Jaime Howden is starting her career without the debt carried by many of her peers.
Howden, 19, works as a junior stylist at Urban Edge Hair Group in Parksville. She graduated from Vancouver Island University last month and was awarded the B.C. Lieutenant Governor’s Silver Medal for academic excellence and community contribution.
But she doubts it would have happened if not for the university’s willingness to waive the tuition fees for her 10-month hairdressing program, a benefit it offers to all young people who have grown up in foster care.
“It helped a lot,” Howden said. “I might still have been able to go to school, but I would have had a lot more debt. I would have been a lot more stressed, and I would not have been able to focus as well.”
Vancouver Island University’s tuition waiver program began in 2013 with a challenge from Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C.’s representative for children and youth, to the province’s colleges and universities.
Turpel-Lafond pointed out many foster children find themselves alone and without support when they turn 19 and become adults. Free tuition would help them to enroll in post-secondary education, she said.
“Is it complicated? Of course it’s not complicated,” Turpel-Lafond said. “Just go back to your board of governors and do it.”
Within two months of her challenge, Vancouver Island University had stepped up to announce any young person raised in foster care would qualify for free tuition.
It was the first post-secondary school in the province to make the move. Now, at least 11 of B.C.’s 25 colleges or universities waive fees or offer assistance to youth leaving foster care.
At any time, the province has about 5,900 young people in foster care. Each year, about 400 of them reach adulthood.
Turpel-Lafond said fewer than one per cent of young people aging out of government care went on to post-secondary education — a number so low nobody even counted it. Within two years of her challenge, 175 people raised in foster care were enrolled in post-secondary programs.
Vancouver Island University is the largest single educator in the province of young people leaving government care, with about 65 students. The university has not put a limit on the number of students who can receive the tuition waiver.
Ralph Nilson, president of Vancouver Island University, said the institution serves an area of small-town, rural economies with a high proportion of First Nations peoples, and offers trade-style courses, such hairdressing, as well as university-level academic courses.
Nilson said it was determined early on that the best service the university could provide was access to post-secondary education and support to complete it. Other schools could act as feeder institutions, preparing students for medical school or other post-graduate challenges — Vancouver Island University could best offer that first step to life as a citizen.
“We really take seriously the importance of post-secondary education for people to earn a family-level income and be able to contribute to society,” he said.
“It’s the kind of thing where we see we can really make a difference in our province and in our community.”
Helping young people leaving foster care to get a post-secondary education is unleashing a phenomenal human resource on the province, Nilson said.
“Every one of these young people has incredible resilience,” he said.
“By just getting here and getting through, they have shown they are going to be incredible employees.
“And they are also going to be incredible contributors to their communities.”
