If I need financial aid and my parents don’t want to put their financial information online, what can I do? They refused to give my brother their info for his financial aid applications and he got a full scholarship so it didn’t matter, but I think I will need financial aid.
The vast majority of merit scholarships do not require your parents’ financial information or even any completed financial aid forms at all. So presumably your brother received a MERIT award and not a need-based one. If you aim for colleges where your GPA and test scores put you well above the medians, you could be in the running for big merit grants as well. When you research colleges, make sure you aim for those that offer significant merit money.
Occasionally there are extenuating circumstances that allow a student to apply for need-based aid without submitting parental information. But these instances are few and far between and usually pertain only to applicants whose parents have little or no presence in their lives.
If your parents are willing to play with the Net Price Calculators provided online by your front-runner colleges to estimate your Expected Family Contribution, they may learn that you don’t qualify for need-based aid anyway or, conversely, that you could be missing out on some major dough. They might be unwilling to do this, even in the privacy of home, for fear that their financial information will somehow leak to colleges. But it wouldn’t. Even so, it sounds like they don’t want to pursue need-based aid at all. Thus your best bet is to look for merit aid.