Each year about 20,000 young people transition from foster care to independent living without the financial support or resources that many other young adults receive from their parents or other relatives. These independent young adults are faced with additional barriers and challenges when pursuing postsecondary education opportunities, and most are navigating how to pay for high and rising educational expenses on their own. As a result, the experiences, needs, and outcomes of these young people differ from those of other young adults who have not experienced foster care.
Purpose
This brief seeks to describe the financial support that students with a foster care history receive to attend college compared with those of their peers. This brief is part of a larger body of work on foster care, postsecondary education, and financial aid, including an evaluation of the Education and Training Voucher (ETV) program.
Key Findings and Highlights
Postsecondary education is expensive. For all student groups, even after grants and expected family contributions are applied, there is a still a significant amount of the cost of attendance to cover. Students with foster care history are choosing the least expensive options by mostly attending public two-year institutions and attending part time.
Most students with foster care history receive grants to help them pay for college, but the sufficiency of grants received varies by institution type. Although these grants usually cover the student’s tuition and fees at two-year public institutions, they are not sufficient to cover tuition and fees at either public or private four-year institutions. Students with foster care history receive more in grants at these higher-cost institutions, but they do not keep pace with the cost of attendance.
Despite choosing less expensive schools, the cost of attendance for young people with foster care history may still be higher than that of their peers, as they often do not have the option of living with their parents while they attend school.
Students with foster care history have more unmet need even when compared with students with low incomes and no foster care history. Even at the lowest-cost institutions, the net price for young people with foster care history is more than 100 percent of their income.
Methods
This report used data from the National Center for Education Statistics, National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, Administrative Collection: 2018, Undergraduates (NPSAS:18-AC). The NPSAS:18-AC data include administrative records from a national cross-section of students enrolled in postsecondary institutions in academic year 2017–18; they contain information on student financial aid, enrollment, demographic characteristics, institution characteristics, and income. For our analysis, we looked at postsecondary students ages 23 and younger.
To examine the financial aid experiences of young people with foster care history, we stratified the population by a variable that captures the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) question “At any time since you turned age 13, were both your parents deceased, were you in foster care, or were you a dependent or ward of the court?” This question is part of a set of questions on the FAFSA form that seek to determine a young person’s status as an independent student. A limitation to using this question to identify students with foster care history is that it will include some students who do not have foster care history but whose parents were deceased and students who were a “ward of the court” (e.g., a young person in the custody of a public child welfare agency). For brevity, we refer to this population as “students with foster care history” throughout.
Recommendations
This work helps shed light on financial need of students with foster care experience and suggests that more financial support is needed to ensure they can afford postsecondary education.
This publication is part of a broader evaluation of the ETV programs. For more information, please visit our ETV project page.
