Social Capital and Employment Skills Acquisition Among Transition-Age Youth with Foster Care Histories: The Mediating Role of State Support Programs

Background and Purpose: Youth exiting foster care have disproportionately poor well-being outcomes compared to their peers in the general population. Recent policies have aimed to improve outcomes for this population, yet poor education and employment outcomes persist due to barriers in access and utilization of support programs. This study examined the role of social capital in youth’s acquisition of employment skills, and the mediating role of state support programs.

Methods: This study uses nationally representative data from the third cohort of the 2017 National Youth in Transition Database (NYTD) to investigate the roles that social capital and support programs play in foster youth’s (n = 6,964) employment skills across 50 U.S. states and Washington DC (N = 51). Bayesian multilevel logistic SEM framework was used to estimate whether youth connected with a significant adult are more likely to be in support programs, and whether being in such programs is linked to higher likelihood of accessing employment skills training.

Results: The within-level direct path reveals that youth who reported having a connected adult were significantly more likely to be enrolled in a state support program (b = .057, β = .029, p <.01). Likewise, youth enrolled in a support program had higher odds of reporting employment skills than those not enrolled (b = .102, β = .058, p <= .01). However, having a connected adult was not directly significantly associated with employment skills at the individual level (b = .057, β = .017, p = .169). Across states, a higher participation rate in support programs is not significantly associated with completing employment skills training. The wide credible interval indicates uncertainty in the between-level effect (b = .468, β = .222, p =.119). A formal test of the mediated pathway confirmed a statistically significant positive indirect effect of having a connected adult on employment skills, mediated through program participation: Indirect = .005, SD = .003, 95% CI = [0.001, 0.012]. While the effect size (.005) is small, it remains credible as interval estimates exclude zero.

Conclusions and Implications: The results suggested that being connected to significant adults and participation in support programs play crucial roles in the development of employment skills among transition-aged foster youth during early adulthood. These findings are especially meaningful within a policy and intervention context with vulnerable populations, as small indirect effects can accumulate overtime when scaled. Thus, policies and programs that integrate components of social capital and access to support programs wield significant potential for mitigating the employment and earnings gap between transition-aged foster youth and their peers in the general population. More research is also needed to explore in detail the forms of social capital (i.e., bonding or bridging) as well as the specific support programs (i.e., financial assistance, education aid or other financial assistance) that are associated with employment-related skills among TAY.