What about teens who are abandoned or disowned or kicked out of abusive homes, I wonder? Or who were removed and placed in foster care?
To be clear, I am not talking about anyone striving for any of those categories. Only saying that if one finds themselves in such a category, perhaps all hope is not lost. College might still be achievable.
Speaking from fairly recent experience (about 7 years in my case, 2 in my sister’s) here.
We weren’t removed from the home, and so couldn’t provide documentation in the form of court orders and such. Nor could we provide police reports, or counselor statements, etc.
For some background, I’m 7 years older than baby sis. Our parents are pretty dysfunctional: dad’s in bad health and some sort of mentally ill, who knows what, and mom’s an alcoholic with distinct sociopathic tendencies.
When I went to school, I left home and went a thousand miles away. I initially went to the only school I was allowed to, but realized pretty quickly that although I’d been promised financial support while going there, I wasn’t getting it. I had to start working two jobs to support myself, get out of the (as private schools go, reasonably-priced, but still pricey) private school mom had picked out, and enroll at the local community college. Which was one of the best decisions I ever made, but I digress.
The community college financial aid people told me–incorrectly, as it happens–that there was no way to be declared independent of my parents for financial aid purposes unless I married, joined the military, or turned 25. I took them at their word for the next three years. Over the course of that time, my mother did her best to sabotage my efforts at getting an education: I’d have to beg and plead with her to send me her financial paperwork for FAFSA. For those three years, she didn’t send the information until it was too late in the year to do any good or sent it on time but falsified it to show she was earning more money than she was (very long story) so that I wouldn’t be eligible for need-based financial aid. I worked my tail off, and got enough scholarships to cover the very minimal community college costs for two of those years–had to take out a loan for the other. The whole time, I was working two or three jobs at a time, which while necessary (I needed to eat!) also meant that I was still less eligible for financial aid because between me and my parents, although, of course, they weren’t helping me at all, that meant we were “earning” enough to render me ineligible for a lot of the need-based stuff.
When I transferred to a four-year school to finish my degree, I was blessed to have a very helpful financial aid counselor who told me that I might be able to get emancipated from my parents for financial aid purposes, and walked me through the steps to do so. It was made harder in my case because I wasn’t a foster kid, I did have (extremely limited, and for the sake of baby sis who still lived at home) contact with them, and I didn’t have any sort of documentation to prove the tax fraud, her stealing my identity to use in other tax fraud, the sociopathic behavior, and so forth.
However, thanks to some friends and family members who really put their necks on the line for me by making written statements about the ongoing stuff they were aware of (my mother can be extremely vengeful, and if she’d known about this, would have sued them) and that counselor, I was able to be declared emancipated.
A few years later, I walked my sister through the same thing, as our mother was doing to her exactly what she did to me: get her into a private school (mom’s a snob, and believes that her kids shouldn’t go to one of those disgusting public universities with Everyone Else), sign her up for a lot of debt, promise financial help, and then skip out on it. As it was with me, it was difficult but not impossible to get her emancipated; her school was a lot more rigorous in its research, and I suspect that if I hadn’t done this before, she wouldn’t have gotten it, as my school was, with my permission, able to share that they’d gotten me emancipated and why, plus I was able to write up statements with the right “buzzwords,” if you will, to get a financial aid officer’s attention.
Mind you, being emancipated doesn’t mean everything’s scot-free, either. Ironically, you lose a lot of the need-based stuff just because some of it is based on the idea of helping out overstretched parents, not single people out on their own. (Or at least, such was the case a few years ago: things may have changed in the interim.) We still got more than we would have if we relied on mom’s forged tax returns, assuming she’d have even given them to us, or if we couldn’t have gotten her info for the FAFSA at all, but also nowhere near as much as if she’d given us the correct financial information in the first place.
ETA: apologies for the run-on sentences and some grammar errors above–I was typing this on a deadline, just as the toddler was waking up.
