Marquis Cabrera is the founder and Chairman of Foster Skills.

In The Huffington Post, he asserts that children in foster care can benefit from skills learned from entrepreneurship.

Beyond managing product development cycles that gain traction with potential customers, entrepreneurship is learning to survive all the while figuring out how to thrive. In normal day-to-day life, U.S. (and international!) foster kids are just trying to survive, but they must learn how to thrive in order to beat the odds. I believe learning entrepreneurship can help foster youth become successful, productive citizens.

About 750,000 children are affected by foster care annually. Nationally, 50 percent of foster youth graduate from high school and less than five percent graduate from college. Fast forward into the future: In 10 years time, an estimated 3.75 million foster youth will not obtain a high school diploma and seven million foster youth will not hold a college degree.

“College graduates have higher employment rates and make more money,” writes Eduoardo Porter in his New York Times article. “According to the O.E.C.D., a typical graduate from a four-year college earns 84 percent more than a high school graduate.”

From a cost-benefit perspective on education, a college degree is a fiscal imperative. Most foster youth, however, do not attain secondary and tertiary educations. As a result, they rely on government subsidies, become homeless or commit crimes that lead to imprisonment — these are negative social spillovers that do not add value to our economy.

After listening to the Wall Street Journal’s “Rapper 50 Cent Thinks Like a Harvard Businessman” and Forbes’ Interview with Jay-Z and Warren Buffet, I was shocked to see high school dropouts 50 Cent and Jay-Z compared to graduates of prestigious universities, like Harvard and Columbia. I then realized that Jay-Z and 50 Cent, two former at-risk youths, were able to beat the odds by taking risks to develop original creations and launching themselves and their “lyrical-products” into the world. They became resilient — a lesson learned through their entrepreneuring.

…Youth entrepreneurship programs have the power to reengage poor youth, curb juvenile delinquency and create new jobs that pump life into economies. Therefore, I support organizations like BUILD, Young Biz and The Possible Project. They use entrepreneurship curriculums to empower opportunity youth in school settings to achieve. However, many foster kids do not care to sit in classrooms learning information seemingly irrelevant to their daily survival.