For it to be that big a fraction of my life it's of course an example of parental betrayal, and as I've seen in and outside of my family, hardly a unique one.

The trick is to realize sooner rather than later that your parents are lying, perhaps including to themselves, and to stop throwing good time after bad (if you're talking about your bachelor's degree, there's a good chance it's more their money and your time).

And if you have siblings, keep in touch with them so you can pass on critical information. As the eldest, I was blindsided, my following sister believed my parents' lies and no doubt thought it was a one off, but then experienced the same thing, allowing my two younger brothers to face the issue with sufficient knowledge to play it the way they wanted to, given the severe constraints.

In the US, at least, the odds are pretty strong your parents will be required to contribute to your undergraduate education; me, I "wasted" most of my primary and secondary schooling (2-12) focusing on becoming a scientist, without knowing that would ever happen, and then another decade trying to somehow make it work.

In the meantime, lots of luck and no small amount of skill, plus the habits of mind developed in pursuing the science track, kept me fed with a roof over my head and helped me shift to a career of software and systems. In that, I suppose I was lucky, none of my siblings have enough STEM talent and all have suffered much more crimped careers, perhaps counting or not my sister who married well and became a full time mother, and still did some of what she trained for prior to college (dancing).

As for the "possibly getting your killed", just realize there are normal seeming people out there who are sufficiently messed up on the inside that the continued well being of the other people in their lives is simply not something they (are capable of) care(ing) about. So take how deeply you make a relationship slowly enough so that you can gauge their character, or lack thereof. In the case of siblings, don't let natural attachments blind you to their faults.

In general, don't trust without having some evidentiary basis to believe in the good will of the other, and never disbelieve your eyes, e.g. if you see someone taking actions that'll destroy or severely damage your company, take immediate action. Now, in the case I'm thinking of here, I wasn't in a position to take decisive action, but if I'd been more aware of what was going on, and not so focused on the Maximum Effort software project I was leading, I would have noticed the general sabotage of an on the surface perfectly nice co-worker in another part of the company.

And taken steps to protect myself and my project and team, and fed useful information upwards to our common boss, who then might not have been blindsided when this guy walked out taking our biggest customer. Losing that customer's project started a set of cascading failures that pretty quickly killed my project, and soon enough the company. And let me emphasize that guy did it more for the hell of it than any cunning Machiavellian plan (e.g. he failed after leaving the company, and his backstabbing of me was totally orthogonal to any of his financial goals, our projects were completely disjoint).

Maybe the bottom line is a great line from my favorite history teacher, "Original Sin is an empirical observation," which the class heartily agreed with. Believe that evil exists before circumstances force you to do so, or force dysfunctional accommodations on you that don't directly acknowledge and allow for it.