Hope seen in transition from foster care to adulthood in Midwest

Tasha Collett spent most of her teen years shuffling between so many different foster families that she's lost count of how many. By the time she aged out of the Iowa system at age 18, she ended up living in homeless shelters, on and off.

Not exactly a foundation for success. But Collett, now 21, still managed to land an apartment and a part-time drug store job. She's studying to become a registered nurse at Mercy College of Health Sciences in Des Moines.

“I'm very blessed,” Collett says, making a statement that's confirmed when you look at the often grim findings from a long-term study on older youth who've been in foster care.

According to the study, released this week on Wednesday, a quarter of the youth didn't have a high school diploma or GED. Only about half were working, compared with 72 percent of their peers who weren't in foster care, the multiyear study of teens and 20-somethings in Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin showed.

The study focused on their transition out of the foster care system and into adulthood. Almost half reported at least one hardship during the study, such as an eviction or utility shut-off, while nearly a third said they sometimes didn't have enough to eat.

“On average, they're not doing well when compared to their peers,” says Mark Courtney, the study's lead author and the research and development director at the University of Washington's Partners for Our Children program. That's been especially true in tough economic times.

Still, when you take a deeper look at the numbers, it wasn't all bad news, Courtney said, especially when young people had more support. He noted that a third of the young people studied were, like Collett, making a relatively successful transition to adulthood. Another quarter, whom he dubbed “emerging adults,” were living with friends or relatives but were often working or going to school and poised to make the transition with support.

Glimmers of hope are in the study. Comparing the outcomes for youth tracked until age 23 or 24, the researchers found that:

• By the end of the study foster youth in Illinois were more likely to have gone to college for at least one year - 44 percent in Illinois compared with 26 percent in Iowa and Wisconsin. The finding is significant because Illinois is the only state among the three that offered youth the option to remain wards of the state until age 21.

• The longer youths remained in care beyond age 18, the higher their wages - likely a direct result of their schooling, researchers said.

• Young women who remained in the system also were more likely to delay pregnancy, at least until age 19 and sometimes longer.

The findings are based on a series of interviews researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Chicago began in 2002 with 732 young older teens in the foster care systems in the three states and concluded in 2008 with 603 remaining participants, when they were 23 and 24.

Signs showed that aging out of the system at 21, instead of 18, wasn't a cure-all. By age 23 or 24, most of the Illinois participants who attended college were no more likely to have a college degree, for instance.

The study also found that while staying in the system until age 21 delayed homelessness, it didn't prevent it.

Even so, “it seems irresponsible that more states haven't moved the age to 21 by now, given all the sound arguments there are for it,” says Curtis McMillen, a professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis who has studied the foster system in his own state.