Legal Question in Family Law in Illinois

College Expenses for a Non-minor Child

Section 513 of the Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act, 750 ILCS 5/513, authorizes a court to award educational expenses from either or both parents to the parents� non-minor child. The statute can be found in many local public libraries in their set of Illinois Compiled Statutes (i.e., ILCS), and in the law libraries of law schools and county courthouses. The latter would likely have an annotated set, which means that synopses of cases relating to the statute are contained in the volume.

You can make application for this award but it is still considered an enforcement or modification of the divorce decree, and both parents are necessary parties to the proceeding.

Following are certain case opinion summaries which might relate to your particular situation (case cites omitted):

Dissolution agreement that provided husband would pay one-half of child's college expenses, but was silent as to a specific price or method by which a specific price would be determined, implied that the price for college expenses would be reasonable.

Where the obligation to provide for a child's college expenses is included in a property settlement agreement which is later incorporated in a divorce decree, the obligation to provide for a child's education embodied in this section is said to be even more definite and obligatory.

Respondent was ordered to pay petitioner's attorney's fees, necessitated by respondent's noncompliance with an agreement to pay for his child's college education.

Respondent's noncompliance with the provision of the dissolution judgment requiring him to pay his daughter's college expenses constituted prima facie evidence of contempt.

There is no absolute duty for a father to pay college expenses; such a duty is created only by a trial court's order, after a hearing, either to enforce an agreement between the parties or to create a post-divorce decree duty, upon proper petition of a party.

A settlement agreement which made provisions for the college expenses of the son, rather than this section, controlled the disposition of the case because the parties in a dissolution proceeding may voluntarily settle their property interest. The parties' mutual adjustment of their marital rights so far as the education of their children was concerned was conclusive in the absence of unconscionability, fraud, coercion, duress or a violation of public policy or morals.

The trial court did not abuse its discretion in ordering husband to pay toward his daughter's first year of college without directly receiving testimony regarding wife's finances where the clear intent of a divorce decree which incorporated a property settlement agreement was that the husband would bear the burden of his daughter's college expenses if he was financially able to do so.