Social Work Commons^™

A Multi-State Evaluation Of The Factors Predicting Educational Achievement Of Adult Foster Care Alumni, Markell Harrison-Jackson

Graduate Student Dissertations, Theses, Capstones, and Portfolios

Child maltreatment, a major public-health concern in the United States, has the most detrimental impact on adult emotional and physical development. According to the urban Institute, in the past decade foster-care expenditures for child maltreatment totaled $14.4 billion. Each year, 30,000 alumni "age out" of foster care. These are alumni who exit the foster-care system only because they reach the age of 18, not because they are reunited with their families, are adopted, or leave to attend college. Prior longitudinal research has shown that the nearly 80% of the alumni who are emancipated at the age of 18 failed to …