its first contract for a year and a half; Coburn hopes the decision to keep Fort Hill open for another few years will bring about a “quick and positive” bargaining agreement. 

“Smith has said that its intention was to make a more equitable childcare benefit, and my coworkers and I have talked for years about creating more equitable access to our school. We are not blind to the fact that we’re very expensive, and that childcare on the whole is very expensive in our community,” Coburn said. “We would really like childcare to be more accessible to more families—that is not something we disagree on—it’s just a question of, ‘How do you successfully do that in a way that really supports the whole community?’”