In the United States, there are 407,000 youth in foster care. Of those, nearly 30,000 reach the age of adulthood (age 18 to 21) and are discharged—disconnected from the vital resources that stand-in for familial structures and inter-generational wealth. High school completion is a powerful and accessible avenue to achieve social mobility that is unconditional on one’s socioeconomic background or foster care status, yet literature does not exist addressing the topic of high school completion broadly for youth in foster care due to the ethical concerns of qualitative studies and lack of accessible, unified administrative data for quantitative studies. This paper attempts to fill this gap by utilizing the National Youth in Transition Database’s (NYTD) survey data and the three completed Cohorts: Cohort 2011, Cohort 2014, and Cohort 2017.

Findings suggest that youth in foster care complete high school at rates far lower than their peers—this paper provides an optimistic estimate of at least 20 percentage points lower. Those who complete high school while in foster care follow similar trends to national graduation rates based on demographic characteristics, and there is evidence of a statistically significant association between all but one characteristic captured in the NYTD data and high school graduation. There is evidence that some characteristics captured in the NYTD data are significant predictors for high school graduation by age 19. However, the attempted deployment of machine learning models and evaluation of their efficacy of predicting high school graduation suggests that data collection standards, data quality, and types of data collected should be revisited by both federal and state governments.