I’ve got a nephew who’s going to college with the help of several scholarships. Those scholarships are contingent on good behavior. If he gets arrested for something like underage drinking, for example, his scholarships can be pulled. Many colleges have similar policies.
Now some college administrators are thinking about criminal background checks as part of the admissions process. KHTV in Little Rock, Arkansas, reports that “What you do as a kid could soon determine your future. Because of violent incidents, like the Virginia Tech shootings, some colleges and universities are considering adding background checks to the admission process. And even non-criminal offenses may come up in determining scholarship awards.”
Today many colleges ask applicants about past misbehavior. It’s all on the honor system, though because nobody checks what the applicants tell them.
Most of the people applying to college out of high school are sixteen or seventeen years old. In most states, according to Traci Truly in her Legal Guide for Teens, the age at which you are tried as an adult is either seventeen or eighteen. Whatever legal troubles most applicants have had was handled under the juvenile justice system and the records are likely to be sealed.
But before you let your teen breathe a sigh of relief, consider this. If the background check turns up the fact of a juvenile record, the college can ask for details as a condition of continuing the application or scholarship award process. The college can also make lying on the application for admission or for scholarships cause for dismissal or withdrawing the scholarship.
And you can bet that colleges, like employers, will be checking out social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. However it works out, the prospective college students of the future are almost certain to get more scrutiny.