Cliches such as “the odds were against her” don’t even come close to telling Tyleen Caffrey’s story.
The “odds” included physical abuse as a child, placement with relatives, placement in foster care, back to an abusive home and back again to foster care while she was in high school. The odds also included doing research as a child to locate nearby soup kitchens so that she and her brothers could eat.
At one point in her troubled childhood at age 11, her mother – who was alcoholic and a drug abuser – moved the family to rural Missouri, where they lived in a converted chicken shack.
Today, the Kansas native is involved in academic research as a Ph.D. student in social work at Our Lady of the Lake University, a Hispanic serving institution (HSI) in San Antonio, Texas. She’s studying the effectiveness of online doctoral social work programs on first-generation undergraduate students who are underrepresented and underprepared for college.
OLLU’s Ph.D. in social work is a new online three-year program that brings the cohort to campus each summer for two weeks.
According to Casey Family Programs, which focuses on foster care and child welfare issues, only 2.5 percent of children who grow up in foster care graduate from a four-year college, compared to 24 percent of the general population.
And that makes Caffrey exceptional.
