I understand that colleges do background checks on applicants’ FB and other online profiles in the application process. What I’m curious about is whether they do a Criminal Background Check on the applicants’ parents, in addition to general education and financial background information. I’ve never heard of or seen any Ivy League or top-tier colleges & universities students’ or alumni’s parents with shady criminal background (arrest or conviction). That’s simply not the “Ivy Poster Child” representative of such prestigious education.
Reason: my ex has been an irresponsible and abusive father, who often intentionally withheld child support for 15+ years. He got into legal trouble and abandoned my daughter at the beginning of her 12th grade year, before she turned 18. It isn’t his first time with legal trouble since his Juvenile Delinquency days. So we didn’t supply any of his information on any of her college applications. However, Columbia University found his information and sent him the CSS application, even though our FAFSA’s EFC is zero.
Does anyone know if the Ivies and top-tier schools, such as Northwestern, Duke, Notre Dame, and Vanderbilt, Secretly take shady parental characters into admission consideration behind closed doors?
Questbridge Finalist.
1490 SAT score.
4.667 GPA.
National Title: 3rd Place in Stellar Xplorer (sponsored by the U.S. Air Force; building the most cost efficient, effective satellites).
Recruited Stellar Xplorer Team Captain.
NCWIT State Winner title (not Honorable Mention).
MESA President 10th Grade.
Mock Trial President, 10th, 11th, and 12th Grade.
Won Gold Medal in a regional Prosthetic Arm competition, 9th Grade.
Won Silver Medal in Speech & Debate, 9th Grade.
But some other non-Valedictorian Top 10 classmates with SAT scores significantly below hers, without any National or State titles, or leadership positions got into Harvard and Yale. Is it a matter of her father’s most recent criminal case? Or is it a lack of affluence on our part?
I highly doubt that colleges run background checks on parents, but if you fail to provide requested information about your parents on your college applications, that could possibly lead to the application being considered incomplete or even suspicious.
In particular, when applying for financial aid, especially to colleges that use the CSS Profile application, the usual assumption is that both parents, even if divorced and one without any custody, will contribute financially to their child’s education. Colleges that use the CSS Profile application for financial aid do not rely on the FAFSA EFC – that only determines the student’s eligibility for federal grants and loans.
Colleges recognize that there can be exceptional circumstances, but you have to make a special request. Did your daughter request a Non-Custodial Parent Waiver as part of her financial aid application?
Vanderbilt does not typically require non-custodial info. Their website says that they will sometimes ask for more info. I had 2 kiddos who attended and they never asked for anything except for what was asked on the CSS profile…I believe name, address and occupation.
Your income will have no bearing on admission to elite schools, which are need blind. The background of the father would not be considered either. However, the CSS Profile is required from the other parent, as a matter of routine, unless, as suggested above, you apply for a waiver. If you need help, the admissions office could perhaps assist you.
Not all families of kids at these schools meet the stereotype you are imagining
The CSS application should never have been required in the first place, because she applied through the QuestBridge National College Match Scholarship application. It is a full ride scholarship to the Ivies (except for Harvard and Cornell) and other top-tier schools for low-income families, waiving all the application fees and eliminated the need for the CSS profile for most of those schools. She only applied to the schools that did not list the CSS profile requirement, as per the QuestBridge website. But the fact that Columbia found her father’s information without her submission and sent him the CSS application is a red flag to us.
Questbridge looks at the income and assets of both parents. Remember Questbridge is just vetting students, The financial aid is actually coming from the colleges. They can ask for whatever they want when it comes to disbursing their money.
You D not having contact with her father this year is not grounds for a non-custodial waiver.
Colleges also do not “send the CSS Profile” to anyone. If anything…the College Board might have done so…with information you provided about the non-custodial parent.
remember the the students also places their parent information on the college application. So even if it is not on the financial aid forms and on the application, financial aid offices will reach out to non-custodial parents for information
Even if you did not put his information on the financial aid form, somewhere on the application was information that this person exists, so Columbia reached out to him to let him know his information was needed to consider his D for financial aid at their school (nothing unusual or sinister about this)
Honestly, I don’t think “need blind” means very much. When 20% of the students in some of these schools come from families in the top 1% of earners (more than 630,000 a year), I do think there is some filtering going on in admissions based on perceived income.
It is not the shadiness of the parent, it is the non-cooperation of the parent on financial aid forms that is the issue at colleges that require both parents’ finances. In divorce situations, either parent can veto the kid’s ability to attend a college that requires both parents’ finances by non-cooperation, and that often happens because one or both ex-spouses prioritize the ongoing hostility to each other over college for their kid.
Of the super-selective private schools, Chicago does not require the non-custodial parent information, Vanderbilt usually does not, and Princeton only requires the non-custodial parent information if the custodial parent is not married.
@MusakParent Perhaps smart/high achieving parents produce smart/high achieving kids? Or perhaps the application pools to these schools already consist majority of well off families’ offsprings (like 30% from private prep schools and another 30% from well funded pubic school districts with GT programs)? In such case, the applicants are self-sectected already, why these schools have to do something to filtering the income level. It is actually the other way around in this CC site that people are complaining that the selective colleges put lots emphasize on seeking the 1st generation, URM, lower income applicants that many high states and wealth to do ORM kids are unfairly having disadvantage in getting admitted. I am not arguing which way is correct, but saying that your arguing that your saying of need blind isn’t true has a huge hole in it.
I guess your real question is why she wasn’t accepted to Harvard or Yale, but only to a lower Ivy like Columbia. Could it be due to her father’s background?
My take is that it would not have anything to do with the deadbeat father or his financial situation. If anything, the low income status would have helped her at H/Y. It is just that the competition at the very top is so fierce that even a low income/QB status hook was not enough. And you never know what hooks others at her schools really had. At the national level there are many FGLI kids with 1550+ and national/int awards applying to H/Y, and not all are accepted.
I’d love to see stats on overall financials of all applicants at these schools vs. the final numbers. It would be great if that data were released. I’m not saying they don’t have some opportunities to lower income kids. These schools cannot afford to give huge numbers basically free tuition. I think they have to balance their budgets at the end of the day.
Saying they are “need blind and meets need” is good marketing, I don’t think it accurately portrays what happens in admissions as they sort kids into buckets. I suspect there would be much wider fluctuations in their financials year to year if this wasn’t happening. If you have a kid from an east coast boarding school that has done a bunch of expensive traveling and extra curriculars vs. the kid from a high poverty urban public school that has done all school based activities and volunteering and a paid job, you can probably tell a little something about their financial need in admissions and those 2 kids wouldn’t go into the same “bucket”.
I suspect you don’t know many people who have gone to such schools.
There are young people with arrests and convictions who go to these schools. It all depends upon the circumstances.I think it’s rare, but it happens. In one well known case, Brown admitted someone who spent 8 years in prison. After he got out, he applied to Brown and was rejected. He then got a job and went to a CC where he racked up perfect grades. He then was accepted to Brown as a transfer student. After Brown, he went on to Yale Law School. His was an unusual story.
UChicago isn’t an Ivy, but I know a student with a juvenile conviction it accepted. He too is now a lawyer.
I know of a student whose father was involved in a major securities fraud case–a white collar case which was front page news–who went to Yale.
It’s all about the money. Your ex’s background doesn’t matter in the least.
@jzducol She never applied to Harvard in the first place, because Harvard pales in comparison to Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCLA in STEM. Yale does has a decent STEM program, but only at the Master’s or Ph.D. level, not for undergrad. So Yale would be useless to her for engineering. She clicked on Columbia strictly for practicality due to the application fee waiver.
In fact, with the exception of Yale grad school, all the other Ivies are very weak in STEM programs. For example, only MIT and Purdue have a Nuclear Reactor on their campuses, the Ivies don’t have the funding for that. In STEM, the most important part she was looking for was the school’s research funding, for it is pointless to learn so much theoretical math without the resources with which to build anything concrete. The top STEM schools in the nation have the top research funding, such as from the U.S. Department of Defense, the Air Force, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and other private donors. Due to her STEM strength with Aerospace Engineering, Computer/Software Engineering, and Cyber Security (volunteer mentoring & coaching), she only clicked on the very few non-Ivies-but-still-top-tiers that have decent undergrad engineering programs with research funding at the undergrad level.
She also never bothered with MIT or Caltech because she didn’t nail a perfect 1600 on the new SAT. I told her that a 1490 is a shame to my ancestors’ altars. 750 - 770s on her SAT Subject Tests are also a shame to my side of the family. My policy for her: anything less an 800 across all the Subject Tests, she may not apply to MIT or Caltech. Her father is already the biggest disgrace to us by not obeying the judge’s order on monthly child support since she was 3 years old. When he dodged the legal radar by not holding down jobs, moving out of the state, and even moving out of the country for that many years, I’m not about to stoop down to his level and hunt him down for a single penny. That is the Family Legacy he chose to uphold for his family name, that’s the legacy he will live. His choice. His loss.
@MusakParent Thank you for your insight. I completely agree with you. There were only a handful of schools on her wish list. Northwestern was her #1 choice. However, she did receive a 3/4 ride from her #2 dream choice, Colorado School of Mines, which has the strongest Physics and Aerospace Engineering departments and substantial research funding, even at undergrad level. Now we’re just waiting on the remaining non-Mines scholarships to come through. Her safety school, Rensselaer Polytech, also really wanted her, but they didn’t offer her enough Merit Scholarships. Even with the Half Ride scholarship from RPI, Colorado School of Mines’ gave a more substantial offer. It’s her father’s loss.
