“Our top priorities, and the top priorities of Harvard College, are the students’ health and well-being and their continued enrollment,” Donahue said. “Family dynamics can be incredibly explosive and complex and the resources necessary to support students in these situations often extend well beyond the Financial Aid Office.”

A report by Center for American Progress on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender on financial aid issues, however, criticizes an unspecified Ivy League university for requiring students to attend such counseling. In the report, a student named Colin—whose parents cut him off financially after he came out as gay—alleges that the Ivy League university required a psychologist to sign off on his sanity. In the report, he said that entire process “absolutely terrified me.”

Representatives of University Health Services did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Donahue said that students can access loans to cover the cost of continued enrollment at the College even while other offices work with students and their families.

“There have only been a small handful of occasions in which it has been deemed by the collection of offices working with a particular student that the situation was completely irreconcilable,” Donahue said. “Those situations are real exceptions and ones that take a significant amount of time and conversations and resources to make that decision.”

Donahue said that she is not aware of a student leaving the College in the last decade as a result of inability to pay caused by parental conflict.

Still, though Harvard insists that it has a process for handling such difficult situations, the procedure can be daunting for students.

PARENTAL ORDERS

Marsha, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, came out as gay in the spring of her freshman year. After returning home for the summer, her parents told her that they had decided to stop paying her tuition and that she would have to find something new to do when her summer job ended.

“It was one of the worst experiences of my life. I cried myself to sleep every night,” she said. “I just had no idea what I would do when the summer was over.”

After spending the summer contemplating her future, Marsha—whose family did not receive any financial aid from Harvard—decided to join the military.

But four days before Marsha had been scheduled to return to campus, her parents informed her that they had changed their minds and that she could return to Harvard on a conditional basis. At the end of each semester, they would reconsider whether to continue paying. Among the requirements were that she improve her GPA, attend church on a regular basis, and quit her sport.

“My actual thought was sweet Jesus, I hope my parents will still pay because I guess I’m going to such debt if they don’t,” she said. “If I couldn’t complete four years at Harvard, I thought that the rest of the course of my life would be far worse than it could be.”

Concerned that her parents would change their minds, Marsha visited the Financial Aid Office where she was told that parents often use tuition as leverage when they want something from their children. Marsha said that potential plan was much like what Donahue described. Should Marsha have needed it, the Office would have offered her loans while attempting to resolve the situation.

Regardless of Harvard’s ability to deal with such situations, Marsha’s parents’ last-minute decision had been a fateful one, Marsha said. She would not have otherwise thought to reach out to the Financial Aid Office.