What is ETV Funding?
Federal Chafee education and training vouchers provide financial assistance to youth who have aged out of foster care and are seeking additional educational opportunities. These funds can be spent at both college and technical schools.
How do students qualify?
- Must have aged out of foster care
- Must be enrolled in an accredited institution
- Must maintain at least at 2.0 GPA
What can these funds be spent on?
- Tuition at college/technical schools
- Rent and other living expenses
- School supplies, including textbooks and a computer
- Health care and child care
Where does OFA fit in?
Social workers and their departments are not set up to administer scholarship programs to emancipated youth.
Therefore, the Orphan Foundation of America works with several states to administer their ETV program and to ensure that foster alumni receive ETV assistance in accordance with federal law.
The following states have empowered OFA to administer ETV assistance: Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, New York, North Carolina and Ohio.
In a recent survey, 92% of students gave high marks to the help they received from OFA.
Challenges that foster youth face in college:
1.) Financial pressures: As well as college, foster alumni need to be able to afford to pay for their rent, transportation and basic living expenses (electric, phone). If they have children, they need to be able to afford child care.
2.) Work conflicting with school: In the recent OFA survey, over 20% of participants reported that their class hours were inconvenient.
3.) Need for academic support: When asked how often they met with their academic advisors, two out of five students (40%) reported that they rarely or never met with their academic advisor. Nearly one quarter (27%) reported that they received poor or no academic advising.
4.) Social isolation: One in ten foster youth reported in the OFA Spring survey that they did not have an opportunity to become involved with other students. Nearly a fifth reported that there were few people with interests and backgrounds like their own.
23% of foster alumni reported feeling lonely, and stated that those feelings of loneliness were having a negative impact on school performance.
What helps foster youth to succeed in college?
1.) Healthy social relationships: Speaking from personal experience, I know that I found the family I never had through my involvement with campus organizations.
Therefore, I was not surprised to learn from the survey results that between 45-55% participated in campus organizations. Students reported serving meals, tutoring and mentoring. They participated in dramatic productions or athletic teams. One student taugh English as a second language.
2.) A sense of direction: 42% of foster youth reported that they needed additional support in navigating their school's administrative services. 61% reported that they needed career counseling. Foster youth need guidance in order to set and meet career goals.
Personally, I changed majors five times in college. I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do. Eventually, they all added up and made sense, and I ended up going for a Master's degree. But I figured this out the same way I made most of my decisions: alone.
Recommendations
1.) In order to make the best use of funds, ETV funding should be coordinated with other sources of funding assistance. Ideally, foster youth would receive a combination of funding sources that is sufficient to provide for both their living expenses and education.
2.) Don't overlook the need for mentoring and counseling: One quarter of the participants in OFA's survey reported their need for academic and mental health counseling.
For more information, please visit: www.statevoucher.org
Source:
"Spring 2006 Survey of (1204) OFA ETV Students." Orphan Foundation of America, July 5, 2006.
2 comments:
Danielle,
I agree 100% with you. Those thoughts crossed my mind when I was typing the entry.
Ideally college advisors would be knowledgeable, involved and supportive.
(And, to be fair, ideally students would go to their office to meet with them, which the survey showed that a lot of foster alumni were not doing).
Lack of guidance is not a problem that is unique to foster alumni.
In fact, I would guess that probably one reason that you are the ideal ally for foster youth and foster alumni is that you've had to figure out a lot of things for yourself.
So, I don't disagree with you at all. My posting is just a summary of the findings and recommendations from OFA's survey.
Looking back on my personal college experiences:
-My grades were fine
-Grants, loans were available
-My professors: some better than others
-I bought textbooks for big bucks and sold them back for pennies, just like everybody else
My biggest challenges were:
1.) Lack of safety net: I knew I'd be homeless if I blew it. However, when I was 17, I did mess up and as a result, I was homeless for two weeks.
2.) No car & didn't know how to drive - this is the downside of starting college at age 16.
3.) Worked up to five jobs on campus simultaneously, because I was living on campus, and part-time jobs were what was available.
4.)I had no medical insurance. This became an expensive problem when I had a cancer scare at age 19.
What OFA is doing is examining their effectiveness with foster youth and how they might be more effective in the future.
They are also justifying their existence and (I'd guess) hoping to administer ETV funding in other states, as well as the seven that they have on board already.
Lisa
Danielle is absolutely right-I went to a poor HS and we had one guidance counselor for over 600 students. She didn't have time to explain college funding possibilities, which was really sad since 99% of the kids at my school couldn't have went to college without some sort of financial aid. Thankfully, I had my parents to help me navigate the system, but many of their parents weren't informed enough to do that, and clearly, foster children have no one at all to help them with that end of things, let alone what to do once they get to college.
I do know from talking to a Children's Services worker here that Ohio has several scholarship programs for foster children, and they also qualify for almost every grant program available, at least for undergraduate degrees.
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