For Drew Bowles, tattoos are a form of self-expression, so the 23-year-old has a lot of them.
There’s a tiny cross just beneath the corner of his eye, an ornate key on the skin in front of his ear. The koi fish on his chest are in memory of his foster father who passed away a couple years ago.
“I have a lot of family tattoos, which is maybe contradictory to the whole idea of foster care, right?” he said. “People might stigmatize and think of foster youth as people without families, but family doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be related.”
“People might stigmatize and think of foster youth as people without families, but family doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be related.”Drew Bowles
Bowles’s foster family was supportive when he decided to pursue a fine arts degree from Youngstown State University, with dreams of expanding his tattoo business.
But family isn’t his only form of support as he navigates higher education: Bowles is one of a fraction of former foster youth participating in Ohio’s Education and Training Voucher – or ETV – program.
The federally funded program gives young adults who have left the foster care system $5,000 a year to pay for college expenses like tuition and transportation. But of the young people eligible for the program, a relatively small number enroll.
Ohio’s Education and Training Voucher program
“Often, when people start talking about youth and foster care, they think about infants or toddlers or younger children. And if they do think about the teenagers, they don't necessarily think about what happens after that support is gone,” said Maggie Stevens, president and CEO of Foster Success.
In addition to administering Ohio’s federal ETV funds, the nonprofit connects eligible young people with coaches. They help with classic college issues like registering for classes or handling a bad grade.
“In most situations, I look at our students that we're working with as what we would consider first-generation college students,” Stevens said. “They don't have anyone ahead of them that has modeled this for them. And so, much like any first-generation college student, they're trying to figure out how to navigate campus.”
But Foster Success’s coaches are trained for specific challenges that former foster youth face as well.
“If they're living in a residence hall and the residence hall closes over the holidays, one of the things that our team will help them do is think through what are their housing options?” Stevens said.
The program has proven successful.
“We can invest a relatively small amount of dollars, some human support, and we can move three times as many students to the finish line."Maggie Stevens, Foster Success
About one in 10 former foster youth attain a college degree. If a student participates in Foster Success’s ETV program, their odds of graduating go up three-fold.
“We can invest a relatively small amount of dollars, some human support, and we can move three times as many students to the finish line,” Stevens said.
Expanding the program’s reach
Last year, Foster Success dispersed over a million dollars to 319 Ohio students. Many more are likely eligible for the support, but don’t take advantage of it.
Nationwide, half of states returned federal ETV funds in 2021.
In Ohio specifically, a study from the Urban Institute found that of the quarter of former foster youth who went to college in 2011 and 2012, only about half used an ETV. Stevens says the numbers haven’t changed dramatically since.
“What we've found over time is that the number of young people who participate in extended foster care services … are lower than what we would think,” she said.
She thinks that’s due to a number of reasons. If a kid had a bad experience in foster care growing up, they might not be inclined to engage with the system as an adult. Plus, Stevens says, teenagers can sometimes be overconfident in their abilities.
“This is typical for a lot of 18-year-olds,” she said. “They think they have it all figured out and then they start adulting and realize it's a little trickier than what they originally thought. And so there's movements and efforts to try to say, ‘How do we better educate young people about what these resources are?’”
Those efforts include expanding the program to the age of 26, so if it takes them longer than four years to get a degree, they won’t be suddenly cut off from support.
And last month, Republican U.S. Representative Max Miller from Ohio’s seventh congressional district introduced a bill to allow foster youth to use ETVs for vocational training, apprenticeships and remedial education too.
Without this type of financial — and human — support, Drew Bowles says continuing his education would be “10 times harder.”
“With owning my own business and going to college full-time, I have no time and room for error,” he said. “It's hard and it's demanding, but it's worth it. Especially for somebody that has been through the system and everything like that, to be able to implement what I want to implement, I think it's vital.”
When he graduates, Bowles wants to do advocacy and outreach programs through his business, so that more kids with experiences similar to his can follow their dreams too.
