Making the Transition: How Asset Building Services Can Promote Positive Adult Outcomes for Foster Youth

Background/Purpose: Foster youth in the U.S. often face a multitude of adverse outcomes, including lower educational attainment, adult poverty, and disproportionately high rates of homelessness. While there are many factors that drive these outcomes, one factor that receives little attention is that foster youth are less likely than their non-child welfare system-involved peers to build assets, including traditional financial assets as well as social assets. Asset building for vulnerable populations is a growing field of social policy research and advocacy, but few programs, and fewer rigorous evaluations, have focused on asset building services for foster youth.

Often, foster youth face several barriers to asset building. Many youth have several placements during their stay in care, receiving inconsistent schooling, unreliable support, and limited opportunities to work or save money. Furthermore, prior to the instability many youth face in the system, most youth enter foster care from low-income families who are themselves often unable to effectively build assets and teach such skills to their children. This paper responds to the need to understand the accessibility and effectiveness of asset building services currently available to foster youth by examining the frequency with which foster youth are offered such services and whether the youth who receive these services observe better outcomes than those who do not.

Methods: This study uses a merged sample of the services and outcomes files for the first complete cohort (FY2011) of the National Youth in Transition Database (NYTD) (n=9,141). The NYTD records the outcomes for a cohort of youth over four years (ages 17-21) and tracks the services youth receive during this period. Using a Propensity Score Matching methodology, this study analyzes the effect that two services, 1) Budgeting and Financial Education, and 2) Post-Secondary Education Services, have on four outcomes: 1) homelessness, 2) employment status, 3) current education enrollment status, and 4) financial aid status.

Results: The analysis finds that youth receiving Budgeting and Financial Education are 3.4%* more likely to receive financial aid and 12.2%** less likely to experience homelessness while youth receiving Post-Secondary Education Services are 11.7%*** more likely to be currently enrolled in an education program, 12.2%*** more likely to receive financial aid, 6.2%** more likely to be employed at least part-time, and 4.4%* less likely to experience homelessness (* p<.10,  ** p<.05,  *** p<.001). Despite positive and significant results, these asset building services are only offered to approximately 25% of foster youth at-risk of aging out of care and receipt of services negatively covaries with demographics such as race.

Conclusions and Implications: This study attests to the effectiveness of using an asset building model to prevent adversity and promote long-term stability for foster youth. Increasing equitable access to asset building services for foster youth has the capacity to significantly reduce many policy concerns including youth homelessness, unemployment/underemployment for at-risk youth, and barriers to educational attainment. Additionally, these promising findings present a need for more rigorous, site-based evaluation of individual asset building programs/services in order to define specific, effective models for replication and expansion.