Question of Child’s Education Debated

Do parents have the legal obligation to pay for the education of their children?

As a new parent with a mere two weeks’ experience, but knowing the high cost of a college education, I couldn’t help but find this reader’s question of more than passing interest.

Both the state Legislature and the courts are interested in this subject. In fact, earlier this week, a petition was filed with the state Supreme Court asking this very question.

Suing Her Father

Nineteen-year-old Jennifer Jones, whose parents were divorced in 1980, is suing her father to compel him to help pay for her college education. She was asking for $300 a month to help defray her expenses, but both the trial court and the Court of Appeal dismissed her suit, ruling that neither “California statutes nor case law precedent” impose such an obligation on a parent.

Jones and her lawyers told the Court of Appeal that two state laws should be interpreted to require parents to pay for their offspring’s college education.

First, they cited a law that says parents, to the extent of their abilities, must maintain their children of whatever age “in need” if they are unable to maintain themselves “by work.”

But the Court of Appeal ruled that this law “only comes into play” if a child is unable to be self-supporting because of a mental or physical disability or inability to work.

Nathan Goldberg, Jones’ attorney, thinks the court was wrong. Instead of looking only at whether a person is incapacitated, he argues that the court should look to the “reasonable expectation of the individual.”

If a child is born into a family of doctors, he noted, and everyone expects the child to go to medical school, but then the parents are divorced, it is unreasonable, he says, to allow the father to refuse to pay for the child’s college education.

One other California court had accepted similar arguments and allowed an 18-year-old boy to sue to force his father to provide financial assistance while the son finished high school. But this court said this case was different because it involved college, not high school.

To compel parents to pay for college, which, unlike high school, is not free in California, might “open the floodgates of litigation to disgruntled children seeking indefinite funding of an open-ended education,” the court said.

Jones also relied on another state law that says: “The father and mother of a child have an equal responsibility to support and educate their child in the manner suitable to the child’s circumstances, taking into consideration the respective earnings or earning capacities of the parents.”

Law Not Applicable

But the court said this law only applies to a “minor child” under the age of 18, so it wouldn’t help the 19-year-old Jones.

After the case was dismissed, the lawyers for Jones’ father asked the court to impose sanctions on her for bringing a “frivolous” suit, but the court decided the case was not frivolous.

If the state Supreme Court refuses to hear Jones’ appeal, she will not have a chance to have her case heard by a jury. However, she and others like her may still have their arguments heard elsewhere. The state Legislature is considering this issue but only as it affects the children of divorced parents.

A bill now in the Legislature (S.B. 1129) would permit a court to order a divorced parent to pay for a college education, if the court was convinced that if it weren’t for the parents’ separation or divorce, they would have paid for their child’s college education anyway.