I don’t live with her, and she’s been sick all my life. She has a mental illness and obviously will not contribute to my higher learning. I understand I could put “unknown” for somethings, but it asks for her phone number and email and such. I tried calling College Board but the wait time is like thirty minutes. Thought I could get faster answers on here. Thanks.
Going off on a bit of a tangent her, but I really wish these sort of applications would take into account parents who are not in their students’ life for uncontrollable circumstances.
For schools that require the NCP Profile, you should consider trying to get waivers.
OP, are you 40 years old?
Be careful, the answers that you get from Internet may not be correct.
Very true. Unfortunately, my experience has been that the answers you get form the College Board may also not be correct.
You need to contact the colleges and ask their procedures for a non-custodial parent waiver.
You will need to contact each college that wants the noncustodial form, explain the circumstances, and ask for a waiver.
I agree that the system is not user friendly for people in unusual circumstances.
I had the best luck emailing the actual Director of Admissions. At first I tried calling the colleges but the results were all over the place and when I had to go back for clarification, emailing worked way better, plus you and they have a written record. I usually heard back within a day.
Don’t use the generic FinAid email. Look for an “about us” or “staff” link and send your email straight to the Director of Financial Aid.
They may require some kind of documentation which perhaps your custodial parent can help with, or sometimes they will accept statements from counselors, pastors, etc. Just email about your situation and you will find out. If they ask for something that’s a problem, just email back about it.
I found all but one Director very pleasant to work with. The Director that was being a pill resulted in D not applying there because I was afraid they would mess everything else up. You can’t do it one way for one college and another way for a different college. Hopefully they are all in agreement. A different college that was asking for something different, when I emailed back and said how can we do this when other colleges want ____, the Director said, don’t worry, that’s fine, we’ll work with whatever the other colleges want you to do. All of the directors I communicated with said that they were noting our waiver in my D’s file.
You will still have to put something in the noncustodial section of the Profile because it won’t let you submit it till you do even after you have received waivers. The colleges are not able to change anything in the Profile system. I think it was basically just the name, address, maybe phone of the noncustodial parent. Check the directions or google for help if, for instance, she doesn’t have an email and that field is required. Oftentimes they suggest a dummy format for the email field.
Call or email each financial aid office and ask for a NCP Waiver. They will know exactly what you’re asking for.
The waivers all essentially ask for some combination of the following things:
- Statement from the student about his/her relationship with the non-custodial parent
- Statement from the custodial parent
- Third-party statement regarding the non-custodial parent’s relationship with the student – this can’t be a family friend or relative. Maybe a clergy, guidance counselor, etc. Ask this person to write a statement on a letterhead; don’t make it to a specific school because you’ll be sending it to all of them.
- Any supporting documentation, like court papers, divorce decrees, custody decisions, etc.
- A few simple questions about - (a) how much child support the NCP paid in 2015, (b) how frequent the contact is or when the last contact was
If you have yours and your custodial parent’s statements composed and ready to go, it will just be a matter of “assembling” the waiver packet for each school. All of the schools on my son’s list accepted it digitally – either uploading on to their financial aid portal or sending to the admissions office by email. So, we found it easier to have documents scanned in and ready to go.
For the Profile and any online application forms that required non-custodial info, like phone numbers, that we just didn’t have, we put in the custodial parent’s info and sent an email afterwards saying that’s what we did. All of the schools seemed fine with that (no one complained).
Do you live with your dad, or are you in some other living situation? I agree that each college will have to allow some kind of waiver.