Climbing a Broken Ladder: Contributors of College Success for Youth in Foster Care

Climbing a Broken Ladder

The American Campus

Founded by Harold S. Wechsler

The books in the American Campus series explore recent developments and public policy issues in higher education in the United States. Topics of interest include access to college and college affordability; college retention; tenure and academic freedom; campus labor; the expansion and evolution of administrative posts and salaries; the crisis in the humanities and the arts; the corporate university and for-profit colleges; online education; controversy in sport programs; and gender, ethnic, racial, religious, and class dynamics and diversity. Books feature scholarship from a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Vicki L. Baker, Laura Gail Lunsford, and Meghan J. Pifer, Developing Faculty in Liberal Arts Colleges: Aligning Individual Needs and Organizational Goals

Derrick R. Brooms, Jelisa Clark, and Matthew Smith, Empowering Men of Color on Campus: Building Student Community in Higher Education

W. Carson Byrd, Poison in the Ivy: Race Relations and the Reproduction of Inequality on Elite College Campuses

Nolan L. Cabrera, White Guys on Campus: Racism, White Immunity, and the Myth of Post-Racial Higher Education

Jillian M. Duquaine-Watson, Mothering by Degrees: Single Mothers and the Pursuit of Postsecondary Education

Scott Frickel, Mathieu Albert, and Barbara Prainsack, eds., Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Theory and Practice across Disciplines

Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed, eds., A New Deal for the Humanities: Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education

Adrianna Kezar and Daniel Maxey, eds., Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century: Moving to a Mission-Oriented and Learner-Centered Model

Ryan King-White, ed., Sport and the Neoliberal University: Profit, Politics, and Pedagogy

Dana M. Malone, From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses

Nathanael J. Okpych, Climbing a Broken Ladder: Contributors of College Success for Youth in Foster Care

A. Fiona Pearson, Back in School: How Student Parents are Transforming College and Family

Barrett J. Taylor and Brendan Cantwell, Unequal Higher Education: Wealth, Status, and Student Opportunity

James M. Thomas, Diversity Regimes: Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities

Climbing a Broken Ladder

Contributors of College Success for Youth in Foster Care

NATHANAEL J. OKPYCH

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Okpych, Nathanael J., author.

Title: Climbing a broken ladder : contributors of college success for youth in foster care / Nathanael J. Okpych.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Series: The American campus | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020020456 | ISBN 9781978809178 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978809161 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978809185 (epub) | ISBN 9781978809192 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978809208 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Foster children—Education (Higher)—United States—Case studies. | College attendance—United States—Case studies. | Foster children—United States— Social conditions.

Classification: LCC LC4091 .O394 2021 | DDC 362.73/30973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020456

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Nathanael J. Okpych

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to Andy Zinn

Contents

Part I Background

Introduction

1 Framework for the Book

2 Description of the Midwest Study

Part II Findings

3 Exploring College Outcomes

4 College Enrollment Patterns

5 Predictors of College Enrollment

6 Predictors of College Persistence

7 Predictors of Degree Completion

8 The Role of Avoidant Attachment on College Persistence and Degree Completion

9 Impact of Extended Foster Care on College Outcomes

Part III Recommendations

10 Policy and Practice Recommendations to Increase College Enrollment and Completion

Appendix A: Statistics in Plain Language

Appendix B: Making Sense of Odds Ratios

Appendix C: What Is Multivariable Regression and Why Do We Need It?

Appendix D: Description of Study Predictors

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Climbing a Broken Ladder

Part I

Background

Introduction

Baseball and Broken Ladders

While writing this book, my mother was in the process of moving out of the house she had lived in for thirty-seven years. Her attic was cluttered with enough stuff to fill a small museum. My Little League baseball trophies were on the chopping block. Most of the trophies did not hold much sentimental value, but there was one that I struggled to part with. I was around ten years old that season, and things looked grim from the start. Several players on the team had minimal exposure to baseball. As other teams were practicing hook slides and turning double plays, we were working on the mechanics of a proper throw.

One saving grace was the coaches. They saw something in us that was blocked from our view by doubt and frustration. What they saw was not where we were, but what we could become. They had us practice, far more than other teams. The coaches drove from neighborhood to neighborhood to pick up players who could not get to practice. Even on game days we were catching pop flies an hour before the first player of the opposing team showed up. Instead of giving players equal time or even devoting more time to the standouts, players who needed the most help got the most practice. The coaches showed a genuine interest in us. This rubbed off on the players, and a strong bond started to form.

At first, we had to weather hard losses, but we were not allowed to beat up on ourselves, blame each other, or wallow in our mistakes. Instead we continued to practice and improve. Eventually the hard work started to pay off. On the field, we began to look like other teams that were loaded with seasoned players, and eventually we won enough games to land a spot in the playoffs. One playoff game in particular is etched in my memory. We had made it to the quarter-finals and were facing one of the toughest teams in the league. In the last inning we were down by a run with a couple of our players on base. With two outs, the one player on our team who had never gotten a hit the entire season stepped up to the plate. The pitcher threw a hard fastball, and the batter cracked a line drive deep into the outfield that left the fielders scrambling. He made it to third base, driving in the winning run. I remember the roar that erupted from the crowd, the disbelief on the other team’s faces, and the tears that filled his father’s eyes. We went on to win the league championship, with each of us sent home with a big goofy-looking trophy.

My trophy, which was now sandwiched between a Singer sewing machine and outdated New Jersey road maps in my mother’s attic, was so meaningful not because of anything I personally achieved but because of the transformation that occurred in our team. Although the comparison is far from perfect, I think some parallels exist between the turnaround baseball story and the college completion gap for foster youth. One statistic that drew me to this area of research is that less than 10 percent of foster youth complete college, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority aspire to do so. Like some of the players on the team, life circumstances leave many foster youth behind their peers in how prepared they are for college. This is due to a variety of reasons, such as gaps in educational opportunities, frequent school changes that derail learning, and the emotional toll of maltreatment and separation from one’s family. However, there is also good reason for hope. Similar to the baseball story, with the right mix of relationships, resources, and support, which are undergirded by effective policies, I believe it is possible to increase the number of foster youth who enter and finish college. The transformation will not happen overnight. There is no magic bullet. And similar to the way in which the coaches sized up the challenges at the beginning of the season, what is needed is a frank account of the challenges that lie ahead for foster youth in pursuit of college degrees.

In my years as a therapist, counselor, care coordinator, middle school teacher, Upward Bound SAT instructor, college residence life building director, and researcher, I have had the opportunity to work with many young people who had to face considerable obstacles standing between them and a college degree. One foster youth compared her experience of making it through college to that of climbing a broken ladder.¹ Take a moment to picture this image in your mind. On the one hand, there is the insistent climber. Youth with foster care backgrounds have made it through extremely trying circumstances. They know how to fight and survive, to persevere through material and emotional hardships, and they draw on this strength when faced with challenges. However, on the other hand, before them are ladders that are missing rungs, that have unsteady side rails, or that stop halfway to the top. The ladder placed before each youth is a little bit different. The broken pieces symbolize the impediments each foster youth will face on the climb into and through college, both personal and systemic. What are the common impediments? This is an important question for child welfare and education professionals, advocates, foster parents, foster care alumni, scholars, and anyone else invested in improving college outcomes for youth with care histories. Having a clearer picture of the impediments will put us in a better position to develop effective responses. This book illuminates pieces of the broken ladder based on rigorous analyses of data and presents practical suggestions about challenges to target.

Purpose of This Book

The central purpose of this book is to investigate a wide range of factors that influence the chances of college success of young people with foster care backgrounds. It examines three principal outcomes: college enrollment, persistence, and degree completion. Each outcome is an important marker on the road from secondary school to finishing college. Additionally, the book probes a number of special topics, such as identifying enrollment patterns through college, investigating the role that trauma plays in college success, and evaluating the impact of a policy that increased the age limit youth can remain in foster care by three years.

This book focuses on a small but understudied group of students: adolescents and young adults who are in foster care. More than seven decades of theory building and empirical research have been conducted on students entering and attending college. This research has pointed to a number of background characteristics, experiences while in college, and institutional factors that influence persistence and degree completion for students (e.g., Mayhew et al., 2016). Importantly, there is the widespread recognition that different sets of risks may be at play for certain subgroups of college students, which challenges a one-size-fits-all explanation of college completion (Perna, 2013). Young people with foster care histories are an important subgroup. Compared to the massive amount of research on the general college student body, theoretical and empirical research on factors influencing college success for foster youth is thin.

In higher education, foster youth are considered one of the hidden student populations. They are not easily identified on campus and face a particular set of challenges unlike those encountered by most college students. Most have experienced maltreatment severe enough to require separation from family and being taken into the care of the system. While in foster care, bouncing from placement to placement and school to school causes further disruption and academic setbacks. The turnstile of relationships leaves many foster youth understandably wary of trusting others, including those who genuinely want to help. Food scarcity, economic hardships, housing instability, and needing to work are common burdens that bear down on foster youth who make it to college. Some foster youth reach the age limit of foster care while they are in college, which means they then must survive in an adult world without the material and symbolic safety net that foster care afforded them. Often, family members are not there to fall back on. This early, forced transition to adulthood occurs without a pause in the academic clock—tuition bills are due, classes must be attended, and exams must be passed.

Contribution of This Book

This book is written at a time when there is a growing momentum around initiatives to improve college outcomes for youth who are or were in foster care. Several federal laws in this area were passed in the last two decades, as well as varying state laws that specifically address foster youth who pursue higher education. There has also been an uptick in the number of programs offered by nonprofit agencies and programs, both in the community and on college campuses. It is exciting and promising that more laws, resources, and services are being directed toward a population that for years largely fell under the radar (Barth, 1990). However, despite the policy and service advances, the amount and rigor of quantitative research presently available to guide these initiatives are limited. Several qualitative studies, which are based on in-depth interviews with foster youth and professionals who serve foster youth, have provided rich descriptions of barriers to and promoters of college success (e.g., Batsche et al., 2014; Hines, Merdinger, & Wyatt, 2005; Salazar, Jones, Emerson, & Mucha, 2016; Salazar, Roe, Ulrich, & Haggerty, 2016). However, these studies tend to be small and are not designed to provide generalizable findings.² Quantitative analyses, like the ones in this book, build on these earlier qualitative studies by rigorously analyzing data collected from a large, representative sample of foster youth. Their findings will help meet the need for research to inform our laws and services, ensuring that our initiatives affect factors that will be most influential in improving the chances that foster youth succeed in college. In the absence of such research, even well-intentioned policies and programs can wind up expending money, time, and effort that could have been used more effectively.

Although the volume of postsecondary education research on foster youth is growing (see Geiger & Beltran, 2017a, 2017b), more research is needed to understand which factors influence foster youths’ likelihood of enrolling in college, persisting through the first few semesters, and completing a degree.³ This book is one of the most extensive and data-driven investigations of college outcomes of foster youth to date. The findings are based on data collected by the Midwest Evaluation of Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth (hereafter, Midwest Study), a seminal study of transition-age foster youth, which followed more than 700 young people for nearly a decade from 2002 to 2011 (Courtney, Terao, & Bost, 2004). When considered together, the five waves of interviews conducted as part of the Midwest Study provide a moving picture of the transition that foster youth made from late adolescence to early adulthood. College records for Midwest Study participants were obtained from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) in 2015, which provided information on college enrollment, persistence, and completion. The data collected from Midwest Study interviews combined with NSC college records provided an unprecedented opportunity to examine factors that influence college outcomes for foster youth.

This book moves the field forward in several important ways. First, the breadth of predictors is wider than those examined in most studies: predictors include characteristics of the youth, their academic backgrounds, and their foster care histories, as well as life circumstances at play before and after they enroll in college and characteristics of the colleges they attend. Second, contributors of college persistence and degree completion are particularly understudied outcomes for foster youth. In this book, these college outcomes are assessed up to about age thirty, which is important because foster youth tend to enroll in college later and progress through college slower than their peers. Having data on foster care youth into their late twenties captures achievements missed by other studies that end earlier. Third, the book uses a range of advanced statistical methods to increase the rigor of the analyses and confidence in the results. This is complemented by the high quality of the data. The Midwest Study is a representative sample of foster youth in three states and has high participation rates at each interview wave. Finally, the book adds to emerging research on the impact of the extended foster care policy on college outcomes. This is a timely issue, because only about three-fifths of U.S. states have extended the foster care age limit beyond age 18. Findings from this study can be used to inform states taking a wait-and-see approach to extending care.

Straddling the Child Welfare and Education Systems

This book focuses on young people who have been in foster care in their late adolescence, roughly on or after their sixteenth birthday. The period of time between the late teenage years and the mid-twenties provides a window of opportunity in which we can potentially intervene and move the needle on college outcomes for foster youth. Within this window, college-bound foster youth are involved with at least three systems: the foster care system, the secondary education system, and the higher education system. Although college preparation and support have become an increasingly important focus of child welfare departments, and secondary and postsecondary education systems are beginning to recognize foster youth as a distinguishable student subgroup, these systems too seldom interact in planned and coordinated ways. With a growing number of states signing on to extended foster care, supporting college success is a new reality that child welfare departments need to grapple with. Conversely, students with foster care histories are among the college students at greatest risk of dropping out, and higher education institutions need to be better attuned to and equipped to address the needs of this student population.

This book straddles these two professional fields: education and child welfare. Some parts of the book may be well known by those on the child welfare side but new to those in education. Conversely, other parts will be familiar to those in education but new to child welfare professionals. An aim of this book is to provide information and recommendations that are useful to both fields.

Why We Need to Study Youth with Foster Care Histories

Young people in foster care make up a small fraction of the population of youth in the United States and a small fraction of the college student body. This begs the question: Why devote so much attention to such a small group? There are many good reasons, and in this section I present a few of them. First and foremost, rates of educational attainment are demonstrably lower for youth with care histories than for their peers. Among those who make it to college, foster youth are in greater danger of dropping out than other high-risk groups, such as first-generation low-income students without foster care involvement (Day, Dworsky, Fogarty, & Damashek, 2011; Frerer, Sosenko, & Henke, 2013; John Burton Advocates for Youth, 2015, 2017). For example, the fifth wave of the Midwest Study reported that foster youth were about five times less likely than their peers to have earned a college degree by their mid-twenties (Courtney et al., 2011). These disparities are especially concerning because children of color are disproportionately involved in foster care. Increasing the rate of college success for foster youth is one avenue for addressing inequities in higher education access and completion among African American, Hispanic, and Native American young adults. On the flipside, failing to adequately support college success for youth with care histories disproportionately hurts children of color.

Second, the consequences of not going to college or leaving college without a degree are arguably more severe for youth with care histories than for their peers. When young people reach their state’s foster care age limit, foster youth are expected to transition to adult independence and financial self-sufficiency without necessarily having the safety net of family support. As would be the case for many youth who had to fend for themselves, many foster care alumni experience bouts of economic hardship, homelessness, unemployment, need for public assistance benefits, and justice system involvement (Courtney et al., 2007, 2016). Having a college degree can help avert these difficulties. For example, an earlier analysis of Midwest Study data found that the annual earnings of youth with care histories were about half that of young adults in the United States—$14,148 versus $28,105—and they were employed at much lower rates (48.7% versus 70.0%; Okpych & Courtney, 2014). However, the earnings and employment rate gaps narrowed substantially for youth who had completed at least some college (Okpych & Courtney, 2014). This is an important but not surprising finding. Voluminous research has demonstrated the benefits of higher education. We know that having a college degree increases the chances of getting a job with higher wages and more stability, of saving more, of relying less on public welfare benefits, of and attaining higher levels of physical and psychological health and civic engagement, and lower levels of family stress (for reviews see Ma et al., 2016; Mayhew et al., 2016; Tinto, 2012). If we are able to effectively intervene with foster youth, the course of their lives could be fundamentally altered.

Third, as a society, we should be profoundly troubled by the stark disparities in higher education outcomes between youth with care histories and their peers. When young people are placed in foster care, the state essentially becomes legally responsible for their protection and well-being (Courtney, 2009). We need to ensure that foster youth are afforded the opportunity to lead safe, healthy, and productive lives, just as we want our own children, nieces, nephews, and other young loved ones to do. This includes supporting their pursuit of a college degree. It also means that we may need to invest more resources and services in youth with care histories than in other young people to address the oversized challenges they face. The fact that foster youth make up a relatively small fraction of the youth and college student populations means that targeted, tailored services to support college success can be provided without exorbitant cost.

To be sure, college is not the only path to economic security, and this book certainly does not take the position that it is college or bust. However, the overwhelming majority of foster youth say that they want to go to college, so helping them get there aligns with their hopes and intentions. Moreover, although there are certainly good jobs that do not require postsecondary education, the employment landscape has been shifting over the last few decades. The proportion of jobs that require analytic skills and higher-level social skills has increased, while jobs in manufacturing and physically intensive sectors have declined. Moreover, wages have also increased for jobs that require high levels of social and analytic skills but have remained stagnant for jobs that require more physically intensive skills (Pew Research Center, 2016). This means that jobs that pay a living wage are increasingly going to workers who have education beyond high school.

Book’s Audience and Organization

This book comprises two background chapters followed by several empirical chapters and a concluding chapter. The empirical chapters present findings from a variety of quantitative analyses. Although some of these analyses are quite sophisticated, the book is written to be accessible to a broad audience. For readers who may not have been exposed to the types of analyses in the book or for those who need a refresher, several appendices explain the statistical methods underlying the analyses and how to interpret the results. For readers with stronger statistical backgrounds, additional details about some of the analyses are provided in technical appendices. Given its interdisciplinary and practical focus, the book will serve as a useful resource for bachelor’s- to doctoral-level students, policy makers, advocates, higher education administrators, child welfare professionals, youth-serving organizations and programs, foster parents and other caregivers, youth with care histories, and researchers.

This book has three parts: Background, Findings, and Recommendations. The first part has two chapters. Chapter 1 summarizes information on the foster care system, relevant federal laws pertinent to foster youth and college, and the programs designed to support foster youth into and through college. The chapter also presents a conceptual framework for the book. Chapter 2 introduces readers to the Midwest Study, explaining the study design and describing its participants.

The Findings section includes seven empirical chapters, each with a different purpose. Chapter 3 summarizes the main outcomes examined in this book: the percentages of youth enrolled in college, who persisted, and who earned a degree. College persistence and degree completion outcomes are compared to a nationally representative sample of low-income first-generation students. The chapter also describes the types of colleges that foster youth commonly attend and analyzes the extent to which foster youth enroll in colleges that match their academic credentials. Chapter 4 describes semester-by-semester enrollment trends of youth in the study who made it to college. This analysis identifies four common enrollment patterns and describes the types of students who fit into each pattern.

The next three chapters investigate predictors of the three key outcomes of this book: enrollment (chapter 5), persistence (chapter 6), and degree completion (chapter 7). These chapters draw on rich data collected from the Midwest Study on foster youth’s background characteristics and experiences. The analyses of persistence and completion also examine characteristics of the colleges that youth attended.

Having examined general sets of predictors of the three college outcomes, the final two empirical chapters examine topics particularly important to practice and policy audiences. Chapter 8 investigates the relationship between avoidant attachment and college persistence and degree completion. Avoidant attachment stems from high exposure to past maltreatment and relationship instability and is characterized by emotional guardedness and a disavowal of the need to depend on others for help. Findings from this chapter have relevance for programs and professionals who work directly with foster youth in college. Chapter 9 is a policy analysis of extended foster care. Does extra time in foster care affect foster youths’ likelihood of entering college, persisting, and earning a degree?

Part III includes a single chapter that synthesizes the findings from the empirical chapters and presents practical, actionable next steps (Chapter 10). Recommendations are organized around two critical tasks: increasing college enrollment and promoting college persistence to degree completion.

Foster Youth Terminology

The terms youth with foster care histories/background/experience/involvement, foster youth, and transition-age foster youth are used interchangeably throughout this book. The first set of terms is preferred, because it captures the fact that being in foster care is a part of a young person’s life and experiences but does not define who they are.

It is important to note that, in the research literature, the term foster youth does not have a clear and consistent definition. Some studies denote foster youth to include young people who were in foster care after a certain age (e.g., their thirteenth birthday), whereas other studies use a more expansive definition that includes young people who were in foster care at any