California foster youth can now go to college completely free

SAN DIEGO — A potential game changer for tens of thousands of California's foster youth with dreams of going to college. New legislation, signed into the state budget Monday, will cover the entire cost of attending a UC, Cal State or California community college.

Currently, there is about 60,000 youth in foster care in California, with more than three thousand of them in San Diego County.

 A recent survey found that more than 90% of them want to go on to college, but currently only about 4% achieve that dream.

"This is a tremendous victory for foster youth across California," said San Diegan and former foster youth Shane Harris, who has been a passionate supporter of Senate Bill 307: legislation that he would love to have had available to him when he aged out of the system in 2010.

"Who wouldn't want to go to college for free, and especially when you're in the situations many of us have been in?" he told CBS 8. "When you lose your parents, you don't have the support system, you're trying to make it though all these different challenges, and then you go to pay for college?"

Now head of the non-profit People's Association of Justice Advocates, Harris pointed out that while college graduation rates among foster youth is disproportionately low, rates of eventual homelessness are disproportionately high.

This new program could reverse that trend.

"It opens the doors for foster youth to go to school, go to college debt-free," he added. 

"It is a game-changer, an absolute game-changer for young people in California," said state Senator Angelique Ashby,  who authored SB 307. This legislation will cover the entire cost of college for foster youth here in California at a UC, Cal State or California community college. 

She said that it provides a promise to those teens in the foster care system who have done the hard work needed to make it to college.

"The state of California has done a good job historically of paying for tuition for foster youth who find their way to college,"  added Ashby, "but it didn't cover everything. including housing, which for foster youth then you might as well cover nothing if you're not going to cover the housing."

$25 million has been allocated annually for this program, paid for through the state's existing Middle Class Scholarship Fund, covering everything from tuition and housing to books and computers, without the need for loans. 

Harris said says the biggest challenge now, is getting the word out to foster youth that this is available.

"To know one of the in the the state of California  your dreams are possible, you can become anything you want to be, and now you can go to college for free," he added. 

Harris said that he plans to launch an outreach campaign, since this funding is now available.