By Nathanael J. Okpych, Suggeun (Ethan) Park, Mark E. Courtney, and Jenna Powers, Chapin Hall, November 2021
Graduating from college is a life-transforming achievement for young people with foster care backgrounds. This memo provides an early look at factors that promote or stymie college degree completion by around age 23 of youths transitioning to adulthood from the foster care system.
What We Did
The outcome investigated in this memo is whether or not youth completed a college degree, drawing on data from the Wave 4 CalYOUTH interviews and from National Student Clearinghouse data. The sample included 719 participants from the longitudinal study. Additionally, we ran separate analyses on the subset of youth who had enrolled in college (n = 446). Several groups of factors were analyzed as potential predictors of degree completion, including youths’ demographic characteristics, personality traits, educational background characteristics, maltreatment and foster care history characteristics, involvement in foster care planning and information they received about extended foster care, behavioral health problems, social support, and postsecondary education services in their county (based on caseworker perceptions). Additionally, in the analysis involving just college enrollees, we also analyzed several characteristics of the college the youth first enrolled in, as well as whether youth were involved in a campus support program (CSP) at any point in college and whether they had received an Education and Training Voucher (ETV).
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