Funny you should ask, as I just finished up a conference at which a retired judge and family advocate spoke on this very subject.
The statistics are tragic. Those that had the greatest impact on me:
- children raised in foster care have a 2.1% likelihood of graduating from college with a bachelor’s degree
- adults who were raised in foster care have an extraordinarily higher likelihood of being incarcerated, unemployed, or dead within just a few years of reaching their 18th birthday
- the two most common characteristics of people in prison are 1) they lack empathy; and 2) they were raised in foster care
- children in foster care suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at substantially higher rates than other children
This speaker was of the opinion, an opinion held by many, that the foster care system is doing children more harm than good, generally. Given all the statistics that he shared, it would have been hard to argue otherwise.
Infographic | What happens when kids age out of foster care?
51 Useful Aging Out of Foster Care Statistics
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