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For decades Exchange magazine has tracked the growth of the for profit child care sector. This year in our January 2006 issue, instead of looking one year back and one year forward as is our annual practice, we instead reflected on trends in the for profit sector over the past four decades. You can now read this entire article (including our annual list of North America's Largest For Profit Organizations) on our web site at http://mail.ccie.com/go/eed/938. In the meantime, here are a few highlights...

1969: La Petite Academy, Gerber Children’s Centers (now Learning Care Group), KinderCare Learning Centers, and Children’s World Learning Centers (the latter two now both part of Knowledge Learning Corporation) all come into existence. These four companies expand quickly and dominate the for profit sector for the next two decades.

1971: Barron’s Financial Weekly dubs child care as “the electronics industry of the '70s” and lists 125 companies with aspirations of becoming national chains, many making outrageous claims about their plans for growth and their ideas about education. While the industry does expand rapidly, only six of these companies survive the decade.

1974: Speakers at a conference on “Industry Day Care” in Chicago confidently predict that employers will start stepping forward to provide child care centers for their employees. Though the prediction is correct, it is about two decades premature.

1982: IBM makes its first venture into the child care arena by funding child care resource and referral services nationwide. This is the precursor of an ever-expanding work/life commitment by IBM, culminating in its current $50 million Global Work/Life Fund.

1987: Daybridge Learning Centers (formerly National Child Care Centers) merges with Children’s World Learning Centers, the biggest merger to date in the for profit sector.

1988: In its National Day Care Study, Abt Associates estimates that there are about 8,000 for profit child care centers in the US, representing about 40% of all licensed centers.

1997: Corporate Family Solutions raises $27 million and Bright Horizons Children’s Centers raises $42 million in successful initial public offerings.

1998: Exchange reports, “For the second consecutive year, child care franchising operations were among the fastest growing organizations in the industry.”

1999: Bright Horizons acquires Corporate Family Solutions.

2005: Knowledge Learning Corporation exceeds its recent record-setting acquisition (of Children's World Learning Centers) by merging with KinderCare Learning Centers.

2005: Learning Care Group (previously Gerber and then Childtime) is acquired by ABC Learning Centres Limited, Australia’s largest private child care provider, operating 697 centers in Australia and New Zealand.

2006: In their projections, the majority of CEOs of Top 40 for profit companies report more optimism than they had in any of the past five years.

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