<p>How does residency work for tuition purposes? I am a junior in high school and I live with my mother in Florida. My father lives in New York. If I went to school in Massachussets, for example, where would I be considered a resident? </p>
<p>To clarify, where would I be considered a resident when applying to grad school*</p>
<p>Wow… WAY ahead of the game on this one! Every state (or school) has different rules for establishing residency, so everything is dependent on where you wind up. Generally, you or a parent must have a permanent residence in the state - attending undergrad in the state or moving to the state for grad school does NOT usually qualify, and since you and/or your parents may well have established in entirely different states by that time it is going to be hard to predict.</p>
<p>Also, what field are you planning on going into? If it is a STEM field, you should be fully funded and not worrying about this. If not… well, if you aren’t fully funded then you may well be looking at a painful financial situation no matter what!</p>
<p>But to paraphrase Apollo 13, there are a thousand things that you have to do to get into grad school. That is step 971, and you are currently on step 8. Stay focused on the nearer term.</p>
<p>@cosmicfish I’m looking at vet school, which I’m pretty sure is stem, but also like 38k OOS, and 18k IS. And thank you very much for your response. In that case, I’d be able to apply as IS for NY and FL or would I have to pick one?</p>
<p>You would normally be considered resident of the same state for both undergrad and grad schools. The only way to change that is to work in the state where you do undergrad and establish residency there. Not sure what happens if your mom moves.</p>
<p>You are a resident of Florida since you live at home with your mom and attend high school there.</p>
<p>@texaspg Is there any way that I could claim residence with my father in NY?</p>
<p>Not unless you move to NY and complete your high school there. Very few colleges accept your residency in anothet state from where you went to high school.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.suny.edu/sunypp/documents.cfm?doc_id=402”>http://www.suny.edu/sunypp/documents.cfm?doc_id=402</a></p>
<p>Here is what SUNY looks for in determining residency. </p>
<p>Vet school is a professional program, so forget what I said about STEM majors and the like - professional programs rarely have financial support besides loans, and what grants and scholarships exist are going to be limited to a handful of students with exceptional undergrad performance and usually membership in some underrepresented group.</p>
<p>If you are living with your mother in FL and are in MA only for school, then you will maintain FL residency - not MA, NY. It looks like NY is not going to accept you as in-state unless you either first live with your father for a year or else establish a permanent residence there (very tricky to fake) - on the bright side, if you moved in with your father during veterinary school, you would likely get in-state after your first year. MA would only give you residency if you established a permanent residence.</p>
<p>The way I read it, A7a. says if you spend more than 50% of your time-away-from-college in the year before you graduate and go to vet school (i.e. if you put “Father” on your FAFSA in 2020 when you fill it out. Custody for FAFSA (or NY residency?) is not based on legal documents, but on who you spent the majority of your time with.), you will be in-state in NY. A7b. says that no matter what, if you live with your dad while attending college in NY, you will be considered in-state in NY. It seems you do have some choice, assuming you want to spend time with your dad. Perhaps you could arrange a job/internship in your Dad’s city in Summer 2019 and live with him over that summer, and just visit FL for a couple of weeks.</p>
<p>Actually, where your parents live won’t matter for vet school. Graduate and professional school applicants are automatically considered independent students for federal purposes, and most universities and colleges also consider them to be independent students for the purpose of residency So where your parents live generally doesn’t matter for claiming residency in a state. This is both good and bad - it means that your options aren’t limited to wherever your parents live, but at the same time, it also means that the fact that your father lives in New York means diddly squat to NYS universities.</p>
<p>It’s a bit more murky for a student going straight from undergrad to grad. In my own experience as someone who did that, I was considered an in-state resident because of where I lived, not where my parents lived (which happened to be the same state). When I moved to New York for graduate school, I became a NYS resident by establishing a domicile, even though I had primarily moved there for graduate school. I registered to vote, changed my license, and filed my taxes in NYS. Therefore, when I wanted to take some classes at a CUNY as a non-degree student, I was considered an in-state resident.</p>
<p>In some states, residency requirements for graduate students are much more relaxed than they are for undergraduates; it really just depends. For example, a lot of public universities allow their PhD students to claim in-state residency after a year of attending, because their departments are largely footing the bill and it allows the department to pay less tuition for their students.</p>
<p>It is possible to be considered a resident of nowhere for tuition purposes, btw. So if you went to school in MA and your parents live in NY and FL respectively, it’s possible that none of the public universities in any of those states will consider you an in-state resident. It depends on the policies of each individual state’s universities. Most likely if you attend high school in Florida and lived in Florida before you went to MA for your bachelor’s, then Florida would consider you to be a resident of their state for tuition purposes. New York most likely would not, unless you could provide a lot of evidence showing that you intended to move with your dad permanently. It’s not clear that A.7 means that you can go home for a summer and claim residency; “resides with a non-custodial parent who is a New York State resident and…intends to continue to reside with that parent throughout his or her attendance at the University”, to me, implies that a student has moved in with their non-custodial parent and commutes from their home to the NYS university they choose to attend. </p>
<p>One way to completely circumvent this is that if you are really dead set on going to a NYS vet school, after you graduate from college, move to New York and work for a year or two. Then you will definitely be a NYS resident.</p>