A new study finds that adults who received high-quality child care starting as babies were still reaping benefits even 30 years later.
The new data were published last month in the journal Developmental Psychology by researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. It comes from the long-running Abecedarian Project led by the university’s FPG Child Development Institute.
The follow-up study conducted when participants were age 30 found that the low-income children who had been randomly assigned to take part in the special preschool program were four times more likely to have earned college degrees than similar children in a control group. Nearly a quarter of the program participants had graduated from a four-year college or university, compared with only 6 percent of the control group.
Participants also delayed parenthood by two years longer on average than their control-group peers.
