Faculty and Staff News

Mark Courtney, the UW and the Midwest Study are mentioned in the commentary in the Huffington Post

Reported by Daniel Heimpel, Freelance journalist http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-heimpel/two-percent-aint-good-eno_b_340659.html

A study released earlier this year found that extending care past 18 and thus allowing foster youth the stability to attend college made fiscal sense. Conducted by the University of Washington School of Social Work, the study found that caring for young adults until age 21 will represent a return of $2.40 on every government dollar spent in California. The study narrowly focuses on how much more money youths will make over their lifetime with as little as one or two years of college, and does not take into account the vast savings derived from reduced state involvement in these young people's lives. Leaving homeless shelters and emergency rooms out of the equation and getting foster youth on the college track is a windfall: in California, the Department of Corrections estimates an annual cost $53,000 to incarcerate and individual. "

Allowing them [foster youth] to remain in care appears to at least double the likelihood that they will complete at least a year of college," Mark Courtney, the study's author and the country's preeminent researcher in the outcomes of foster youth told me a few months back. "In today's labor market, that is a huge benefit, and the absence of that benefit becomes a cost to society. It is a major missed opportunity."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-heimpel/two-percent-aint-good-eno_b_340659.html