Divorce or marry a child: what drastic measures are Americans taking to get financial aid to college

There is one circumstance that puzzles more than direct admission to college. This is the payment of huge tuition bills.

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In online communities such as Facebook and Reddit, some parents share standard suggestions on how to overpay tuition bills. Options include saving more money or choosing a less expensive college.

Others suggest more radical measures aimed primarily at how to get more money through FAFSA, the federal student financial assistance program.

For example, if a student marries, he is considered legally independent of his parents. And given his small income (if any) and his savings, he may claim a more substantial amount of state aid.

Some parents propose hacking the FAFSA system in a simpler way - by transferring the money deferred to college from the student’s savings account to the account of his brother or sister. Thus, the student financial assistance system will assess his situation as more complex and offer a large amount of help.

Others even consider divorce as an option to outsmart the system. After a divorce, FAFSA will only consider the income of one parent when calculating the amount of assistance. Debbie Schwartz, founder of the Facebook group Paying for College 101, said she often saw parents jokingly offering to legally get a divorce to receive large amounts of financial assistance.

But some parents, she said, do not laugh at such proposals, but act.

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College has become more expensive than ever, and students graduate with great debt. This leads to extreme cost-cutting measures, as an investigation in Illinois showed.

An investigation conducted by ProPublica Illinois and the Wall Street Journal in July testifies that some families abandoned legal guardianship of their children, which gave them the right to receive great financial assistance. The University of Illinois referred the case to the U.S. Department of Education and canceled the scholarship that he provided to students involved in the scam.

Schwartz does not support what parents did in this situation. But she said that deep in her soul, she "understands what despair could push people to such a step."

Just as people plan to retire or try to lower their tax bill, parents often look for ways to reduce the amount they are expected to pay to cover college student expenses. This figure is known as the “Expected Family Contribution” (EFC), determined after the family applies for Federal Student Assistance (FAFSA).

In an ideal world, families pay the amount available to them through EFC, while college and government take care of the remaining costs. But in practice this does not work.

Parents often need to cover an amount that is much higher than their expected family contribution. Even those whose family contributions are equal to zero, as a result, spend considerable amounts on college. Students spend on teaching materials and accommodation not covered by the college, or their financial assistance package may include federal loans that need to be paid back later.

FAFSA Application: A Long, Complex, and Opaque Procedure

The federal government calculates the EFC based on salary, asset, and other information that families provide in FAFSA applications. Most universities require students and their families to fill out this form if they want to receive financial assistance in the form of grants or scholarships.

The government also requires applying to the FAFSA from anyone who wants federal loans to finance their education. The FAFSA application window for the 2020-2021 academic year opened in October. The federal application deadline is June 30 2020, although some states have different deadlines.

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Conceptually, FAFSA, of course, makes sense. Schools and the federal government need some kind of tool to find out how much students and their families are able to pay for education.

Parents are often shocked by the amounts that the federal government believes they can pay for their child’s education.

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Many parents are perplexed: the federal government expected them to pay tens of thousands of dollars to educate their children, while at the same time covering other students' expenses — living expenses, meals, and teaching materials. Others noted that they ended up having to pay a lot more than what was stated in the EFC.

The obscure process of evaluating what a family can afford makes it difficult to plan a student’s education. This may mean that the student, in order to save money, chooses a less expensive college, which may have less resources for training.

How colleges use EFC

Colleges apply to the EFC in two ways: first, they see it as the basis for offering their own student financial assistance program, but it’s not clear how they interpret the income data and how they decide how much scholarships to offer the student. Secondly, they see this as a signal about the family’s equity - but one that often needs to be checked, because data falsification schemes are more and more often revealed in FAFSA.

To stop scammers, some colleges try to verify family financial information in other ways. Staff can actually verify the student’s address. If his family has a low EFC, but a huge house, this may encourage college to abandon the idea of ​​providing a student with a scholarship.

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At the University of Illinois, where families abandoned legal guardianship of their children to save on school bills, administrators were unable to determine how much federal or state money students received through a fraudulent scheme. But university officials refused scholarships to scholarship students after they learned that students had access to more funds than was indicated in their FAFSA applications.

To better understand how much college can cost students, parents should contact the university’s financial assistance department. The federal government also requires colleges to have costing calculators. You can find them here.

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