Early Engagement in College Support Programs: The Key to Academic Success Among Former Child Welfare Youth and Homeless Students

Background and Purpose: Foster youth are significantly less likely to obtain college degrees compared with their peers from the general population. Foster youth’s low educational attainment results in many negative outcomes in later life, such as homelessness, substance use, mental illness, and criminal justice involvement. Similarly, homeless youth reported less educational achievements than their peers. In response, many universities throughout the country offer programs to former foster youth and homeless students. Few studies examined the implementation and effectiveness of these programs using quantitative data. This study contributed to addressing this knowledge gap.

Methods: This study focused on a group of students at a public university in a large metropolitan area in the Southeast. The university provides a college support program serving students from three types of backgrounds: former foster youth, adoptees from the Department of Children and Families (DCF), and homeless students. The university identifies eligible students through tuition waiver records in their administrative data. Former foster youth and adoptees from DCF receive DCF tuition waiver, while homeless students receive homeless tuition waiver. In Spring 2016, the university identified 141 eligible students: 56 former foster youth, 45 adoptees from DCF, and 40 homeless students. This study demonstrated a unique collaboration between the authors and the university administration, and used data from two sources: administrative data from the university and survey data collected by the authors. The university provided us with administrative data for all of the 141 eligible students, which contains their demographics, high school GPAs, admission types (e.g. freshman from high school, transfer from community college), college GPAs, and grades. We diligently engaged all eligible students in our survey through emails and calls. On average, each student receive four calls. Fifty six of them answered our survey. We linked two sets of data using the student IDs. We used descriptive analysis and generalized linear model to analyze administrative data. We used non-parametric analysis to analyze survey data merged with administration data.

Results: Former foster youth had significantly lower high school GPAs than the other two groups (F=.06, p<.01). However, after entering college, the three types of students did not show significantly different GPAs at first semester. Results from generalized linear modeling showed that with controlling for covariates, background type is still not associated with their GPA at first semester. On average, survey respondents’ initial engagement in the campus support program occurred two semesters after their enrollment. The length of time between university enrollment and program engagement is negatively associated with their cumulative GPA prior to their engagement (Spearman’s rho=-.50, p<.01). The findings indicate that late engagement is associated with lower cumulative GPA.

Conclusions and Implications: The current study is unique and advances the knowledge base with regard to the implementation and effectiveness of college support programs serving former child welfare youth and homeless students. Our findings suggest that early engagement is important for students to obtain good GPA and success in college. Implications for child welfare, higher education and social policy will be discussed.