“There is the stigma and indignity of having to list them as divorced, when they are, in fact, not,” said Emily Hecht-McGowan, director of public policy at the Family Equality Council, “It creates confusion and this extra step that children raised by L.G.B.T. parents have to go through,” she added referring to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals.

An undergraduate at Harvard, meanwhile, said his challenge was trying to figure out how to get financial aid while excluding his parents. He said that when he was home during winter break in his sophomore year, he told his parents he could not change his sexual orientation. His parents promptly decided to cut off their financial contribution to his studies, he said, and asked him to leave the family home. (The student wanted to remain anonymous to protect his parents’ identities.) He scraped together the last of his savings to get a plane ticket back to Harvard, and his resident dean helped him find a place to stay for the remainder of the break.

But figuring out how to pay tuition was a bigger hurdle. Students under the age of 24 generally must have their parents fill out the Fafsa, unless they can persuade their institution to grant them independent status, which colleges have the power to do. But the Harvard student said that he was told that the university typically required students to take two years off to be deemed independent. “When I first heard this, I was mildly panicking,” he said. “I had no idea what I could do for two years or where I could do it.”

Ultimately, the university agreed to grant him independent status, as long as he took out about $10,000 in total loans, kept a part-time job, and visited a counselor (which made him uncomfortable, since his only experience with therapists was with those who tried to convince him that he could change his sexuality). He was also required to get a letter from his parents explaining why they cut off financial support — something he knew he could not possibly do.

Eventually, Harvard relented and told him it would not require him to get the letter and allowed him to continue his studies. But college officials did urge him to take a short break to clear his head. “It was a pretty intense series of steps to get into this independent status,” he said. He is taking the current semester off, and will start his senior year in January. “I know if I had been at any other university, I would have had to drop out,” he said, since he had a support system that included his dean. Even so, “It was a pretty excruciating experience.”

Vincent Garcia, director of the scholar relations and selections program at the Point Foundation, which provides scholarships to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students, said he gets calls a couple of times a month from gay and lesbian campus directors, financial aid directors or students who were in similar situations. “The federal government has given the colleges the ability to declare the student independent, but they don’t want to tell them that from the outset because they don’t want to commit the financial aid dollars to someone who suddenly has so much financial need.”

Part of the problem, he said, is that many colleges do not have a protocol for dealing with these students, whether they are abandoned by their families or are from families like the Illinois student with two mothers.