Does anyone around here have some experience with what to put down on the FAFSA as far as parents’ tax information? I wonder if schools require both parents or if I can just enter my mom’s info. My parents are divorced, by the way. My mom makes less than my dad.
From what I understand, if I don’t include at least one parent’s info, I won’t get much in financial aid or loans.
Thanks!
If this is for medical school then you are not required to put down your parent’s tax information. Some schools will ask you to do this to be eligible for their institutional aid. But federal aid is not based on parental information regardless of whether or not you include the information on the FAFSA.
In the case of divorced parents, you would include the information from the tax return of the parent with whom you lived with more in the past year or the parent that provided you with the more financial support in the past year.
Yeah, this is for institutional aid at medicals schools. Pretty much every school I applied to has said that they require parents’ financial info on the FAFSA. Some have said that they won’t even process applications for institutional aid without the parental info. What I cannot figure out though, is whether they require both parents’ info. I haven’t lived with either of my parents or been supported by them in quite a few years.
I did not put any parental $ info on my FAFSA; fortunately I am going to a school that did not require it. There was no way I was going to designate one of my two divorced and retired parents to contribute their life savings to my education, since I left home at 18 and have been supporting myself for 24 years.
Ask the financial aid officer; this is different for each school. Many schools require both but as part of a separate application–e.g., the College Board’s “non-custodial parent” form. You may petition for independence at many schools but you must submit your parents’ information first regardless of whether they intend to pay.
I can’t emphasize enough the importance of early and warm communication with financial aid officers on this topic.
cheers
joe
Well, warmth is my specialty. I am going to need it too, if I am going get my dad to cough up his tax returns. He hasn’t disclosed his income to anyone in the family for at least 15 years.
Ok, I will call the financial aid offices to find out when and how I need to provide this information. Maybe I won’t need it all for the FAFSA after all.
pushkin - the only school I have found so far that does NOT require parental income is Northwestern. You just need to prove to them that you have earned, independantly, for 2.5 years (at least 2000 per month) to qualify for ‘independent’ status.
Matt
A few schools also use 30 as an arbitrary cut-off age for independence–i.e., after that age you’re considered independent. Not sure whether any of your top candidates fit in that category. In my school’s case there are a set of not-totally-rigid criteria by which people are judged; I only know two of us who’ve managed to succeed in getting declared independent. Both have been on the basis of age, time in the workforce, time since declared a dependent, divorced parents, and a bunch of other forms of pleading.
joe
joe
The University of Minnesota doesn’t require that info either.
For the others, I guess I’m going to have to sort this out school by school.
Anyway, just to vent, what’s with all those Eastern schools expecting parental contributions? Anyone who looks at my application will know my family did not exactly arrive on the Mayflower, or have a tradition of passing wealth down from one generation to the next. My dad has already said that he is willing his entire estate to Consumer Reports magazine, which he feels will provide greater financial benefit to the younger generation than if he just poured money on us now. Of course I disagree but that has no effect.
I can just count on paying for my entire eduction with loans. I bet I will be that one outlier who owes 2 or 3 hundred grand at the end. Or I will get halfway through 4th year and max out, and then have to escape to Brazil.
I guess pleading is the key.
Quote:
The University of Minnesota doesn’t require that info either.
For the others, I guess I’m going to have to sort this out school by school.
Anyway, just to vent, what’s with all those Eastern schools expecting parental contributions? Anyone who looks at my application will know my family did not exactly arrive on the Mayflower, or have a tradition of passing wealth down from one generation to the next. My dad has already said that he is willing his entire estate to Consumer Reports magazine, which he feels will provide greater financial benefit to the younger generation than if he just poured money on us now. Of course I disagree but that has no effect.
I can just count on paying for my entire eduction with loans. I bet I will be that one outlier who owes 2 or 3 hundred grand at the end. Or I will get halfway through 4th year and max out, and then have to escape to Brazil.
I guess pleading is the key.
As stated above, call each school - the only way to get the straight poop on a stupid question! I had to do the same…independent? Sheesh, I was 33, on my second marriage & had been out of home & on my own since age 18!!!
Oh well…just one of an infinite number of hoops you will leanr to jump through. In fact, you will become so good at hoop jumping that you will successfully do so in your sleep w/o even noticing the passing of said hoop(s).
As an aside, “owing $200grand”, esp if you attend a private medical school is no longer considered an unusual. Last I read, the average endebtedness for a private school grad was 175~190…it ain’t cheap!
Well, I don’t really mind the concept of owing $200 grand. ($300 grand scares me much more though.)I just feel like the system for obtaining that money is convoluted and archaic.
No way are my parents going to pay for a second career for me. What surprises me is that med schools would expect anyone’s parents to pay for grad school.
Iowa requires you to list parents financial data regardless of your age if you wish to qualify for scholarships/aid from the medical school or university itself. If you don’t list your parents financial information you’re still eligible for federal loans - just nothing through the University itself.
Yes, I agree this is unrealistic. If I call up my mom at age 35 and ask her to pay for four years of medical school she just might laugh herself right into a cardiologist’s waiting room.
I realize that perhaps it’s splitting hairs, and I am not defending the practice, but I don’t know that one should infer that medical schools necessarily EXPECT our parents to be paying some part of our schooling just because they ASK for the information. One reason they ask, I believe, is simply because they can and they always have - that is, it’s an ingrained institutionalized response and they’ve just never questioned it. Gotta love bureaucracy!
But I will say that I had an awful lot of classmates who seemed to get a variety of help from their families, whether that was in the form of tuition or other financial means. I had classmates driving really nice cars, for example - way nicer than anything I’ve yet to own at my advanced age. I had classmates whose parents bought property in the area and then let them stay in it rent-free or at a reduced cost; the argument was that it was a real estate investment and the adult child of the investors was helping to protect the investment, but the bottom line was the twenty-something child got free rent in a very expensive real estate market.
So I quite honestly can’t fault schools for asking to get some sense of what other resources MIGHT be available to a student, whether that person would have access to them or not. I do think it gets way touchier when it seems they’ll be requiring you to produce information on a divorced / out-of-touch parent, for obvious reasons.
But your age / independent status alone doesn’t mean that the rest of the world can assume that you don’t get some goodies from your parents. Hell, I’ve got a 26-year-old son who could very well apply to grad school and need my tax information at some point. He will bristle and say that he’s independent, which he certainly is. However, he bought his condo thanks to a $50K loan from me and my husband - a financial help that was significant. (and it’s totally off the books so it’s not something he could show on his FAFSA) Should schools consider that since he’s gotten such help once, he could potentially get it again? While I can tell them with confidence that it’s highly unlikely that he’ll get more than this one leg up, I can’t blame them for thinking that perhaps he’s got a safety net that another applicant might not have.
It’s one more instance of my old adage, “It’s their game, their ball, their rules.” While all of us have equal access to Stafford loan money, schools have huge discretion in who gets scholarship money, private organizations even more so, and so they can request all sorts of information to help them decide who should get it.
Mary R-R,
You make way too much sense! It is far more fun to poke fun & bitch about the practice! LMAO
That is utterly sensible, and I agree with every word of it. I just wanted to complain, as usual. 
Also, I think my dad secretly cringes every time the thought of his 32-year old, career-changing, and soon-to-be-nearly-insolvent daughter comes to mind. Considering his views, he’s been incredibly nice to me in my quest to go to med school. I’m just not hopeful about his wanting to get involved in some wacky tuition or real estate scheme halfway across the country with me.
Oh well, even if I have to borrow the entire sum to attend medical school AND live in a place like New York or DC or anywhere else, I won’t be any worse off financially than I would have been as a liberal arts grad who had NO career prospects a couple years ago! 
I’ve started rounding up the info and there are schools that don’t require parents’ info for students over 30. As for the others, well now I have an excuse to find out how much my folks rake in each year! Hee hee…
Thanks again for all the input everyone!