Preschool procrastinator

I'm told by several of my friends in San Francisco that I'm already late to think about preschool for Olivia. A couple schools that looked interesting to me didn't even accept applications until kids turned 2.5 , of course, those were city run schools in San Francisco.

I don't have many memories of my pre-K education. I remember a lot of arts and crafts and sing alongs. Is there something beyond that which kids should be doing at pre-school. I thought that the basic goal was to learn how to get along with each other in a structured environment.

The pre-school question opens up a boat of other questions -- what kind of preschool should we enroll Olivia in, and what factor should drive my decision?

Curriculum?: I have ambitions of Olivia being bilingual in Chinese and found this school. There's also the question of Montessori vs non-Montessori curriculum. Would I have gotten into Harvard if I had gone to a Montessori school instead of the neighborhood nursery school? (Seems kind of unlikely.) On the other hand, there's no question of the selection bias that a n academically oriented curriculum introduces. Do you want your kid hanging out with the kids of other parents who care about academic achievement, or parents who are looking for a cheap place to park their kids while they work. On the topic of cheap places to park their kids, ...

Price?: I made Spencer leave a parking garage today because it was $1/hour more expensive than the garage next door. I make a lot of decisions in my life based on price. Should Olivia's education be one of them? How much does preschool really matter? And there is the financial question of whether the money is better spent on pre-school or college. Let's see, if I enroll her in a city-subsidized program and saved $8000/year for 2 years and put the money into a US Market Index fund, it'll be worth roughly $100 when she turns 18. Or, maybe the economy will turn itself around and we'd have around 25-30K to spend on college.

Location, location, location: Let's face it, we're pretty busy. As we're learning from having our current daycare situation, the old real estate adage applies.