“Get a job” is the advice most often handed to young people leaving foster care, as though employment were a door anyone could walk through with enough effort. The data tells a different story, one where the obstacle is rarely a lack of willingness to work and much more often a lack of the surrounding infrastructure, a place to live while job hunting, a car to get to a shift, a family member who can float rent for a month, that most people never notice because someone else is quietly providing it for them.

The employment numbers for former foster youth are consistently worse than for their peers, and the gap widens rather than narrows with time. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s KIDS COUNT Data Center, only 59 percent of youth who were in foster care at 17 were employed, even part-time, by age 21 (Casey Foundation). By age 24, only about half of former foster youth are employed at all, compared to roughly 75 percent of their peers (Blue Ribbon Project). And the gap does not close as former foster youth get older and gain more work experience, if anything it hardens. A 2022 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that by age 26, young people who aged out of foster care had earnings 50 percent lower and employment rates 20 percent lower than other young adults with comparable levels of education (Casey Foundation). That last detail matters enormously: this is not a story about a lower level of educationtranslating into worse jobs. Holding education constant, former foster youth still earn roughly half as much and work less often than their peers.

Other studies put similar numbers on the problem from different angles. A multi-state study found that 47 percent of former foster youth were unemployed, and among those who did have jobs, more than 71 percent reported annual incomes under $25,000 (Children’s Rights). One estimate found that within four years of aging out, half of former foster youth had no earnings whatsoever, and those who did work averaged only about $7,500 a year, an income far below what it takes to live independently in nearly any part of the country (iFoster). None of these figures describe a population that lacks the desire to work. They describe a population that is, by nearly every measure, locked out of stable employment despite trying to get in.

Researchers who study this gap directly have converged on a useful framework: employment outcomes are shaped less by individual effort than by the different kinds of “capital” a young person brings into the labor market. One influential study frames this in terms of human capital (education and skills), personal capital (things like mental health and self-regulation), and social capital (the network of relationships that connect a person to job leads, references, and informal support), and finds that former foster youth are systematically disadvantaged across all three, not because of any deficiency in the young people themselves, but because the system that raised them rarely builds these forms of capital the way an intact family does (ScienceDirect). Social capital does heavy lifting in most people’s careers in ways that are easy to overlook. A parent’s professional contact, a family friend who can vouch for a young person’s character, an aunt who mentions an opening at her own workplace are all ways young people get jobs. Former foster youth, by definition, tend to lack this kind of informal network, and it shows up directly in employment statistics.

A separate analysis using data from the Midwest Study, one of the more detailed long-term surveys of former foster youth, looked specifically at what predicts yearly earnings at age 21 and found that race, level of education, and histories of substance use or mental illness were all significantly associated with earnings, which lines up with the trauma and mental health patterns covered earlier in this series (ScienceDirect, “Midwest”). More striking is what the study found did not predict earnings: whether a young person had received formal employment-related assistance made no measurable difference to their income (ScienceDirect, “Midwest”). That finding should give pause to anyone assuming that job-readiness workshops or resume-building programs are, on their own, sufficient. If a young person’s earnings are being shaped primarily by unresolved trauma, unstable housing, or the absence of a professional network, a workshop on interview skills addresses none of those underlying constraints.

The employment gap is also not evenly distributed within the former foster youth population itself. Research using California data found clear gender and racial disparities, with women and youth of color earning significantly less than their white male peers who also aged out of care (Gómez and Courtney). That pattern mirrors broader labor market inequities, but it compounds on top of the disadvantages foster care experience already imposes, meaning some young people are navigating overlapping barriers rather than a single one. A statewide analysis in California summarized the bind plainly: even when former foster youth do find work, they have an extremely difficult time earning enough to rise above the poverty line, and within four years of aging out, half will experience unemployment or homelessness, frequently both at once (California Health and Human Services Agency).

All of this research suggests that “just get a job” misunderstands what a job actually requires as a starting point. Most young adults enter the labor market with a place to sleep while they search, a phone plan someone else is paying for, a car or a ride from a family member to get to an interview, and a name to drop when an opening appears. Former foster youth are typically missing several of these things, and no amount of individual motivation substitutes for their absence. The programs that show the most promise, evidence-informed job training paired with mentorship, wraparound support that addresses housing and mental health at the same time as job placement, and extended foster care that gives young people a few more years to build stability before they are expected to be financially independent, work precisely because they try to rebuild the surrounding infrastructure rather than treating unemployment as a simple skills gap. Financial independence is not something most people achieve alone. It is usually the product of a support system working quietly in the background, and the entire employment story for former foster youth is what happens when that background system was never there to begin with.

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Works Cited

Annie E. Casey Foundation. “What Happens to Youth Aging Out of Foster Care?”The Annie E. Casey Foundation, 25 Feb. 2025, www.aecf.org/blog/what-happens-to-youth-aging-out-of-foster-care.

Blue Ribbon Project. “The Harsh Reality of Aging Out: What the Numbers Tell Us About Foster Youth Left Behind.” The Blue Ribbon Project, blueribbonproject.org/resource-library/news-items/274-the-harsh-reality-of-aging-out-what-the-numbers-tell-us-about-foster-youth-left-behind.

California Health and Human Services Agency. “Priority Employment Best Practices.” CHHS, 2019, www.chhs.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Priority-Employment-Best-Practices.pdf.

Children’s Rights. “Unemployment Rampant Among Former Foster Youth.”Children’s Rights, 22 Feb. 2023, www.childrensrights.org/news-voices/unemployment-rampant-among-former-foster-youth.

Gómez, Anthony, and Mark E. Courtney. “Employment and Earnings Outcomes Among Transition-Age Youth in Care.” TAY-Hub, University of California, Berkeley, 2024, tayhub.berkeley.edu/?p=1902.

iFoster. “6 Quick Statistics on the Current State of Foster Care.” iFoster, 9 Nov. 2020, www.ifoster.org/blogs/6-quick-statistics-on-the-current-state-of-foster-care/.

“Employment Outcomes of Former Foster Youth as Young Adults: The Importance of Human, Personal, and Social Capital.” ScienceDirect, 11 May 2011, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0190740911001733.

“Employment Outcomes of Foster Youth: The Results from the Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Foster Youth.” ScienceDirect, 29 Nov. 2009, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0190740909003363.