Splitting a Son's College Costs After a Long Marriage Ends

The situation

Min-ji and Tesfay had been married for over twenty years before they separated. They handled the split the way they had handled most things in the marriage: informally, and without much paperwork. There was no formal separation agreement, just an understanding that Min-ji would keep the family home in Chatham and Tesfay would pay a modest, agreed amount of child support for their son, Biniam, who was seventeen at the time.

Min-ji works as a personal support worker, visiting clients in their homes to help with daily care. Tesfay works as an early childhood educator. Between them, household income after the separation stayed under $45,000 combined, split across two households, and neither had much in the way of savings. When Biniam turned eighteen and enrolled full-time in a two-year college diploma program, the informal understanding broke down. Min-ji assumed Tesfay would help with the new costs, the way he always said he would when Biniam was younger. Tesfay assumed that once Biniam turned eighteen, his support obligation was largely his own concern, and that Min-ji was on her own for anything beyond the modest monthly amount already being paid.

By the time Biniam's first semester started, Min-ji had covered tuition, a laptop required for coursework, and a transit pass out of her own pocket, using money she did not have to spare. She came to Treadstone Law wanting to know whether Tesfay actually owed her anything toward these costs, and if so, how to get it without a drawn-out fight.

The legal problem

Separated parents often assume, reasonably enough, that once a child turns eighteen and starts working part-time, the financial relationship between the parents is largely finished. In practice, the law draws the line somewhere else, and that gap between assumption and rule is where a great many disputes like this one begin. It is also where informal, handshake arrangements tend to fall apart, because neither parent has anything written down to point to when expectations diverge.

Canada's child support framework, set out in the Child Support Guidelines, separates two kinds of financial support. The first is basic monthly support, calculated from a table based on the paying parent's income and the number of children. The second is a separate category, often called special or extraordinary expenses, which covers costs that fall outside everyday living expenses: things like health-related expenses not covered by insurance, extracurricular activities above a certain level, and post-secondary education.

The first question was whether Biniam still counted as a "child" for support purposes at all. Under the Guidelines, a child who is over the age of majority but still in full-time attendance at school, including college or university, generally continues to be a child of the marriage entitled to support. Biniam's full-time enrolment in a diploma program meant this threshold was met without much difficulty, since he had not withdrawn from his parents' financial orbit the way a fully independent working adult would have.

The second question was how the cost of college should actually be split. Special and extraordinary expenses are not simply paid by whichever parent the child happens to live with, or divided evenly down the middle. They are shared between the parents in proportion to their respective incomes, after deducting any contribution the child is reasonably expected to make from their own resources, such as savings, part-time earnings, or government student assistance. Because both parents earned modest, broadly comparable incomes, this was not a case where one parent could be expected to shoulder the bulk of the cost alone, but it also was not a case where Tesfay could walk away from the expense entirely just because Biniam had turned eighteen.

There was also a practical wrinkle. With no written agreement in place, there was nothing on paper spelling out how these costs would be divided, and no mechanism for Min-ji to formally demand reimbursement short of applying to family court, which neither parent could easily afford in time or money.

What we did

1. Confirmed Biniam's continued entitlement to support. We reviewed his enrolment status, program length, and course load to confirm he met the full-time attendance standard the Guidelines require for a child over the age of majority to remain eligible for support, and gathered the college's enrolment confirmation as proof.
2. Calculated the net expense to be shared. We totalled the actual costs Min-ji had paid, then subtracted the portion Biniam was expected to contribute himself from a part-time job he had taken on campus and a modest provincial student grant he had qualified for. What remained was the amount properly subject to sharing between the two parents.
3. Determined each parent's proportionate share. Using both parents' recent income information, we calculated the percentage split the Guidelines called for, based on their relative incomes rather than an even fifty-fifty division, and applied it to the net expense figure.
4. Sent a clear, documented request rather than starting a court proceeding. We wrote to Tesfay directly, setting out the legal basis for the request, the math behind the figure, and the supporting documents, and invited him to resolve it by agreement before either side spent money on litigation.
5. Drafted a simple written agreement once Tesfay engaged. Once Tesfay's initial resistance softened, we prepared a short agreement covering not just the amount owed for the current semester but how future years of the program would be handled, so the same dispute would not recur every September.

The outcome

Tesfay's first reaction to the letter was defensive, insisting he had already "done his part" by paying basic support for years. Once he saw the calculation laid out, though, and understood that the law treated this as a shared obligation tied to income rather than a discretionary favour, his position shifted. He did not want to spend money on a lawyer to fight a claim that was, on the numbers, straightforward.

The net expense after Biniam's own contribution came to roughly $6,400 for the school year. Based on the parents' relative incomes, Tesfay's proportionate share worked out to a little over half of that figure, close to $3,700, with Min-ji continuing to cover the remainder given her smaller share of overall household income between the two homes. Tesfay agreed to pay his share, backdated to the start of the school year, in three instalments over the following months rather than a single lump sum, which suited his own tight budget.

The written agreement also fixed the arrangement for Biniam's second year, so Min-ji would not have to renegotiate the same dispute from scratch. It set out that both parents would exchange updated income information each year, that Biniam's own contribution would be recalculated based on his actual part-time earnings and any grant he received, and that the resulting shared expense would follow the same proportionate formula. For a family with little financial cushion, having that framework fixed in writing removed a recurring source of conflict at exactly the time of year money was already tight for both of them.

The matter never went near a courtroom. It was resolved through a documented request, a clear application of the Guidelines' income-sharing formula, and a short written agreement, at a fraction of the cost either parent would have spent litigating it.

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