To help financially support students with foster care history achieve their educational goals, California recently passed legislation creating the Middle-Class Scholarship (MCS) for Foster Youth. The new legislation expands MCS educational funding for students with foster care history who attend public colleges and universities within the state. To learn more about how this program is impacting the lives of students and how it can be improved, we spoke to students with foster care history who are eligible for this program to find out what they knew about financial aid when deciding to attend college, how they are paying for college, and their experience receiving educational funding. We also examined data on MCS utilization, including the amount of aid students receive and the extent of unmet financial need.
Authors
Laura Packard Tucker, Devlin Hanson, Annabel Stattelman-Scanlan
- Pages
- 30
- Published in
- United States of America
Table of Contents
- Background 1
- Challenges Enrolling and Persisting in College for Students with Foster Care History 2
- Decreasing Affordability of Postsecondary Education 2
- Difficulty Paying for School 3
- Financial Aid for Students with Foster Care History 3
- Middle-Class Scholarship (MCS) for Foster Youth 5
- Paying for College as a Student with Foster Care History 1
- Middle Class Scholarship Usage in the Data 6
- Young People’s Experiences Paying for College 8
- Students’ College Decisions 8
- What did Students know about financial aid when making their college decisions? 8
- How did information about financial aid guide their decisions? 10
- What might they have done differently with more information? 13
- Paying for College 14
- WHAT Share OF THEIR COST OF ATTENDANCE DO students PAY? 15
- HOW ARE THEY MAKING UP THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AID AND COST? 16
- HOW DOES Paying for School IMPACT THEIR college EXPERIENCE? 17
- Students’ Insights and Recommendations 19
- Conclusion 23
- Notes 26
- References 27
- About the Authors 30
- Acknowledgments 30
