What does an education background check show?

You may not be as clever as Einstein or as intellectual as Stephen Hawking but that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily content to spend the rest of your life with someone who lies about their standard of education. While it may be potential employers that most commonly need to perform an education background check, they’re not the only ones who’ll find the results of such a search informative and useful.

The best education verification processes will not only reveal what schools an individual attended but also when they were there and what qualifications they left with. Whether you want to check that your own official academic history is correct or want to double-check on someone else, online background check services can help you get accurate results in minutes.

How Do I Perform an Education Background Check?

In most instances, performing an education background check is a simple process that takes just a couple of working days and requires only a person’s first and last names or even just a telephone number.

When it comes to what will show up in a background check, the more information you can input about an individual, the more accurate and comprehensive the results, but if you only have a name, it’s still enough to get you started. Even if the person whose education you want to verify studied overseas, a reliable background check will still come up with the goods.

Having said that, some educational verification processes need a bit more to work with and will require you to submit the following in addition to full name, date of birth and social security number:

• Name and address of the last institute attended
• Name and address of high school
• Start and end dates for the period of study and degree name
• Diploma
• Transcripts

To perform a basic education verification check using an online background check service, all you really need to do is select a service and head over to its website. You’ll instantly see the options for searching and, in most instances, can change the criteria using the tabs at the top. Once that’s complete, enter as much information as you have available and hit enter. The site will now do what it’s designed to do although some, TruthFinder in particular, will ask a series of questions as it generates results, using your input to narrow down the findings.

What Does an Education Background Check Show?

The most comprehensive education background check will give you the following:

1. Name of the school
2. Subjects studied or qualifications achieved
3. Dates of study
4. GPA (Grade Point Average)

Top Education Background Check Services

Not all background check services produce the same accuracy of results nor the same detail, so finding the best one for educational background checks is key if that’s what’s motivating your search in the first place.

The following background check companies are fast and reliable, providing comprehensive, accurate results within a matter of minutes in some cases. Let’s take a look and see what one of these leading background check companies could tell you about your latest online date.

#1 BeenVerified

BeenVerified will give you a pretty accurate understanding of an individual’s educational background, and won’t just stop there either, digging deep into the past to uncover all kinds of secrets, some of which might come as more of a shock than discovering your husband-to-be is a high-school drop-out rather than an Ivy League graduate.

BeenVerified has its finger on the pulse when it comes to reliable data sources and has been around long enough to know exactly where to look during an education verification check. With access to dozens of public records, BeenVerified collates information from billions of websites and other sources to give you a clear picture of someone’s life. From education to employment, speeding tickets to social media profiles, BeenVerified will show it all.

Accessing public records often requires some money to change hands so it’s hardly surprising that the best education background checks are the ones you pay for. Nevertheless, prices are generally affordable with most services costing between $20 and $25 per month for unlimited background checks and reports.

The only drawback is, if you only want one report, you’ll feel like you’re coughing up more in the way of subscription fees than you ought to be, although $26.89 to confirm that your fiancé did graduate from Yale and doesn’t have a criminal record is a complete bargain.

With BeenVerified, even the most extensive report takes just a matter of weeks, and you don’t need to be hovering by your PC the whole time either. BeenVerified has handy apps that are compatible with Android, Apple Watch, and iOS so you can check out as many people as you like while on the go.

Although some people do share their entire resumes online, many people prefer a higher standard of privacy in their lives, which makes finding out the truth about their pasts a little more challenging. Fortunately, performing an education background check with BeenVerified is simple and straightforward so you don’t need a degree in rocket science to get the hang of it.

#2 TruthFinder

TruthFinder is a reputable background check company that makes a lot more of its education verification process than BeenVerified. While BeenVerified remains fundamentally tight-lipped about what its users can discover from an education background check, TruthFinder dedicates a whole article to the subject.

Even if you’ve seen a copy of your boyfriend’s résumé or that of your new next-door neighbor, you shouldn’t take that information at face value. With research indicating that around 70% of job applicants exaggerate their academic accomplishments on their resumes, without digging around, you can’t be sure whether that Bachelor of Arts from Princeton is real or fabricated.

Although better known for its dark web scan which helps victims of identity theft track down their private data, TruthFinder is nonetheless reliable in terms of generating an accurate record of an individual’s education. One of the best things about TruthFinder is that, even if you only have an email address to enter into the search criteria, you can still expect to see education history in the report.

If you want to get into the real nitty-gritty of someone’s life, you could opt for a premium report which will detail known associates, hunting licenses, professional permits, and possible neighbors, among other things.

Anyone doing a background check runs the risk of unearthing some unpleasant surprises and, while producing your report, TruthFinder activates a series of pop-up alerts to prepare the user for some unwanted truths.

Unfortunately, whether the results bear good news or bad, you’re still going to have to pay for them and TruthFinder’s prices are pretty steep. A one-month subscription costs $27.78 and, once again, there’s no option for a one-off report.

However, you can run as many reverse phone look-ups as you like for just $2 a pop, so, if you have the phone number of the person whose education you wish to verify, this is a very cost-effective way of going about it. Not only will the reverse phone look-up give you information about a person’s education and qualifications, where available, it will also give you insights into their social media profiles and location history. You can check out our review here.

#3 People Looker

People Looker is a user-friendly service with a trusted track record that performs searches and generates results a little faster than TruthFinder but doesn’t always include the same depth of information in its reports.

While TruthFinder covers a wide range of topics and includes comprehensive information about a person’s academic and employment history, among a variety of other things, People Looker is a little more ambiguous about what it’s found. In other words, you have to cough up the money before you can even see which areas of a person’s history have been included in the report.

Many of the sample reports viewed showed no education history at all but did include less common areas such as marriages and divorces and professional licenses. While this might be handy in some instances, if you’re specifically interested in education verification, BeenVerified or TruthFinder are probably better options.

Like the other background check companies reviewed here, People Looker has apps available that are compatible with both iOS and Android. On the downside, you won’t get education history included in reports generated using the app unless you upgrade to a paid subscription.

Having said that, upgrading on a mobile app seems a lot cheaper than opting for a subscription online. A one-month subscription will give you unlimited searches and cost $22.86 if you sign up online. If, on the other hand, you head over to Google Play, you can download the People Looker app for free and then upgrade for as little as $7.16 per month. Unfortunately, I was unable to verify this information as the app is not available outside the US. Regrettably, that also means you might struggle to use People Looker to uncover the details of someone’s academic past if they were educated overseas.

While there are more limitations to People Looker’s service compared to both BeenVerified and TruthFinder, it’s still a reputable service that generates reliable results. Simple to use and comparatively affordable, People Looker offers a comprehensive service but isn’t the best for those looking to do an education background check.

Is Lying About Education Background Common?

You have every right to check out an individual’s education if you want to, although the wording on some background check services’ websites might have you doubting that. While it’s illegal to use a non-CRA company to establish someone’s suitability for employment based on their education, it’s perfectly acceptable to use one to verify that your new love interest isn’t lying to you and did graduate from Harvard three years ago.

Certainly, lying about academic achievements isn’t as uncommon as one might expect and if you’re an individual who values education and the financial stability it promises, it’s well worth making sure your partner is who he says he is. After all, lying about college admissions and qualifications seems to be quite popular at present.

A couple of months ago, it was reported that influencer Blac Chyna had been accepted onto an online course at Harvard Business School. Despite sharing an image of her acceptance letter, it soon turned out that the whole thing was a scam and Harvard officials confirmed that no such acceptance letter had been issued.

Lying on a resume is also surprisingly common and, according to a survey conducted by CareerBuilder, around one-third of the employers interviewed had caught a candidate lying, with around a third of those lying about their academic qualifications.

If you want to make sure no one pulls the wool over your eyes and that you’re not dating someone who never managed more than a couple of weeks at university, an education background check is the best way to go. Of course, you don’t have to have a degree to be intelligent, but if you’re dating someone who says he has when he hasn’t, you may need to take stock of exactly what’s going on in that grey matter of yours.

Conclusion

The best background check services provide detailed, accurate information in a format that’s easy to comprehend and navigate. It also helps if there is a range of search criteria available as it’s not always people we know that we want to investigate. For example, if you just met someone online, chances are you have their email address but not necessarily their first and last names.

While it may not matter too much to you if your fiancée graduated from Yale or the local community college, if she’s been lying about it, you may feel differently. No relationship can survive unless it’s based on trust so exposing those home truths before the relationship goes any further could save you a lot of wasted time and heartache.

If you want the most up-to-date and accurate information from an education verification check, then you need to opt for a reliable background check service with a solid reputation and a wide range of data sources. BeenVerified and TruthFinder have ticked all the boxes, although BeenVerified holds onto its number one position by virtue of its competitive pricing and easy-to-read reports. While People Looker is a good background check service, it doesn’t excel at producing up-to-date information about a person’s education, but does offer excellent value for money with its reverse phone look-up which, if you’re lucky, might just strike pay dirt!

Don’t limit your options by committing yourself to a relationship with someone you don’t know and can’t trust. Check out your partner in crime’s shady past with one of the best background check services available, after all, whether you find they graduated summa cum laude from Harvard or dropped out of Fayetteville State University (currently ranked one of the worst in the US), “it’s better to get hurt by the truth than comforted by a lie”.