National Youth Rights Association of Orange County Calls for Legislation To Protect College Students from Deadbeat Parents

5/1/09

Students across Americas are being punished for their parents' income.  Under financial aid rules, an amount for family contribution, based on family income, is withheld from college aid under the assumption that families will pay that amount.  Too often, self-centered parents, most often fathers, are unwilling to pay that contribution and students are unable to afford college.  In other words, students are being punished for income to which they don't have access and the punishment is resulting in an uneducated middle class.

Why should children be punished for the selfishness of parents?  This is the number one complaint of students who are planning for college.  It is time the government stepped in and helped American college students.  The college students suffering the most are from the middle class.  The rich hand over the bucks and the income of the poor doesn't punish the students.  It is the middle class families that do the balancing act and often shortchange their kids' college education.  America's leaders need to decide whether they want the middle class to die with this generation or if they want to help middle class students who want to attend college.

The main problem appears to relate to fathers.  Of students complaining, virtually all are attributing the problem to overbearing fathers who force their deadbeat will on their families.  Some of these fathers would prefer to see their kids shoveling manure to fund their own college instead of doing what fathers have done for years and pay for the education.

Some fathers seem to have either forgotten the importance of education or have been so pampered by sacrificing family members all their life that they feel no need to assist other members of their own family in having the same advantages they had.  It may be time for the government to lend these fathers a hand in the prioritizing department or in zeroing out the father's income as a consideration in college aid.  A solution favored by prospective college students would be for the government to provide the aid to the students, regardless, and later collect reimbursement from deadbeat parents who could have paid but refused.

America is on the verge of becoming a third world country.  Jobs are currently going to better educated citizens of India.  Students ask whether the government has any interest in bringing jobs home.  The answer is in the funding of college education.