Foster Youth Essay

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Background The impact of growing up in foster care creates a plethora of barriers, inhibiting a foster youths chances of attending college and finding academic success. It is estimated that 65% of foster youth will emancipate into homelessness, less than 3% will go to college and 51% will be unemployed (Children Uniting Nations, 2015). Serval major factors serve as barriers including home mobility, school mobility, mental health concerns, social difficulties, lack of financial support, lack of access to college, and social difficulties. The combine result of all these barriers resulted in foster youth being an at-risk vulnerable population. A multitude of negative factors contribute to understanding why foster youth underperform when …show more content…

Low educational achievement for foster youth was a pressing concern. A study completed by Ehrle and Geen (2002) using a phone survey of 44,000 foster care providers across the United States found that 55% of voluntary kinship care providers did not have a high school degree, this indicated that may care providers lack the knowledge and understanding to help foster youth be prepared academically. After studying over 1000 foster youth Pecora et al (2006) found, about one third of all foster youth repeated a grade in school. In addition, Vacca (2007) identified reasons that foster youth struggled in the school setting. “Foster youth will typically not have any consistent parent advocacy or representative in the creation and implementation of the educational plan for graduation” (p. 67). With primary and secondary education a struggle for foster youth, it was no surprise that higher education was not something foster youth had been prepared for. In a combination survey and interview study titled “Pathways to College for Former Foster Youth: Understanding Factors That Contribute to Educational Success” Merdinger, Hines, Osterling, and Wyatt (2005) studied more than 200 former foster youth and found that “overall 63.8 percent [of former foster youth] reported that the foster care system did not prepare them very well for college” (p.

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