Yet parents, especially mothers, pay most of the costs. The high price of childrearing pushes many families into poverty, often with adverse consequences for children themselves.

Parents spend time as well as money on children. Yet most estimates of the "cost" of children ignore the value of this time. Folbre provides a startlingly high but entirely credible estimate of the value of parental time per child by asking what it would cost to purchase a comparable substitute for it.

She also emphasizes the need for better accounting of public expenditure on children over the life cycle and describes the need to rethink the very structure and logic of the welfare state. A new institutional structure could promote more cooperative, sustainable, and efficient commitments to the next generation.

In Saving State U, economist Nancy Folbre brings the national debates of education experts down to the level of trying to teach--and trying to learn--at major state universities whose budgets have repeatedly been slashed, restored, and then slashed again. Here is a brilliant firsthand account of the stakes involved, the politics, and the key debates raging through public campuses today. In a passionate, accessible voice, Folbre also offers a sobering vision of the many possible futures of public higher education and their links to the fate of our democracy while looking at the practical ways in which change is now possible.