Just because you have wealthy parents doesn’t mean that you have access to that money. To me it would make more sense to only take into account the amount of money they are putting towards your education.
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It’s an unfortunate issue, since if you did such a thing, wouldn’t it just incentivize wealthier parents to “refuse” to pay and their kids would just get free/discounted tuition?
Funds are limited and there aren’t enough in the existing systems to help everyone, so when choosing between these kids and those who DEFINITELY don’t have the resources, the choice they make makes sense
Now I’ve had a number of friends with rich parents with a “fuck you I did it on my own” attitude towards paying for their kids’ education (spoiler, they did NOT do it on their own, they all had enough paid for that they were able to fund it all with a part time summer job), so these kids kind of slip through the cracks of existing systems, but given insufficient resources for everyone, I don’t really see a better way
If you’re talking about the US, it’s because the federal (and by extension, most institutional) higher educational aid system expects custodial parents to contribute tho their offspring’s educational costs at the undergraduate level. The system doesn’t care about how parents choose to spend their income, as that’s seen as a choice beyond a basic threshold that reflects the cost of staying alive.
Source: 14 years of employment in financial aid offices
In Germany, your parents are by law required to care for you financially until you are either 29 or 27, forgot which age. Even most Germans don’t know that, but having low income parents and having received subsidised student loans from my government for 6 years (and having to strip bare any and all financial information of mine and my parents) I speak from experience…
If you get to see any actual money from your parents is a whole different thing though…
I was 27 years old, a junior. Applied for a scholarship. They wanted to know about parents income. I hadn’t seen them for years, didn’t know where they were.
Because there’s no way to tell how much someone’s parents are contributing towards their education
Student loans are often the most favorable loan terms you will ever see in your lifetime in terms of little to no interest accumulation for years and lack of penalties for early repayment or lump paydowns.
It isn’t uncommon for wealthy parents to be able to invest the money they aren’t spending and have it yield more value gain than the interest accumulation on the loan so when the day comes to start repaying can pay the entire thing off at once and still have a profit.
Lol. So basically rich parents can fill out a form that says “yeah we’re rich but we don’t feel like paying for our kids school so give it to us for free?” Yeah sorry but that’s dumb. Financial assistance is for families who don’t have the financial means to send their kids to college, not for greedy rich people to hoard even more money.
Yeah this was a problem I had, wealthy parents one of them extremely wealthy (due to marriage) but there is ways around this.
Others have explained already so I want to add something: In germany your parents are legally required to pay for your first full education. Meaning that, unless you dont already have a for example masters degree, they have to support you during your time at university. If they dont do it eventhough they could, you can sue them. The “Bafög-Amt” (office that handles financial support from the government during education) calculates how much your parents should be able to give you and gives you the missing money to get you to a livable amount each month. Thats how you know how much your parents should give you.
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