Non-parental mentoring and college resiliency among former foster youth

Although the college prospect has been consistently low for those youth coming from the foster care system, emerging studies have discovered otherwise. A number of protective factors like non-parental mentoring have been recently found to enhance the academic outcomes of foster youth. Non-parental mentoring might improve the educational outcomes of foster youth in higher education. Using secondary data from Add Health, the current study objectively followed mentored foster youth into their adulthood (between the ages of 24-32) to examine their resiliency defined as their ability to pursue and attain college degrees. The t-test results indicated a significant difference in level of education achieved between mentored and non-mentored foster youth. Those foster youth who had a mentor demonstrated more academic resiliency as evident by their higher educational success