ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
People who grew up in foster care earn college degrees at rates far lower than the general population. A program in Virginia for former foster youth aims to change that. Its goal is to support college students of all ages with guidance and sometimes financial help while they work on their degrees. VPM's Megan Pauly has this report.
KAREN COLE: Good morning, Keona.
KEONA BEAMON: Good morning, Miss Karen. Good morning.
COLE: Good to see you.
BEAMON: Good to see you too.
MEGAN PAULY, BYLINE: Thirty-five-year-old Keona Beamon is meeting with Karen Cole, her coach through the Great Expectations program.
COLE: So, yeah, going into next semester, you do have kind of a heavy - heavier load...
BEAMON: Yeah.
COLE: ...Than you've had. How are you feeling about that?
BEAMON: I'm very confident, especially knowing that I'm almost done.
PAULY: Beamon is just two semesters from completing her associate's degree in business administration at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in downtown Richmond. And she just got accepted to a nearby HBCU, Virginia State University, to pursue her bachelors.
COLE: I am so happy...
BEAMON: (Laughter).
COLE: ...And proud of you.
BEAMON: Thank you.
PAULY: In their meetings, which happen whenever Beamon needs to talk, Cole provides her with regular encouragement. That's not something Beamon really experienced growing up.
BEAMON: People in the foster care system really need that push, that motivation.
PAULY: Beamon spent a lot of time in foster care as a teenager. At age 18, she says she became homeless. Thinking back on those years, she says she never really felt like she had much support.
BEAMON: Basically, you just felt alone. Like, you really wanted your mother and your father to be the one who'd pick up all the pieces, and they're just not there.
PAULY: Great Expectations is picking up some of those pieces. The mostly privately funded program started over 15 years ago. It provides financial and emotional support for students like Beamon, no matter how long they've been out of foster care. There are no national numbers, but state and regional studies have found former foster youth earn degrees at much lower rates than the general population. An analysis of a study of three Midwestern states found only about 4% completed an associates degree by age 29 or 30. But the graduation rate for students in the Great Expectations program is higher - more than double with that analysis found for two-year degrees.
ALLISON GILBREATH: Their students are graduating. They're getting degrees, and they're entering the workforce, and they're doing really well.
PAULY: Allison Gilbreath is with the nonprofit Voices for Virginia's Children. She advocates for policies that support foster youth. She says people who grow up in foster care can have a hard time settling into life as independent adults.
GILBREATH: They have experienced numerous traumas. They are trying to figure out life on their own, and that's really hard.
PAULY: Almost a third of youth who transition out of foster care report being homeless between the ages of 19 and 21. One in five report being incarcerated. That's according to research from The Annie E. Casey Foundation. Gilbreath says she thinks the Great Expectations program is important because it helps students meet their basic needs. The program offers housing stipends and helps cover emergency expenses, like for car repairs or to prevent evictions.
GILBREATH: Housing is the foundation. When you feel like you are in a safe housing situation that's stable, you can start to think about the bigger picture. You can start to think about, what do I want? What are my dreams? No one can dream when they don't have anywhere to sleep.
ALEXANDRIA DAVIS: It feels like they saved my life in a way.
PAULY: Twenty-six-year-old Alexandria Davis says, after she started community college, her relationship with her then live-in partner got difficult, and she needed to move. She applied for emergency funding through her school. And that's how she learned about Great Expectations. The program helped with her unexpected housing expenses and awarded her a monthly stipend for other needs.
DAVIS: That first realization of, wow, someone is there to help me, I think really opened my eyes to being, like, wow, like, you know, people do care. People do care about me. People do care about my financial success, my educational success, my emotional success.
PAULY: Now, Davis is working on her bachelor's. She's studying marketing at Virginia Commonwealth University. She says, without the financial and emotional support she received from the Great Expectations program...
DAVIS: I think I would have dropped out of school because I would go back into that same cycle of realizing, hey, I can't afford this.
PAULY: While there are lots of programs across the country designed to help former and current foster youth get a degree, not a lot of them look like Great Expectations. There's a network of such programs called Fostering Academic Achievement Nationwide. A representative there said Great Expectations stands out for its, quote, "comprehensive approach to supporting students at two-year institutions." It's available at every community college in Virginia and helped inspire state lawmakers to fund more support at the state's public four-year schools. That legislation took effect earlier this year and ensures that current and former foster youth don't have to pay for tuition or room and board.
For NPR News, I'm Megan Pauly, in Richmond.
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