conuly

Having dealt with a few related issues (none involving bigotry, just school and taxes), I think the situation is probably more like this:

She may have claimed him as a dependent for the year in which she kicked him out. You need to be providing half of an adult child's income in order to be able to claim them as a dependent on your taxes. If this is so, it will effect next year's financial aid, regardless of his current status.

However, being claimed as a dependent is basically irrelevant to the child. It is relevant to the parent's taxes, but irrelevant to the child's financial aid. Your college financial aid until you are 24 or 25 (something like that) years old in the US is based on the money you have plus the money your parents have unless:

you have a baby of your own
you marry
you were declared an emancipated minor (which is incredibly difficult to do, and is probably too late now)
you go through vastly complicated legal hoops that are essentially impossible for anyone to go through who doesn't have money

If your parents have money and are not willing to help you with college, for any reason, you have two options. Wait. Take out really, really bad and unfriendly loans with horrible interest rates.

Well, you also could marry or have a baby... marriage is probably the better of those two. Marriage could well be the most feasible option, except since he's gay, that becomes rather difficult ~too~. and a sham marriage is likely to be considered fraud by the government. I doubt they generally prosecute for that sort of thing, but it would be risky. And it'd be forcing a gay person to marry a woman, which is all sorts of wrong. And it sets up the need for a future divorce, which also costs money.

Yes, this system does suck. It hit my partner badly, and we had to wait until he was 25 (he has a September birthday, which is particularly problematic) before he could begin college. That didn't work out well for us.