<p>My first reaction was one based on the tenet that parents are responsible for the education costs of their children. But as usual reading the finer print presents quite a different view into the life of certain families. It is worth reading the entire story here:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■/h6ozs0”>http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■/h6ozs0</a></p>
<p>What a mess! </p>
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New Jersey case precedent established that financially capable divorced parents should contribute to the tuition of qualified students. </p>
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<p>This will also open the door to the belief that “financially capable” married parents should also contribute…</p>
<p>Isn’t part of the issue that the girl chose a private school which her parents simply can’t afford? </p>
<p>No it says on gofundme about her going to Temple. Anyways I can’t believe it didn’t seem to matter that she flunked out if her other schools. Are they supposed to keep paying for schooling if she is not taking it seriously?</p>
<p>Well I don’t know if all the facts are given, seems like she transferred to Temple. But I thought the mother claimed she had not finished her studies at the CC.</p>
<p>I guess it’s hard to know who is telling the truth.</p>
<p>^^ So true. Especially since mom claims her daughter chose to leave home to live with grandparents, and daughter claims mom threw her out of the house. </p>
<p>Hypothetically… if her divorced parents remarried, would the court order still apply to them?</p>
<p>Maybe, maybe not. There’s no precedent for it - all of the cases that have gone forward like this have been about divorced families; the opposing lawyers uses non-custodial support agreements to their advantage.</p>
<p>Whether the mother threw her out or whether she left voluntarily is kind of irrelevant, IMO. Her mother might have asked her (a 21-year-old adult, btw) to leave/ “kicked her out” because she wasn’t following the house rules. Mom claims house rules were simply for her to work full-time, abide by the curfew, and take 3 summer classes - and apparently to stop drinking and smoking (she got kicked out of the Disney College program for underaged drinking just 3 weeks into the program, and lied to her parents about it, after they had forked out thousands of dollars for her to go. And that was already her second or third chance). Caitlyn does not dispute that - she said that the disagreement was over the summer classes. And both of her parents’ stories are consistent with each other, despite the fact that they are divorced and have been for years.</p>
<p>Why she got kicked out of the Disney internship program is probably on file at the program and there are witnesses (the roommates, the program personnel who made the decision, etc.) If that’s in dispute none of the news outlets have mentioned it.</p>
<p>Both of the parents are teachers. Her lawyer says her parents make $272,000 a year, though. They must have some kind of side business or rental property or something if that’s their real income. Or someone pointed out that each new spouse’s income might also be taken into account, which would be terrible.</p>
<p>Part of the problem is that NJ ‘law’ is based on case law and those cases were probably based on an 18 year old needing to go to college. Traditional, going right to college after high school, needing both parents to contribute. My understanding is that in those cases the required contribution was based on NJ tuition rates too and not on OOS tuition amounts or dream schools. The child might have gone to an OOS school or dream school, but the contribution wasn’t based on that.</p>
<p>I believe the parents will win in this case on appeal. I think the appeals court will decide that the ‘right’ to the tuition is very limited, and that a 21 year old does not get unlimited funds and unlimited chances. I also read that the parents are working with the legislature to make this a law, and of course that law could be very specific as to what is required, for how long, and under what conditions.</p>
<p>Yes, my bad – the parents say they can’t afford it because it’s OOS, not private. </p>
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<p>I agree with previous posters who feel the working-full time part along with taking 3 summer classes is quite onerous. The maximum load for most summer sessions is 2 courses per session. </p>
<p>At the elite U where I took some summer classes, full load was 2 summer classes for a 12 week session. And the workload for 2 such courses was such I wouldn’t recommend most students work a part-time job…much less full-time. It was enough to juggle one full-time job while taking 1 summer class IME. </p>
<p>Taking 3 summer courses in one such session would have been considered overloading and would strain a student who wasn’t working a job. I can’t imagine how much of a strain it would be for someone with even a part-time job or worse, a full-time job. </p>
<p>Incidentally, I knew a summer college classmate who was so strained from taking 3 summer courses at that elite U that he felt he had to resort to cheating and was caught with serious consequences. And he wasn’t working as due to his international student status, he wasn’t allowed to work on his visa. </p>
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At age 21, are parents still “custodial”? If so, then is there no age cutoff? Can a 30 year old demand that his/her divorced parents pay for college?</p>
<p>There’s no question that this is a quirk of divorce statutory law in New Jersey. As interpreted by the New Jersey courts, there is a pretty strong obligation for divorced parents to pay for college. It’s rare to have that enforced by the kid rather than by the poorer, usually custodial (usually the mother) parent, but, honestly, the provision is there for the benefit of kids whose parents get divorced, so it would be hard to conclude that a kid can’t invoke it.</p>
<p>What’s surprising, of course, is the notion that the kid can enforce it against both parents, when they are in agreement about a reasonable (sort of) plan for college funding (as opposed to trying to get out of funding college altogether). Also, there’s a huge difference between applying the doctrine to Rowan – a directional in-state public – versus Temple – a nearby out-of-state public, but with comparatively high out-of-state tuition. </p>
<p>At this point, I have to notice that we really have no idea what the actual facts are. We have the parents’ massively self-serving online beg, and there are a few smug comments from the girl’s lawyer in the news stories. What it looks like is that the judge found the girl’s story to be a lot closer to the truth than the parents’ – i.e., they kicked her out in a dispute over lifestyle issues, and are basically trying to use college funding as leverage to control what they regard as renegade behaviors. It probably matters significantly, from a practical standpoint, that at least one set of grandparents is backing the child against the parents. Depending on the school district, it would not take enormous savings or outside income for two senior teachers to make $275,000 per year combined around here.</p>
<p>I am not sure I mind the idea that a kid can say to her parents, effectively, “You screwed me over with your divorce, so you lost your unfettered right to decide whether and how much to pay for my college. If you get too stingy or controlling, I’ll see you in court.” I don’t think there’s a chance it will be applied to married parents.</p>
<p>Something to note, however: New Jersey, and lots of other states, actually has a statute on the books requiring parents to support their adult children if the children become destitute. They rarely get enforced, but they are sitting there like unexploded landmines.</p>
<p>The money that will be paid to her is tuition at the state school, Rutgers, so she will be responsible for any difference.</p>
<p>What I can recall from local papers is that she doesn’t even live with either parent, she lives with her grandparents, and that her parents tried to make her independent from them against her will (did not know that parents could even try that!).</p>
<p>Remember that NJ is also the state where a law school student is getting money from her divorced parents to continue in law school. I believe she went to Cornell, and her parents wanted her to go to Rutgers law school which was much cheaper.</p>
<p><a href=“NJ court orders divorced father to pay half of daughter's pricey law school expenses - nj.com”>NJ court orders divorced father to pay half of daughter's pricey law school expenses - nj.com;
<p>So it is cheaper for me and my spouse to not divorce, we don’t have to pay one thin dime for any of our kids to go to college.</p>
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<p>Her parents never specifically said that she had to take them all in one session, though; they simply said that she had to take three. She could’ve taken one class in summer 1 and two in summer 2, or vice versa. Besides, her parents asked her to do this because she wasted their money and course credit when she got kicked out of her previous program. Plenty of people work full-time and go to school taking 2-3 classes a semester…because they have to. My cousin works full-time, attends a nursing program half-time is raising two small children as a single mother. She started during a summer session and always kept her grades above a B she needed to get into nursing school. The girl’s own mother squeezed a full-time job into 3 days and went back to school part-time while raising her daughter. So I have little sympathy for the “strain” it would cause her; she wouldn’t be facing that down if she had been about her business before (not to mention that so many less fortunate than her do so much more).</p>
<p>Also, I read it slightly wrong - her parents wanted her to get a full-time job “for the remainder of the semester,” then take 3 classes over the summer. Perhaps they expected her to cut her hours a bit when she took the summer classes, or maybe the college they had in mind for her had a regular summer session and not the compressed/accelerated ones.</p>
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<p>Not sure. I’ve been reading about this case for a bit and that was one of the things that kept coming up in prior cases - a lot of times the divorce agreement was that the NCP would pay for part or all of the offspring’s college tuition/costs, and that’s what was brought up to force the hand. And we already have the example above of a young woman getting her parents to pay for law school! The article indicates that she took some time off between undergrad and college (one of the reasons her father didn’t want to pay is that she agreed she’d begin law school “within a year or two of graduating college,” and the article indicates she did not. So even if she graduated at 22, she’s got to be mid-twenties.</p>
<p>However, an 18-year-old girl moved out of her parents’ house and then sued them to pay her private school tuition and future college tuition, and that judge rejected that. And he explicitly stated that it was because he did not want to set a precedent in which parents cannot set rules in their own house, for fear that their children will simply move out and sue them.</p>
<p>Funny, that dredges up a memory for me. Twenty-five years after the fact, when we took over my mother-in-law’s finances because she had Alzheimer’s Disease, we learned for the first time that my in-laws’ divorce agreement obligated her father to pay for her law school. Which was great, but no one ever told her, and it never occurred to her to ask him. (She was pretty PO’d at him about the divorce at the time, so they weren’t having lots of long talks about this and that.) She paid for it herself, with help from me. The divorce really impoverished my mother-in-law; it’s sad to think that maybe she gave something up in order to get that concession.</p>
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<p>There’s a serious difference between taking 2-3 courses in a regular fall/spring semester and doing so for a summer session…even a relatively uncompressed one like the 12 week summer session at H. </p>
<p>Also, based on my own experience taking such courses, taking 2 regular courses or 1 course which is equivalent to two regular courses is considered the maximum recommended workload for most students. And I’d think its worse for a school which has 2 summer sessions of around 6 weeks in length each like Columbia’s. </p>
<p>I had some issues juggling my schedule to do justice to that one regular summer course while working a full-time job. I can’t imagine someone hacking a full-time job while taking 2 or more regular courses in a single summer session without feeling the strain. </p>
<p>Most people I know who need to work and go to school would work full-time during summers or if they really want to stretch it, take one course per summer session. Taking any more courses than that would be too much of a strain on their time/mental energy as well as finances. Especially considering summer courses aren’t always covered by FA/scholarship money and could be more expensive per unit depending on school. </p>
<p>I think the mom is horrible for basically slandering her daughter. IMO she is more concerned about herself than her child. Most likely she resents her daughter because she ended up pregnant at a young age. The poor me pity party isn’t working for me. It doesn’t matter to me whether she is supposed to pay the tuition or not ,she crossed the line by putting out all that stuff about her daughter.</p>
<p>I think the daughter opened to the public their family life and finances by suing her parents. And it isn’t slander if it is true - the daughter did get thrown out of the Disney program, the daughter was drinking (before or after age 21 is not clear), she was out after their curfew, etc.</p>
<p>JHS, you said the college tuition was statutory law, but I think it is case law. Case law is always problematic because it is based on the facts of that case. If it were statutory, which they are now trying to make it, there should be limits on the amount, the age of the ‘child’, the length of the education, whether the student has to contribute by working or taking student loans.</p>
<p>I’m lucky I don’t live in NJ and am not divorced, as I set a lot more stringent requirements for my kids to continue my paying for their colleges. No tattoos, full time students, retain their scholarships. If they live at home you bet they’d have curfews and chores.</p>