Note entirely true. After graduating with my B.A., I looked into maybe picking up a few additional skill-type classes. When I tried to sign up for some undergrad classes at the age of 22 (labeling me as dependent on my parents), I was told I could borrow up to $12,000 a year in unsubsidized loans. When I instead applied to a graduate school (grad school automatically qualifies you as independent), I was offered $9,000 a year in subsidized loans and $15,000 in unsubsidized loans.
I went with the grad school.
As far as Pell Grants go, that $2,500 is a hell of a lot of money when you only make $8 or so an hour.
In my experience, dealing with the issue of independent students (I’ve dated two of them)* the trick to getting independent status is to continually hound** the financial aid office of the school which you wish to go to until they cave. You will probably need some third party documentation, but in both cases it wasn’t serious more of a affidavit from someone who knows your situation.
*Both got declared independent status. I think they make it a pain in the ass so there will be less scammers.
**By hound, I don’t mean harass but make appointments, be friendly, explain the situation and find out your options. Remember that the person manning the desk at financial aid office will be one of two types:
A helpful knowledgeable professional able to assist your every financial aid need
A student who could give a shit who is doing that work as part of a work-study program.
If you run into a 2 request to speak to a 1. The students who work in these offices are there to handle the simple routine questions and applications, they generally aren’t trained to handle kind of decision regarding anything more complex than a vanilla FAFSA.
This is because grad school generally has a much higher estimated cost of attendance. While dependency status makes some difference, it’s not a make-or-break for funding school, especially community college.
Yes, Pell grants can be big (for someone who is below the poverty line), but the idea is that you get student loans so that when you graduate you can make more than eight dollars an hour. If you go to a public school, it is almost guaranteed that you will get enough student loans to be able to pay for school and cover most to all of your living expenses (depending on frugality), even for kids whose parents make 200K+. In the scheme of things, the 3k or so for a Pell grant is small. Plus there are plenty of merit-based scholarships as well – Havik, have you tried looking for those?
Either way, it’s not really worth a big fuck you to the gov’t.
First off congrats on starting school. It’s a brave step and stuff like this is confusing, aggravating, and annoying, but once you get things figured out it won’t be so bad.
Some thoughts in addition to other people’s advice:
One what’s your housing costs? Are they more then 1/4 of your income? If so you should look into section 8 housing. It’s based on your income. Whatever you make they take 1/4 for rent. Financial aid income isn’t counted in your rent. As a student you’d qualify for it.
Also books can be found online for much cheaper then the bookstores of colleges. This could cut some costs. Books are one your biggest costs.
If you can’t cover your costs talk your financial aid office at the school. If you qualify for FAFSA at all then you can get student loans to cover the remaining costs. They’re low interest and you don’t have to pay them back till you’re done with school.
The school’s financial aid office can give you leads on scholarships.
If your state is like Michigan then the state’s unemployment office might finance part of your education for certain fields.
Talk to the school guidance counselor. You’re one of many many many people who’ve had your exact problems. If you ask for advice financing school they can prolly give you some leads.
Finally as one college student to another let me give you a lesson I learned from the school of hard knocks. As long as you keep up with your work it isn’t hard to get good grades, but this isn’t high school. Just knowing the stuff and doing good on tests isn’t enough. It’s about more then just learning facts and data. It’s about learning how to be prepared. how to learn on your own, and how to be successful on the job site. Knowing technical data is very important but it’s just one piece of the puzzle.
I know this is not what you are asking for, but the Army can pay for your schooling up to $250 per credit hour. (Still with me, haven’t put me on ignore yet, right?)
You may qualify for a deferment in which you cannot be called for deployment for up to four years. That will depend on your score on the ASVAB, a 50 will get you a deferment. In this case, you won’t need anybody’s financial records or sworn statements.
Before you reply to me and say why you are disqualified, try to call your local Army Recruiter and find out if you are qualified.
I don’t think that’s always the case. I’d have to go back and look at the paperwork to know for sure, but during my senior year of college my mom lost her job, and I received significantly more in grants for my senior year (around $10K, I think). Maybe the school itself gave me extra grants?
I’m sure the grants came from your state or your school. Lots of schools offer additional need-based financial aid. Federal Pell grants are AFAIK the only need-based grant offered by the feds. When I went to school, the max per year was about 1.5k, I think. The max now is only 4K, but tuition rates have increased significantly. 10k is way out of Pell range.
To relate it to the OP, if her chosen school does need-based aid or tuition waivers, they will almost certainly work with her if she doesn’t get money from parents and adjust her estimated needs. The FAFSA itself, while used by schools for their own FA programs, only applies to federal direct loans, Pell grants, and work-study. The determination of independent on the FAFSA is really difficult to get changed – as I said before, asking for an adjustment of your EFC is much easier, and does the same thing; the financial aid director has much more leeway to change your EFC. School-run programs have more leeway as well, since it’s on their own dime, as it were, so she can make the case that her mom’s income shouldn’t count. But for federal aid purposes, the dependent/independent difference is going to be minimal.
A little freebie advice to Havik: Unless you have serious concerns about your academic ability or you have significant community ties, why not consider 4 year institutions? It’s almost certain that you will have to borrow money. Take the ACT or SAT, do well on it if you haven’t already, and try to get into the best school that you can. If you double this up with SSG Schwartz’ advice, you could even do it for free.
The money has to come from somewhere. The alternative is the taxpayers. Read: people who already paid for their own college educations and people stuck in the jobs you get without a college education. Why should they be interested in paying college tuition on behalf of some well-employed RN who can’t be bothered to budget?
If we want to go completely European-style with government funded higher education, I could get on board with that, but that’s not even on the table for discussion in the US. In the mean time, I don’t think people should be able to become conveniently estranged from their children when it comes time to pay for college. If the government knows the parents have the money, and believes as a matter of policy that it’s available to pay tuition, the government should have the cojones to go get it.
The rationale is that it’s your parents’ job to pay for college, so if you’re a dependent their income is factored into your need. However, since college is not some sort of guaranteed right, and too many people in the US go to college already, garnishing wages is a bit much, IMHO.
The system does suck, though- I’ve been putting off law school for five years because I wasn’t old enough to qualify as a non-dependent, and my parents couldn’t afford to pay for me to go despite considerable assets.
Not really. That is, I’ve never heard of such a thing. Despite what this board thinks, the military isn’t prone to breaking its promises for the purposes of evil.
Free?! Hell, the Army paid me to go! Ok, well, that’s not technically true, but that’s because I went to an expensive 4-year school. I got 4,500 from the state, 4k-ish from the feds, plus some pell grants. That was enough to get me reallly really close to what I needed. If I needed the money, I could take out the loans too and actually profit (in the short term). If I went to a state school, I could have made roughly $2,500 a year. That goes a long way towards fees and whatnot.
But it is not your parents’ legal obligation to pay for your school. Your mom and dad could be sitting beside their Scrooge McDuck tower swimming through gold coins and lighting cigars with $100 bills. thentell you to go get fucked when you ask for college money, and that is 100% legal.
Then when you go to get a federal loan, they will still take your parents’ income into consideration. One or the other of these has to give…
It already has. Federal loan AMOUNTS are not based on your parent’s income. The ratio of subsidized to unsubsidized is. The AMOUNTS are determined by the school’s estimated cost of attendance. The expected family contribution is some amount not 0 if you are a dependent. The EFC determines Pell grant eligibility, sub/unsub balance, and a cfew other small things. The EFC is quite easy to get adjusted, regardless of dependent status. If money is that tight, you can go to a public school that counts you as a resident. If you want to go to Harvard, then you better get some private loans, and talk to Harvard’s need-based aid program people. The fact of the matter is that unless you have extreme circumstances, you will be able to get an education, regardless of how rich your estranged parents are.
In Really Not All That Bright’s case, the maximum federal direct loan amount might not cover law school anyway. Unless he is a complete dumbass, he should also be able to get scholarship money from some school(s). Furthermore, there are plenty of private loans available. His dependency status is only costing him the part of the interest over three years. I am intimately familiar with how law school financial aid works, and how much of it is covered by federal programs, and not being able to afford law school is a failure on his part, not a failure of the FAFSA system.
This information is all easily available with a few minutes of google searching. The complaints and bitching about dependency status are misplaced – it does NOT make a big difference in your ability to pay for school.
The furor here seems to be that if you have rich parents who are estranged, you might end up being a little more in debt for your college education. While that might be unjust in some cases, it’s not unjust enough to deserve such scorn. But the bottom line is that no matter how poor you are, you can borrow enough money to go to any school you want, and you will be able to get tuition waivers and reductions from almost every school. The feds are in the business of providing loans, and a tiny smattering of grant money. If you want a free education, then you need to either get your parents or the military to pay for it, work your ass off and get merit-based full-rides, or you’ll just have to get declared as independent so you can (maybe) get the 4k worth of Pell grants the feds give out, which might pay for 1/3rd of each semester. You’ll also either have to take about 4 credit hours a semester or get school-particular need-based aid for the rest.
My suggestion is to do like nearly everyone else in the country and take out the loans which will cover you for school and a thrifty college-student lifestyle. You might even have to work an evening job to pay for some of the extras. But complaining that this dependency status is making it impossible to go to school is just plain silly.
Really, no, if you get a deferment, or actually any incentive in your contract, the Army must honor it if you live up to your end of the contract. So if the Army College fund, a 4 year deployment deferral and a guarenteed job are in your contract, the Army will honor it if you do what you agreed to do, i.e enroll in college, attend drills, etc.
I never had to deal with this since I was already married when I started attending college, but I vaguely recall somebody in the pre-medical program complaining that medical programs count you as a dependent on your parents pretty much forever. Is that accurate?
I know SSG Schwartz is an active duty recruiter so he probably knows a bit about the National Guard but not everything. They have a different recruiting system. I can say that if you join the National Guard you can get up to 15 free credits a semester in state schools. That is free, no money ever changes hands, no initial outlay of cash by you (fees and books not included, just tuition). Additionally you get the GI Bill and other perks. There are deployment deferments and they do stick to them. Not an option everyone might want but it works for many.