Hi, I am a senior waiting to hear back from a number of schools and in the past 2 weeks I have received requests to submit documents to the Institutional Documentation Service (IDOC) from 3 of my top schools (Duke, Notre Dame and Cornell). Does this mean anything for my likelihood or being admitted? Is it a good sign/positive/neutral? I read somewhere that it means you’re being highly considered by the admissions committee. Any insight would be much appreciated. Thank you.
I do not know about those schools specifically, but generally Financial Aid and Admissions are separate considerations/decisions. For my child, the IDOC requests occurred within days of submitting our CSS, but maybe your schools have a different process and consider ability to pay as part of the admissions decision.
In general though, I always think it is best not to try and speculate about admissions decisions. Students will know when the decision is sent out. It can drive one crazy trying to wonder if X, Y or Z is a sign. Relax. You’ll know when you know. Good luck.
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No - it doesn’t - it means, your financial aid submission was never completed.
FAFSA
CSS
IDOC
If you didn’t do all three, they want to be ready should you be admitted.
Had you submitted up front, this wouldn’t have come up.
Best of luck in your upcoming decisions.
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This simply means that they are wondering if you are applying for need based financial aid and are telling you that if you are, your financial aid application is NOT complete.
If you don’t plan to apply for need based aid, you can contact financial aid and tell them so.
This has zero to do with admissions.
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Our Duke portal only has CSS profile listed but we submitted all 3 (CSS, FAFSA and IDOC)…I’m worried that’s a bad sign
You can call Monday to clarify it was received in case it wasn’t. I wouldn’t take it as a sign toward rejection.
With Internet rumors like this, I think it pays to think about what it would take in practice for this to actually work. So, like Financial Aid is sending out IDOC reminder emails, but Admissions then . . . sends them a list of applicants where it says “don’t bother reminding these people”? What if they make late adjustments to their admit list? What if Internet rumors swirl about what it all means?
The far, far easier thing to do is simply let Financial Aid email everyone, or possibly everyone who is showing incomplete, not try to instruct Financial Aid who they can safely ignore now.
And so on. I think sometimes people implicitly treat these colleges as if they had just one person sitting in a room considering one application and making decisions about how to communicate with that applicant individually. When you realize this is instead a huge operation with multiple different offices trying to handle often tens of thousands of applications, the idea there is some great individual significance below the surface purpose of any given communication falls apart.
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