Reducing barriers to post-secondary education among former youth in care: A scoping review

Young people with child welfare experience face significant barriers in accessing and completing post-secondary education. Barriers to post-secondary education often include various system-level factors related to access to college or university, including lack of high school completion, lack of institutional knowledge and familiarity with academic culture, low educational attainment and expectation bias, first in family to attend post-secondary, and financial constraints. These barriers can have lifelong consequences for these individuals, their families, and communities, including economic, social, and legal impacts. While tuition waiver programs are interventions aimed at addressing financial considerations, additional barriers to post-secondary education for this population continue to persist. Our research team undertook a scoping review to better understand the barriers facing former youth in care (FYIC) and how tuition waiver programs can address these challenges. Particularly, the aim of this scoping review was to understand how well Canada, as a signatory on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is achieving its commitment to addressing SDG 4, Quality Education, noting that tuition waiver programs for FYIC are a growing trend aimed at advancing SDG 4. This scoping review followed the methodology as described by Arksey and O'Malley (2005) and a total of 58 peer-reviewed articles met the inclusion criteria. These articles describe the variable requirements for acceptance into a tuition waiver program as well as the differing types of supports offered in tuition waiver programs aimed at FYIC.