The Queer Price of College: Mapping the Financial Landscape for Queer Students

Queer people continue to feel the effects of queer oppression in higher education and beyond (Garvey & Dolan, 2021; Lange et al., 2019), including unique financial challenges. The price of being queer is troubling in a world ordered around capitalism and heteronormative privilege. The purpose of our paper is to examine the financial landscape for queer students and call for a robust research agenda that explores financial issues experienced by queer students. Drawing from the U.S. Department of Education's High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09), we asked, Are there differences in loans, scholarships/grants, parental support, and financial worries between queer and heterosexual college students?

BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL POSITIONALITY

The financial landscape for queer students is underexplored in higher education and student affairs scholarship. However, financial precarity for queer people and students is well documented, given the experience of family rejections and limitations of the Federal Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA; Garvey & Dolan, 2021). Queer youth are more likely to experience family rejection (Rosario et al., 2012), to run away from home due to family conflict around sexual identities (Rew et al., 2005), or to be disowned by family resulting in homelessness (Choi et al., 2015). Queer youth rarely formally emancipate from unsupportive guardians, mostly because the legal system does not account for temporary rejection (Coolhart, 2006). Given the role of capitalism in accessing higher education and systems that fail to account for heteronormative privilege (i.e., FAFSA and family rejection), legal guardians hold a disproportionate amount of power over the lives of queer students. These conditions directly influence financial statuses, paying for college, and financial abuse among queer students (Sharp, 2008).

We are critical scholars who believe queer people deserve access to education, life, and happiness without oppressive financial barriers. Queer students are not a problem to be fixed through individual interventions; rather, we point to systems as the problem in need of transformation to create possibilities for queer people. We hold institutions and governments responsible for the vacuum in financial support and resources for queer students. We believe in free college tuition and the cancellation of all student debt, among other structural responses and solutions to financial inequities, and we understand that capitalism is a system of dehumanization and domination that currently guides, though it has no place in, educational leadership.

METHODS

The U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Educational Statistics began surveying a nationally representative sample of 9th graders in 2009–2010. This longitudinal study, HSLS:09, used a stratified, two-stage random sample design, with the primary sampling units as randomly selected schools (n = 940), from which students were randomly selected for the second stage (n = 24,000). The HSLS:09 second follow-up survey conducted in 2016 (three years after high school completion for most students) marked the first survey from the U.S. Department of Education to include a sexual orientation demographic variable, allowing scholars to examine queer student experiences to promote more equitable educational policies and practices. In the second follow-up data collection, 75.4% of original respondents remained eligible for survey participation. For our study, we used data from the second follow-up and only included students who had ever attended college and who answered questions about their finances (n = 11,670). To explore differences in finances by sexual orientation, we created groups for queer students (n = 1,100; includes participants who selected another sexual orientation, bisexual, don't know, gay, and lesbian) and heterosexual students (n = 10,570). We did not weight our sample because HSLS:09 does not include sexual orientation weighting, nor are there accurate measures of the number of queer individuals in the US to enable such weighting.

We selected a number of variables from HSLS:09 related to college enrollment and finances. Our first variable measured socioeconomic status (SES) for student respondents across five quintiles. Per HSLS:09, SES is a composite score of a family's relative social position based on parents' education, occupational prestige, and...