A Colorado-only cut of the childcare credential ladder. A graduate of a Colorado bachelor's program in Human Development and Family Studies earns about $29,700 in year one. The single-adult living wage in Colorado is $54,071. The median Colorado lead teacher in a state-subsidized childcare program earns $18.50 an hour; the median Colorado kindergarten teacher earns $37.10 for the same developmental work one year later.
Built from Census Bureau PSEO institution-level earnings for CIP 19.07 (Human Development, Family Studies, and Related Services), the Colorado Department of Early Childhood's CCCAP Teacher Salary Increase page, the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment 2024 OEWS press release, Child Care Aware of America's 2024 Colorado affordability fact sheet, and IPEDS / Colorado Department of Higher Education published tuition for the 2024 – 25 academic year.
One empirical claim, three angles. In Colorado, the academic credentials that train the early-childhood workforce do not pay enough to clear a single-adult living wage, and the only credential within reach that does pay enough is one that crosses onto the K – 12 public payroll. This page shows the underlying numbers, by institution and by occupation.
Every chart is built from a public dataset. The methodology section at the bottom lists the file or URL and the exact field used for each number.
The Colorado Department of Early Childhood publishes a direct comparison on its CCCAP Teacher Salary Increase page: the median hourly wage for an early-childhood lead teacher in a Colorado Child Care Assistance Program – participating program is $18.50; the kindergarten teacher comparison wage is $37.10, almost exactly double. The two jobs require the same patience, the same training in early development, and the same long workday with small children. They sit on different sides of a public-school payroll.
The implication. Inside Colorado, the credential market this workforce comes out of points two ways. A teacher who works with 4-year-olds in a state-subsidized childcare classroom earns half what the same teacher would earn five months later if her students aged into kindergarten. The pay difference is not skill. It is what budget the wage gets paid from.
Each row is a Colorado college that reports earnings to Census PSEO for CIP 19.07 graduates (Human Development, Family Studies, and Related Services). Bars show median earnings five years after graduation, which is the latest stabilized point PSEO publishes; the credential is no longer a fresh diploma, the graduate has had time to climb a wage ladder. The red diamond on each row is the 1-adult living wage for the college's campus county, from the MIT Living Wage Calculator (Feb 2026), so the shortfall is the actual gap a graduate working in that county would face. The pattern: five years out, almost every Colorado graduate of this field still lands well short of a 1-adult, no-children living wage in the county they likely work in.
What's striking in Colorado specifically. Colorado's PSEO year-1 medians sit a few thousand dollars above the national medians for the same field. Colorado pays its childcare workforce slightly better than the national average, and the flatness across credential levels still holds. A sub-associate certificate from Pikes Peak State pays about the same as a bachelor's from Trinidad State. The one Colorado institution that breaks the pattern, Community College of Aurora at $48,878 year-1 BA earnings, is offering a community-college bachelor's (CCB) program. That sits closer to the K-payroll wage band than to the CIP 19.07 norm.
Child Care Aware of America's 2024 Colorado fact sheet puts the average annual price of center-based infant care in Colorado at $20,978. The U.S. Department of Labor's National Database of Childcare Prices publishes a separate Boulder County figure of $21,000 for 2022 (the latest county-level data). The comparison reference: a year of in-state, full-time tuition at the Colorado Community College System runs about $4,490, and a year at the University of Colorado Boulder runs $13,902 for an in-state undergraduate.
The pricing problem. A Colorado family pays roughly 4.7× the cost of a year of community college, or 1.5× the cost of a year at CU Boulder, to send one infant to center-based care. Families are at the ceiling of what they can pay, and that ceiling is what determines what providers can pay their workforce. The Colorado colleges training that workforce can do nothing about it from inside their CIP code.
| Institution | Cert y1 | AS y1 | BA y1 | BA y5 | In-state tuition 2024 – 25 |
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| Figure | Value | Source |
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Source: Census Bureau Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO-E), all-institutions experimental release. Rows filtered to cip_level = 4, cipcode = 19.07, agg_level_pseo = 42 (institution × CIP × degree, pooled cohorts), ind_level = A (industry-all rollup), degree_level ∈ {01, 02, 03}. Restricted further to institutions whose institution_state = CO. Each cell represents a 5-year graduation cohort window pooled at one institution; cells suppressed by Census privacy rules are dropped.
Source: MIT Living Wage Calculator, 1 Adult / 0 Children, last updated February 15, 2026. Each Colorado institution is mapped to the county of its primary campus, and the diamond on the institution chart shows that county's living wage. For multi-campus systems, the user-anchored county is used (Front Range Community College is anchored to Boulder County). The mapping:
Source: Colorado Department of Early Childhood, CCCAP Teacher Salary Increase. CDEC publishes the comparison directly: median hourly wage of an early-childhood lead teacher in a CCCAP-participating Colorado program is $18.50; kindergarten teacher comparison wage is $37.10. The annual conversion uses a 2,080-hour work year for ECE staff who typically work year-round. K – 12 teacher annual pay reflects state-published district scales rather than hourly, so the comparison on this page is presented hourly to keep the units honest.
Cross-references: UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, Early Childhood Workforce Index 2024 – Colorado (childcare workers $13.36/hr, preschool teachers $16.19/hr, elementary/middle school teachers $29.11/hr, all from ACS 2018 – 2022); Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, Colorado Occupational Employment and Wages 2024 (statewide median wage across all occupations $27.99/hr, $58,212/year).
State averages from Child Care Aware of America, 2024 Colorado Child Care Affordability fact sheet: $20,978 average annual price for an infant in center-based care, $17,479 for a toddler in center-based care, $13,666 for an infant in family child care. Two-child reference (infant plus 4-year-old) is $35,779. Boulder County infant center-based price ($21,000/year, $404/week) is from the U.S. Department of Labor Women's Bureau National Database of Childcare Prices, 2022 release (the latest county-level cycle).
Source: institution-published full-time, in-state, lower-division tuition rates for the 2024 – 25 academic year. The Colorado Community College System sets a standardized in-district rate across CCCS colleges (Front Range, Community College of Aurora, Community College of Denver, Pikes Peak State, Pueblo, Red Rocks, Arapahoe, Aims, Morgan, Otero, Trinidad State, Lamar, Northeastern Junior, Colorado Northwestern). Four-year publics post their own rates. Cross-referenced against IPEDS IC2023 academic-year tuition fields where available.
This is not a causal estimate of the return to a bachelor's degree in Colorado. Graduates who self-select into CIP 19.07 differ from the general college population in ways PSEO cannot observe. The descriptive fact is what the page documents: conditional on completing a credential in this field at a Colorado institution, the first-year earnings distribution barely moves across credential levels, and lands well below both the Colorado median wage and the single-adult Colorado living wage. PSEO and OEWS both reflect wage-and-salary employment reported to state unemployment insurance systems; family child care providers and other self-employed workers in this field are not captured.