Fostering Higher Education: A Postsecondary Support and Substance Misuse Prevention Intervention for Youth with Foster Care Experience

Possessing a higher education has been shown to have a preventive impact on a variety of outcomes such as employment instability, incarceration, mental health challenges, and risk of death. Youth who have spent time in foster care are a highly vulnerable population who face daunting obstacles to higher education. Yet, the majority of foster youth are interested in earning a postsecondary degree. While a wide range of services and supports exist that aim to help foster youth achieve their postsecondary goals, few have any evidence of their effectiveness, and none have achieved the status of being considered an evidence-based practice. This paper provides an overview of the development and preliminary usability and feasibility findings of Fostering Higher Education, a postsecondary access and retention intervention for youth transitioning from foster care that includes elements of educational advocacy, an adaptation of BASICS substance misuse prevention programming, and mentoring. Youth usability testing of the draft intervention design was conducted with 13 youth in two Pacific Northwestern cities. We found that, on average across the four intervention activities that youth role played, 89% of youth found the material interesting, 94% felt comfortable participating in the activity, and 94% said they would continue in the program after participating in this activity. Data on the feasibility of implementing Fostering Higher Education was collected from local child welfare, foster care independent living program, and local college and university representatives. Participants were asked to rate (1) how important, and (2) how feasible, it would be for an organization to provide each component of the intervention. On a scale from 1 (very important/feasible) to 7 (not important/feasible at all), participants, on average, rated the importance of providing the Fostering Higher Education intervention components to youth as 1.3, and the feasibility of an organization to provide these elements as 2.2. The mentoring component of the intervention was rated as less feasible (although still considered to be feasible) for organizations to implement than the other intervention components (2.9 for mentoring compared to 1.5 for other components). In terms of specific obstacles to implementation, cost was the most commonly perceived challenge. The final intervention design, which includes (1) a professional educational advocate who leads a postsecondary goal planning procedure and delivery of a Top 6 Potential Pitfalls for Higher Education curriculum, one pitfall of which is alcohol and substance misuse, and (2) a hybrid one-on-one/ group mentoring approach will be described.