The transition to adulthood may be particularly challenging for the approximately 20,000 youth who “age out” of foster care each year. Many of these young people are unable to turn to their parents or other family members for support and cannot always count on the state for help once they have been discharged from care. Congress responded to this problem by passing the Foster Care Independence Act of 1999 (FCIA), increasing federal support for youth making the transition to adulthood from foster care. However, very little is known about how former foster youth are faring during the transition to adulthood in the post-FCIA era.

This presentation reports on a large-scale longitudinal examination of the transition to adulthood for foster youth who came of age after the passage of the FCIA, focusing on data from interviews conducted at age 19 with a group of young adults in three Midwestern states. The youth had entered care before their 16th birthday. The primary reason for their placement was neglect and/or abuse. Approximately 95% of youth who met these selection criteria (n = 736) were interviewed when they were 17-18 years old. Follow-up interviews were conducted an average of 22 months later in 2004 with 603 (82 percent) of the original sample. The interview focused on a variety of domains including education, employment, homelessness and housing stability, physical and mental health, social support, relations with family, crime and criminal justice system involvement, victimization, substance abuse, sexual behavior, receipt of independent living services, and receipt of other government benefits. Outcomes of the study population and those of their same-age peers are compared using questions taken from other studies of nationally-representative samples of young adults.

The presentation describes the status of these young adults at age 19 and the results of a multivariate analysis of predictors of being in school or employed at follow-up. The young adults are faring poorly on average across a number of dimensions: more than one third had neither a high school diploma nor a GED; 31% were neither employed nor in school, a rate double that of their peers; 14 percent of those who had left care had become homeless; the females were over twice as likely as their peers to have ever been pregnant; and one-fourth of the males had been incarcerated at least once since the first interview.

We estimated a logistic regression model of being employed or in school at follow-up. Remaining in care through age 19 as opposed to having left care (one of the states allows youth to remain in care through 21) more than doubled the estimated odds of being employed or in school. A youth's desire to attend college, closeness to at least one family member, and general satisfaction with their experience in out-of-home care also increased the odds of employment or education, while prior incarceration decreased these odds. Policy and practice implications are discussed, including the need to consider extending federal foster care eligibility through age 21.