When they encounter a student who has unexpectedly dropped out of class, or who is showing the strain of working multiple jobs, professors and administrators sometimes hear a distressing explanation: My parents cut me off, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do.
Often a thread connects their stories: The students are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, and their parents have stopped supporting them financially because of their sexuality or gender identity.
That leaves the suddenly-strapped students with limited financial-aid options. Students whose parents refuse to provide their information on the federal financial-aid form, known as the Fafsa, might not be eligible to receive any subsidized student aid. Unsubsidized loans could be the only support available unless the students achieve exemption from their status as dependents, but those exemptions are made only in extreme circumstances and after significant processing time. In the meantime, tuition, housing payments, and other living expenses can pile up.
So in the past several years, a small group of college and university officials have begun to fill the gap between familial support and financial aid by establishing emergency scholarships or grant money for such LGBT students.
The scholarships don’t offer much money — typically enough to offset some costs until a student can find another source of funding — but the symbolic nature of the grants can mean just as much as the financial help.
“At Indiana University, our students don’t have to decide between living their lives honestly and openly and an IU education,” said Michael D. Shumate, a board director for the IU Foundation and former president of the university’s GLBT Alumni Association, which administers an emergency scholarship for undergraduates who lose their parents’ financial support after coming out.
‘They Just Need Help’
On any of Indiana’s eight campuses, LGBT students who are cut off financially can each apply for a maximum of $1,500 a semester. The money can be used only for tuition and educational expenses like textbooks.
So far, 13 students systemwide have received an emergency scholarship. All have been able to stay in school, said Doug Bauder, coordinator of the Office of GLBT Student Support Services at Indiana University at Bloomington. Typically, emergency grants are meant to bridge the sudden loss of familial support until financial aid or outside scholarships kick in. And they’re intended to signal to students that the campus supports them.
“I can remember one student in particular talking to a group of alumni at a gathering,” Mr. Bauder said. “At the point in which she felt she lost her family, she realized there was a larger family that cared for her.”
At Kent State University, the emergency fund has been used to cover not just tuition payments but also life expenses. Once the crisis money allowed a student to make a payment on a car that was in danger of being repossessed, said Molly Merryman, an associate professor of sociology who started the fund. At other times, the emergency fund has covered housing bills for students at risk of becoming homeless, she said.
There is no limit at Kent State on how much a student can use (it’s decided on a case-by-case basis), but the average amount is usually $500 or less, said Kenneth M. Ditlevson, director of the Ohio university’s LGBTQ Student Center and the fund’s administrator.
The student center works with the university’s registrar and department of financial-aid services to offer longer-term help, so the fund never has to pay a recurring expense. “It’s really important that you find those allies throughout your institution,” Ms. Merryman said.
Kent State has no formal application process, she said, because that could create bureaucratic delays. The fund’s administrator does not ask students for documentation or proof of their financial hardship.
“If someone’s in crisis, they don’t really need someone saying, Bring me your bills or W-2s,” Ms. Merryman said. “They just need help.”
Raising the Money
The number of institutions that offer crisis funding remains quite small — probably just a few dozen colleges, said Shane L. Windmeyer, executive director and co-founder of Campus Pride, a national nonprofit organization for LGBT and allied student groups. But the idea is gaining favor. Members of the Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals have promoted emergency funds as a supportive option for students, said Demere Woolway, co-chairwoman of the consortium, in an email interview.
“I would venture to guess that more people would want to have such a fund than have the resources for such a thing,” she wrote.
But securing the resources can be a challenge. At Indiana, Mr. Bauder said, the fund’s supporters have watched tuition costs rise in the last couple of years and thought: “We need to do better than this.”
In 2013 the GLBT Alumni Association launched a $1-million campaign to endow both its emergency scholarship and an academic one for LGBT students. Almost two years into the four-year campaign, the association has raised more than $700,000, not counting a number of planned bequests, Mr. Shumate said.
The campaign’s success means that the amount of the emergency scholarships will increase, Mr. Shumate said, “very, very soon.”
At Kent State a fund drive is going to be a priority over the summer, Mr. Ditlevson said, as only about $3,000 remains in the university’s fund.
The dwindling coffers worry Mr. Ditlevson: What would happen if the fund couldn’t cover a student’s request? A possible solution, he said, would be to prioritize the needs of upperclassmen over freshmen, “knowing we wouldn’t have the resources to help with tuition every four years.”
And while he wants to advertise the fund more, he is concerned that additional attention could flood it with requests.
It can take time to make an emergency fund sustainable. Robert Sherer, an art professor at Kennesaw State University, in Georgia, has been attempting to endow an emergency scholarship for LGBT students in the College of the Arts since 2007.
Throughout his career, Mr. Sherer said, he has always taught students whose parents had cut them off because they were pursuing a major in the arts. But when he put a rainbow-colored “Safe Space” sticker on his office door, “it was like the dam breaking,” he said. Students arrived to share their stories.
“The most frequent one was, ‘My parents were already mad at me because I had chosen to go into the arts, and now I told them I’m gay and they disowned me completely. They’re cutting off all my funds for higher education,’” he said.
Mr. Sherer, who is gay, decided to start a scholarship that would award $1,000 a year and could be used for any expense.
It will take $20,000 to endow the scholarship, and Mr. Sherer has raised about $13,000 so far. He donates all the proceeds of a specific line of his paintings to the fund, and has collected donations from community members as well.
But Kennesaw State has been undergoing a merger with Southern Polytechnic State University this year, and that has slowed progress, Mr. Sherer said. Now he’s planning a summer fund-raising push.
