Pa. bill would aid foster kids to pursue higher education

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

When Bryn Elizabeth Albee left foster care in 2004, she did something fairly unusual for a young person aging out of the system — she went to college.

“I was very lucky that I ended up graduating on time and was able to go to college in the first place,” she said, because many of the other foster youth she knew did not attend college, or even graduate from high school.

Ms. Albee is now part of a group of advocates pushing for a bill that would assist kids in foster care in accessing higher education in Pennsylvania.

House Bill 1745 would would create college tuition waivers for foster youth age 14 and older at state-supported institutions, such as state-owned universities, state-related universities and community colleges. The legislation would also require schools to have a point of contact specifically for foster youth to aid in connecting them with services.

Advocates for the bill have said many other states have such arrangements for youth who have aged out of the foster system, either as tuition waivers or scholarships.

“This is something that we know is common,” said Nadia Mozaffar, staff attorney at Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center, which supports the bill.

Completing higher education can be a struggle for children who have left foster care.

Locally, about 28 percent of kids who were in foster care in Allegheny County had at least some two-year or four-year college attendance, according to statistics from the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, although that doesn’t necessarily indicate that they graduated.

That figure “should be considered an estimate,” because of the data-collection method, said Elaine Plunkett, an agency spokeswoman.

While foster youth have the same aspirations for post-secondary education that other young people do, they can face a number of financial and other barriers, said Helen Cahalane, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work.

Estimates of college graduation among former foster youth range between 1 and 11 percent, she said.

“Application costs, tuition, fees, books, supplies, room and board are huge financial barriers that can prevent youth in the foster care system from taking that next step toward higher education,” Ms. Cahalane wrote in an email. “Many youth in foster care do not have monetary resources or family support. Easing the financial burden of higher education can make a huge difference.”

“This bill would really help create a support system that hasn’t existed in this state,” said Ms. Albee, who now works as county caseworker.

The bill passed the House unanimously in June and is in the Senate Education Committee.

Senators return to Harrisburg next week but are only scheduled to be in the Capitol a total of 10 days over the coming months prior to the end of the legislative session. Bills that don’t pass both chambers by then must start over in the next two-year session.

Sen. John Eichelberger, R-Blair, who chairs the Education Committee, said he has concerns about the legislation’s potential costs to the schools.

Colleges don’t have any information about how many students they have who would be eligible for the waiver, he said.

“They don’t know if they have 10 kids or 100 kids or whatever it is ... they can’t project what their costs could be, and they are concerned about that,” he said in an interview last week.

He also said that in the bill’s current form, it is unclear if it would also cover room and board costs for students.

A fiscal note, which estimates the cost of legislation, said the state system estimated that their universities would have to waive approximately $5 million in tuition and fees annually, were the bill to become law.

The other schools that it would apply to — community colleges, the Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology and Temple University — “have indicated the impact of this program on their revenue will be minimal” because the amount of other student aid provided would cover most tuition and fees.

Penn State University, the University of Pittsburgh and Lincoln University did not provide their own cost estimates, according to the fiscal note.

“We are supportive, although we are still trying to accurately estimate the cost of the legislation,” Pitt spokesman Joe Miksch said.

“We’re going to try to work something out, if we can, but we are going to be sensitive to what the universities are telling us,” Mr. Eichelberger said.