<p>As a general rule, most public schools ask only your household income, and most private schools also consider your non-(primary)custodian parent’s household income. </p>
<p>By “household income”, they mean parent + stepparent (if remarried). So most public schools, using FAFSA, would ask your mother’s income only (presuming she’s not remarried).</p>
<p>Most private schools, in contrast, use CSS Profile which includes information for both parents’ households, regardless of custody. That would mean, for example, if your father remarried they would consider your stepmother’s income as available to pay your college costs, even if he never sees you and she has never met you. Some exceptions I am aware of: Vanderbilt, Bucknell, and (just announced) Chicago no longer require non-custodial parent info.</p>
<p>In many ways, this is treating divorced parents exactly the same as an intact family. If you filed the FAFSA in an intact family and it calculated your EFC as $30k/yr, but your parents would only agree to provide $10k/year, that’s really no different than if they calculated divorced parents’ total EFC to be $30k/yr, one parent agrees he can afford to pay $10k and the other refuses to pay anything at all.</p>
<p>They want to make your parents feel responsible because they know that YOU are unlikely to have any money or income fresh out of HS. But legally, you will be an adult; your parents cannot be compelled to support you then, regardless of whether you attend college or not. There is a large amount of guilt-tripping to make parents feel responsible for paying exorbitant tuition rates, without the least admission of shame over the absurd prices and lack of any justification for those prices.</p>
<p>I strongly suspect that there is a small group of divorced parents who cooperate raising their children and who each do whatever they can, and a very large group of divorced parents who have been through many, many years of custody and support litigation and are now looking forward to the children being grown adults as their first opportunity to finally begin to recover economically.</p>
<p>If you get along well with your father, he’s probably perfectly willing to provide whatever information they ask, and whatever help for you that he can.</p>
<p>If you don’t get along with your father, does he have any motivation at all to provide you support when you’re 18? (If you want or need his help paying for your college, then you should really spend at least your late teen years doing everything you possibly can to cultivate a good relationship with him, including spending as much time as possible with him.)</p>