This question has been put to me several times, and it seems to have been asked here before, but I cannot find a definitive answer.
Assume these facts:
- Student has applied to a number of schools that insist that all financial documentation be submitted through IDOC
- CSS profiles all submitted in November 2014 (i.e., months ago), and FAFSA submitted in January (i.e., long time ago)
- Only some of the “IDOC” schools are listed on the IDOC portal as requesting documents - the others have made no request.
Why haven’t the other schools requested any of this student’s financial documents? Is it:
- These schools will make their decisions based on the CSS/FAFSA alone without any backup documentation?
- These schools will make an IDOC request, they just haven’t gotten around to it yet (although it’s getting late in the game, isn’t it?) OR
- These schools have signaled to IDOC that this student will not be admitted and therefore do not want to pay the fee to have those documents processed.
I did see on the IDOC website that schools do pay a per-student fee to have documents processed, and there is a procedure by which they can request that some students’ documents do not get processed (so that they do not incur a charge):
And see (regarding ability of the college to signal to IDOC that a student falls in the “no send” category):https://finaidonline.collegeboard.com/fin/PI_StaticPagesControlServlet/PI_StaticPagesControlServlet.srv?name=pi_idocfaqs
Also - has anyone out there been admitted to an “IDOC-required” school even though the school never asked for any financial documents to be submitted through IDOC (i.e., presumably relied on CSS and FAFSA alone?) I assume there are many, many students who were rejected even though IDOC documents were requested, but what about the reverse? Anyone admitted when the IDOC documents were NOT requested?