Bridging Disciplinary Boundaries (January 11 - 14, 2007)

It was not until 1986, when Congress amended the Social Security Act to include the Title IV-E Independent Living Program, that federal policy acknowledged the needs of these young people. Unfortunately, more than a decade after the program was established what little data were available indicated that many if not most foster youth were still not adequately prepared for the transition to adulthood (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1999). Congress responded to these concerns by passing the Foster Care Independence Act of 1999 (FCIA), replacing the Independent Living Program with the John H. Chafee Foster Care Independence Program, which doubled the maximum amount of money available to states each year to $140 million. While this program has promise, the federal government has yet to issue regulations that would give direction to states in regard to tracking outcomes for former foster youth, leaving the child welfare field still grasping for information on how foster youth in transition are faring (U.S. Government Accounting Office, 2004).

This symposium presents findings from the Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth (“The Midwest Study”), which is following young people in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin as they “age out” of the child welfare system and transition to adulthood. We present findings from baseline interviews conducted when the young people were 17-18 and were all still in out-of-home care (n = 732; 95% response rate) and the first follow-up interviews, when they had all had their 19th birthday and most of them had left care (n = 603; 82% retention rate). The Midwest Study is the only large-scale longitudinal examination of the transition to adulthood for foster youth who came of age after the passage of the FCIA. Thus, it may for some time be the most important source of information on the young-adult outcomes of former foster youth. The symposium includes presentations that provide information on how foster youth fare during the transition to adulthood across four domains (education, mental and behavioral health, pregnancy and reproductive health, and crime). We also compare the experiences of the young people in our study to those of their peers in the National Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Lastly, we discuss the results of multivariate models of the predictors of college enrollment and crime for our study participants. Our findings have implications for social work practice and call into question current social policies affecting the transition to adulthood.