<p>Northeastern requires IDOC, right? As I recall from an older child, IDOC is a huge pain involving mailing packets of paper around. What custom questions does Northeastern ask outside of the regular Profile? Do they ask about vehicles and so forth?</p>
<p>No, Northeastern does not require IDOC</p>
<p>Most colleges ask for various tax forms, IDOC is mostly just a way of sending those forms to the colleges. Yes, it is manual and a major pain. But IDOC itself is just a mechanism for mailing the paperwork. You may end up mailing or faxing or emailing scanned versions of exactly the same thing to a college that does not use IDOC.</p>
<p>Regarding extra questions, you probably know that the college works with CSS Profile to indicate which extra questions they want asked. Maybe someone who did the Profile for Northeastern last year could check and see what extra questions were asked.</p>
<p>As a current Northeastern student who filled out both the CSS and the Non-Custodial Profile, I can assure you, Northeastern does not require IDOC through CSS.</p>
<p>That’s interesting SgtEllie, because the information being given out by the College Board says otherwise:
<a href=“CSS Profile Participating Institutions and Programs”>CSS Profile Home – CSS Profile | College Board;
<p>We had to fill out CSS but not IDOC for Northeastern. The link you attached said and/or. Unless they have changed from 6 months ago, all you need is the CSS profile. </p>
<p>IDOC is not a form. It is a method to send your tax forms and other supporting documentation to the college. I suppose a college could give the choice of IDOC or mail/fax directly.</p>
<p>I didn’t have to mail in anything, only had to fill out CSS online through college board. ( which wasn’t actually fun, but it didn’t involve paper or mailing anything) There wasn’t even a supplement as there was with other schools. Northeastern was the easiest of all the schools we applied. I filled out the CSS for all of her schools at the same time by checking off which schools to send it to and I was done with NEU at that point. Other schools required more information after that. </p>
<p>You applied for need based aid, and didn’t have to provide your parent’s tax returns to prove your family income? That is highly unusual.</p>
<p>@intparent </p>
<p>For the initial application, you didn’t need anything. After, they requested one or two documents online and you just mailed/faxed them in, nothing special. I never heard of IDOC until this thread. If I had to, I would guess it’s optional and / or rarely used.</p>
<p>IDOC is something colleges generally use or they don’t. It is a way to send it all those tax materials. If you send to IDOC and the college uses it, then sending in that one package to the centralized IDOC mailing address gets it distributed to all of your colleges that want it. But some colleges don’t use IDOC and have you send info directly to them instead. I assume once you are accepted, maybe you send in your tax info to Northeastern? Some other colleges do this (I know Carleton used to). They don’t want to calculate FA packages for a bunch of students that won’t be accepted anyway. But some colleges college the info from all students during the application process. It can be tough to get FA packages out to everyone if they wait (since students need to see their packages before the 5/1 deadline to tell colleges if they are coming or not).</p>
<p>intparent: IDOC is indeed a form. Or at least it was when I had to fill it out for my daughter 3 years ago (for a different college). It was a real PITA.</p>
<p>There are multiple pages in an IDOC packet, followed by any tax forms, etc. that the colleges request. IDOC stands for “Institutional Documentation Service”, a service provided by College Board to collect documentation. There are multiple forms in an IDOC packet – always a cover sheet and verification worksheet, and sometimes institution specific sheets. Then whatever (tons for us) tax documents are required. Ours were a ridiculous pain (specific order of documents, some but not all tax forms requested, SSN at the top of every page, etc.).</p>
<p>But once you send your IDOC packet in, it can be used by all schools that use the IDOC process.</p>
<p>Here is a link to information on what IDOC is:</p>
<p><a href=“https://idoc.collegeboard.org/idoc/index.jsp”>Institutional Documentation Service (IDOC);