By Bruce Watson

Filed under: College, Education, How to Save Money, Saving

September is drawing closer, bringing a new school year, along with fresh worries over how to pay the steep cost of college tuition. For students hoping to get loans and scholarships, a lot rides on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. The Department of Education, state governments, and individual colleges use the form to determine what kinds of loans, grants, scholarships, and work-study opportunities a student can receive.

When it comes to funding college, the question of parental contribution can be a big snag. Based on assets and income, the FAFSA determines how much parents can be expected to spend putting their child through college. Of course, that assessment assumes that parents are ready, willing and able to give their children money to help with school, but — as many students have found — there can be a huge gap between the amount of money that a parent “can” give on paper and the amount of money that he or she is willing to part with.

For students facing problems with parental contributions, declaring financial independence is the holy grail: if a student can financially separate from his or her parents, their assets won’t be factored into the tuition equation. For most students — Lindsay Lohan being a likely exception — this would likely drop their apparent wealth significantly, increasing their eligibility for loans and grants.

Limited Options

Unfortunately, most of the grounds under which a young person can be granted financial independence — including being at least 24 years old, being in graduate school, being an orphan or ward of the state, being a military veteran, being homeless, having dependents, or being an emancipated minor — are nonnegotiable, and a student can’t do much to change his or her status.

Other options — like being in the military, being married, or being homeless — are more open to individual action, but would require a serious, long-term commitment and should not be entered into lightly. To put it mildly, joining the military, having a child, or getting married are big decisions, and shouldn’t be undertaken solely for the purpose of getting student loans.

(That having been said, when I was growing up, I knew parents who had gotten married or even had children in order to avoid deployment to Vietnam. Given the high cost of college, and the amazing impact that a college degree could have on future earnings, I’m not sure I can automatically discount the wisdom of marrying one’s high school sweetheart as a strategy for getting student aid.)

How Unusual Is Your Situation?

There is also one method for which the requirements are not so well-defined: a college financial aid administrator can make a documented determination of independence by reason of “other unusual circumstances.” But, while this …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance