The day after my high school graduation, at the age of 17 and with an acceptance letter to an Ivy League university in hand, my foster mother asked me to move out of her house in San Diego.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/your-money/a-teenagers-harsh-lesson-is-an-adults-buffer.html
It is a sad what happened to the writer when she was 17, but I do not understand how she tied the whole thing together:
How did what happened to her at age 17 had anything to do with “The more successful you become and the more money you make, the easier it is to get caught up in and enamored of both…” It wasn’t a success story that she was in a foster home. She lost a roof over her head, but then she was taken in by someone else. If she was telling a story about how she made it to be top 1% then at blink of eye she was homeless, then I could understand where she is coming from. To me, it was a very confusing short story.
I’m a little confused by this story as well. Don’t foster children get full rides to Universities?
They are considered independent students on the FAFSA. But that doesn’t mean a free ride unless the university gies it to them. This girl had nowhere to live from high school graduation to move-in day.
Federal aid = max Pell grant, max student loan (which is $4-5k more than dependent student loan and none of the extra is subsidized), work study. Some states give a bit more, like $5000 in NY if you go to a NY college. That doesn’t come close to the actual cost of most colleges, including living expenses.
The chances are that Penn gave her a real free ride but she wasn’t there yet when her foster parent threw her out.
99.9 percent of foster kids aren’t going to get into an Ivy League school that covers everything. If they are lucky, they will be able to cobble together something and come out of school owing twice what a non-foster kid who has a family to live with during the summer and vacation will owe.
Good for her and thank goodness some people stepped in to help when it was needed. In the end, it is her foster family’s loss.
Yes she did.
“An adult who worked at a school I had once attended, whom I won’t identify because she could have gotten into trouble for helping me, came and picked me up. I ended up living with her for that summer rent-free. She bought my plane ticket to Philadelphia, and a friend of hers paid for my books my freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania.”
Her point was that even if you are highly successful, it may all be taken away in an instant so don’t get too complacent. I wonder why her foster parents made her move out. Some states have now started programs for free tuition for former foster kids but not all.
tx9630, yes, someone stepped up. But she didn’t know that when the foster mom threw her out. And there is no saying that someone would step up for Christmas/intersession break or next summer or any time. She was on her own at age 18. I am very grateful that I wasn’t on my own at age 18, and that my 19-year-old daughter isn’t on her own.
I had a classmate at Penn who had been thrown out of her house while still in high school. She ended up in foster care.
She was given full aid at Penn, yes, but that didn’t cover all her expenses and certainly not her needs. She had to work to buy school supplies (being in design, these weren’t cheap), clothes, toiletries, food (at that time, no dining hall on weekends), and any health bills (it’s best to be healthy but sometimes these kids have physical conditions like asthma).
Saying foster kids get free rides is so wrong. On so many levels.
Thanks @SlackerMomMD for your reality check. I think a lot of people tatke many things for granted.
For all of you who are jealous of people who get “full financial aid” for need, would you be willing to trade your circumstances for theirs?
I don’t think anyone is jealous here. Lets not get off the topic here.
oldfort, I think these responses are referring to post #2. I think it’s a pretty common misconception that kids from poor families or no families get a free ride for college with not a worry in the world about money. That’s simply not true.
Full ride includes tuition, room and board, but I think most people know there are a lot of expenses outside of COA. At many top tier schools, books, travel, misc expenses are all factored into COA, what’s not included is summer/winter break room and board. Not saying it would be easy, but for students at schools like Ivy, they are many options when it comes to summer work. My kids didn’t always make a lot of money over the summer, but they made enough to pay for room and board if need to. The younger one, more of an humanities students, didn’t get paid as much, but through her internship she got room and board paid for and received some stipend. Kids from poor families do not have the luxury of working at some glamours jobs for free, they need to be more aggressive in getting well paid jobs, and sometimes it may need to be 2 or 3 jobs in the summer.
I think it’s not unusual for a foster child to be kicked out upon high school graduation. The foster parents no longer get paid and they either can not afford to keep the child or don’t want to. I think it’s called aging out of the system.
I enjoyed the article - thanks for posting. My takeaway was that her earlier experience as a foster child taught her the importance of saving and not taking success/money for granted - which served her well when she was laid off twice as an adult. It’s not so much about how she paid for college or what aid she rcvd - her point was to never feel too secure - because that’s when life will throw you a curve you are not ready for.
I’m glad to see the voices of reason here. I worked on a youth project once involving a rep from a foster kid advocacy group and yes, many foster parents do it only for the money and kick the kids out the minute they turn 18-sometimes even before HS is over, though I think in WA they still get payments until after HS ends. There are reasons why many former foster kids end up in jail or as teen parents. The lack of support and being suddenly homeless are two of them.
It’s easy to say, well, they should just get jobs to cover their out-of pocket college costs for someone who knows their own kids have a soft place to land if they don’t. But foster kids have often have nothing but the clothes on their backs-imagine having to pay for EVERYTHING else, with no back up if you fail. And please, not many get to Ivies which will even pay for travel costs. Even so, they don’t pay for clothes, toiletries, food. Come on.
I know there are states and various agencies working to make things better for foster kids. I even know of few former foster kids who didn’t end up statistics, but it’s BRUTAL. And so many are abused while in foster care, or treated as servants-our state alone has lost several lawsuits by former foster kids for being left with abusive foster families. That ANY make it to ANY college is pretty remarkable. As long as they can pay for it.
I think she is basically saying that it taught her not to take things for granted, I don’t know why people are confused. . I think what she was saying was that here she was, she had gotten into an Ivy league school, which especially to someone who came from her background, looked like the magic ticket into some sort of ‘good life’, must have seemed like ‘now my life has changed’…and the rug got pulled out from under her when she lost her foster home, which could have completely fouled up her future if not for the kindness of someone else.
How many people have you known, or even yourself, where you think you are living the high life, and suddenly you find it all an illusion? How many people start making the 6 and upper 6 income salaries, they live as if it will never end, and then find out the reality when for example a job disappears, or a company goes under? People who worked at Enron thought they had a nice future ahead of them, with a cushy retirement promised thanks to the Enron stock they had in their retirement accounts (through no fault of their own, Enron forced them to do that, thankfully companies can no longer do that), and it went bust over night…
In her case, she had nothing, and having that Ivy league admission to someone in her position looked like she finally had the path out, and what happened taught her never to think that anything is given or permanent, which is not a bad lesson to learn.
I think oldfort is also forgetting that most top colleges do require a student contribution. After 1-2 years of college, it’s hard to come up with a summer job which pays enough to (1) put a roof over your head, give you food to eat, and cover the expense of commuting to a job AND (2) make the required student contribution. In the bad old days, the student health insurance plan didn’t cover you away from campus during the summer. If you got a cavity, you had another problem paying to see a dentist.