<p>Has anybody applied to college without telling their parents? My application wants my parents' employers' phone numbers. Will they actually call them? This is starting to look like an obstacle to applying in secret.</p>
<p>Is that field required for you? I never filled those in and never ran into a problem.</p>
<p>If anything, I do not think they will contact them. I always got calls for whatever was my primary number and I avoided putting the house number down.</p>
<p>Some students who have difficult family situations are able to arrange to use their school’s address for correspondence. Speak with your guidance counselor about this.</p>
<p>If you will be needing financial information and/or assistance from your parents in order to pay for your college applications and/or college attendance, it might be better to start discussing your possible list with them now.</p>
<p>I was thinking the same thing as happymom: it would not be a good end to the story if your parents decided to not-pay without telling you!</p>
<p>What prompts you to ask?</p>
<p>The “secret” college application might only make sense for a full ride merit scholarship school that the student wants to go to in order to get away from parental control that otherwise would accompany parental contribution of money or financial aid information.</p>
<p>Seems like a pretty narrow set of circumstances, don’t it, ucbalum?</p>
<p>
Agreed.</p>
<p>And even within those circumstances, it seems like an extreme reaction unless said parents are practically abusive.</p>
<p>To answer the original question: I can’t imagine that field being required. Leave it alone.</p>
<p>Good Reasons a Student (she) Might Not want a Parent to know about an application</p>
<p>1) Her cousin got into that school and she knows that if it is known that she applied and she does not get in there will be no end of comments at family gatherings. </p>
<p>2) She wants to attend her mother’s college, but her dad wants her to attend his. Her mom’s school is a reach so unless she gets in it makes sense to keep the application secret.</p>
<p>3) Her mother cannot imagine that Harvard won’t take her, to keep her mother from going on about it she told her mom she would not apply. </p>
<p>4) Dad insists that she only apply to the local school but she is pretty sure that if he saw how much less it would cost if she gets into a school that meets full need he will change his mind. </p>
<p>…</p>
<p>If you are applying for need based financial aid, I don’t see how you can keep it a secret. They will not call your parents at work during the application process. But you need their tax returns and a lot of detailed information for the financial aid forms. And your parent probably has to sign the FAFSA (they can sign electronically, but they still have to do it themselves). And you list the colleges getting the FAFSA.</p>
<p>I can’t see that any of post #9 reasons are good reasons to not tell your parents. No one outside of them needs to know, though (cousins, other family members, etc). Just putting in applications doesn’t mean the student will be accepted or be able to afford the school or choose to attend.</p>
<p>horacio79’s reasons do make sense, but the challenge of covering the application fees, and handling the financial aid paperwork remains. </p>
<p>If the applicant can arrange fee waivers, or pay for the applications on his/her own that part would be covered. Acquiring all of the financial data would be a bit trickier - especially if the “secret” institution is the only one that requires more than the FAFSA. For FAFSA only institutions, often parents and children do share their PIN information (or even more often, only the parent or the child actually maintains the PINs for both) so editing the FAFSA to send the data to a “secret” institution really wouldn’t be hard at all.</p>
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<p>That is a narrow set of circumstances, but they could cover other situations besides abuse where a student may want to do that (based on various threads seen over the years):</p>
<ul>
<li>Parents want to dictate the student’s major or career path, but the student does not want to do that major or career path</li>
<li>Parents want the student to attend a high-debt school for prestige or other reasons, and the student does not want to take on that much debt.</li>
<li>Parents otherwise have a very limited set of acceptable schools that they are willing to contribute money or financial aid paperwork for, and the student finds them poor matches for his/her academic goals.</li>
<li>There is family drama that the student would rather keep at arm’s length or further, but will get dragged into if s/he needs the parents’ contribution for school.</li>
<li>Parents are financially unreliable.</li>
</ul>
<p>Of course, only a full ride merit scholarship would be of use to the student trying to escape parental control in these types of situations.</p>