“Everyone seems to think I’ve got it all under control, and I rarely feel that way. There’s a ticking clock always in the back of my mind. I need to graduate and become financially independent before the support I get from the foster care system disappears,” Noel Anaya, a former foster care student in college. Once a young adult is eighteen, the foster care systems pulls all funding away from the young adult. In Louisiana, one in five foster children become homeless after aging out of the foster system. Only 3 percent of foster kids graduate from college. This is a problem that needs a solution. Implementing a program to support foster children to graduate from college could be the solution. This would prevent dropping out since, students are …show more content…
The young adults do not have the money to pay for household items, so the young adults dropout and get a job. Getting a job in college seems like a normal thing. For foster children, it takes so much more work and effort. Juggling the work of college becomes too stressful on top of the other struggles. The kids figure that a job would be more beneficial than going to school. Former Foster children have no where to stay over breaks, so this makes them think it isn’t worth it. Not all colleges leave the dorms open for breaks. This causes the kids to jump from “couch to couch” over break. The dorms have become the college students homes. If the dorms are closed, it will most likely cause the young adult to become “homeless”. Adding onto this, former foster children are without parent and family support. “I wasn’t prepared for college. I didn’t have parents or anyone to look up to or help me with my college experience,” said Barries, a student that was interviewed by the PBS Newshour. This shows that not only are foster kids struggling to be encouraged, the foster kids are becoming incharge of bills and certain topics that the parents would