zz -- top 3 emailed articles in NYTimes, Feb 22, 2009

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The Big Test Before College? The Financial Aid Form

Most everyone agrees that something is very wrong with the six-page federal form for families seeking help with college costs.

Created in 1992 to simplify applying for financial aid, it has become so intimidating — with more than 100 questions — that critics say it scares off the very families most in need, preventing some teenagers from going to college.

Then, too, some families have begun paying for professional help with the form, known as the Fafsa,a situation that experts say indicates just how far awry the whole process has gone.

“We’re getting thousands of calls a day,” said Craig V. Carroll, chief executive of Student Financial Aid Services Inc., whose fafsa.com charges $80 to $100 to fill out the form. “Our calls for the month of January are up about 35 percent from last year. There’s been a huge increase in the desperation of families.”

Last year, Congress ordered the form streamlined, but in the very same bill it added seven new questions. Critics say that even when all those questions are answered, the form does a poor job of assessing financial worth, both because it excludes assets like cars, boats, the family home and some family businesses, and because it does not factor in the high cost of living in areas like New York.

On the campaign trail, President Obama promised to eliminate the form — officially, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. And his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, talked about the problem at his confirmation hearing, saying, “You basically have to have a Ph.D. to figure that thing out.”

But whether it will be replaced soon, and with what, remains an open question.

Between the recession and the rising cost of college, more families than ever are filing the forms this year, their first step toward Pell grants, Stafford loans, Perkins loans, work-study programs and much state aid. As of Feb. 15, the Department of Education had already received 2,213,408 forms, 20 percent more than at this time last year.

Some researchers have found that the form could be drastically simplified without any great impact on students’ aid eligibility. But experts warn that if the form becomes too simple, some states and universities might create new forms to get additional information.

“In the long run, I think the Fafsa will get easier,” said Lauren Asher, acting president of the Institute for College Access and Success. “But not this year.”

The Department of Education is considering two approaches to simplifying the form, said Robert Shireman, founder of the institute and currently a consultant to Mr. Duncan. One, proposed by former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in a Jan. 16 letter to Congress, would cut out most financial questions, asking only for adjusted gross income and the number of tax exemptions. Her sample form is two pages and has fewer than 30 questions. (The current form, with accompanying instructions, has more than five times as many words as this article.)

The other approach, favored by Ms. Asher and others, would let taxpayers direct the Internal Revenue Service to share information from their tax returns with the Education Department.

“It’s not yet been decided which way to go,” Mr. Shireman said. “One way is simple, using very few data elements, and the question is whether that’s enough. The other approach gets a little more data, but has the drawback that not everyone files taxes, especially lower-income people. And it raises some timing questions, since the Fafsa starts in January, and the information the I.R.S. has at that point is from the prior tax year.”

While some pilot projects may be ready for next year’s application season, he said, transforming the whole system will not be that quick, particularly since some changes would require Congressional action.

“One thing we will have, by August, is a Government Accountability Office analysis of the effects of the different options,” Mr. Shireman said.
The form becomes available each year on Jan. 1, and counselors urge families to file early because some aid is first come first served.

Free help for filing is widely available, from the Education Department, counselors and workshops like College Goal Sunday offering line-by-line guidance.

“It’s daunting,” said Janette Logan, a Connecticut mother who had her daughter, Kate Brown, in tow recently at College Goal Sunday at Norwalk Community College. “Kate met her deadlines in applying for college, and now this is mine.”

But after about an hour in the computer room, Ms. Logan realized that she did not have all the necessary information, so she and her daughter left without submitting the form. As the afternoon wore on, many families drifted away without finishing.

“I didn’t bring everything I need, but at least I know what to do now,” said Gary Curto, who had researched the form on the Internet, landed at fafsa.com, assumed it was the official government site and nearly paid for help.

“I was just about to pay, but my wife knew it was supposed to be free,” he said.

But Brigid Duffy, a mother of four in Lynn, Mass., decided the help was worth the cost.

“I know it sounds silly, but what appealed to me was that you could be done in 20 minutes,” said Ms. Duffy, who used fafsa.com for her son Griffin’s form. “I’d done the Fafsa myself in the past, for my 22-year-old, and it took five or six hours. It’s not fun.”

Without help, however, many give up. “Students who would be eligible for aid see how complex the form is, get what I call ‘form fright’ and just stop,” said Pat Watkins, director of financial aid at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Many affluent families now use high-priced financial advisers to maximize their eligibility for financial aid. Kalman A. Chany, the president of Campus Consultants Inc., attracts many families to his $1,450 service through financial aid presentations for parents at dozens of New York schools, including Dalton, Horace Mann and Brooklyn Tech.

“We’ve had a lot more people sign up this year, especially since October,” said Mr. Chany, whose clients’ children often apply to private colleges that require both the Fafsa and an even more detailed form, the College Board’s CSS Profile.

“We’re not like the services that just take the data and put it on the form,” said Mr. Chany, author of “Paying for College Without Going Broke.” “We analyze the clients’ situation and then tell them, ‘If you change this, your financial aid picture could be different.’ ”
Each current proposal for revising the federal aid form has drawbacks — and detractors.

“The financial aid community wants precision, and a formula that accurately assesses ability to pay, so there’s resistance to any approach that’s simpler but less precise,” said Mark Kantrowitz, president of finaid.org, a financial aid site. “There’s also a very real concern that if you discard the questions the states, or certain institutions, wanted answered, they’ll create their own financial aid forms, putting us right back where we were before the Fafsa.”

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Q. You are getting ready to apply for a job electronically, and your résumé is ready to go. Do you need to prepare a cover letter? Are they necessary in this day and age?


A. Cover letters are still necessary, and in a competitive market they can give you a serious edge if they are written and presented effectively.
Cover letters are a graceful way to introduce yourself, to convey your personality and to impress a hiring manager with your experience and your writing skills, said Katy Piotrowski, an author of career books and a career counselor based in Fort Collins, Colo. You can also tailor them to a specific company in ways that you cannot with a résumé.

Ms. Piotrowski recently had a job opening at her small company, Career Solutions Group, and she was dismayed when about a quarter of the 200 applicants did not send cover letters. Most were within five years of graduating from college, she said, reflecting a more informal mind-set among younger people.

Q. How should your cover letter be organized, how long should it be, and what should it say?


A. First, do your best to find the decision maker’s name, and use it in the salutation. If you are applying to a blind ad, say “Dear Sir or Madam” or “To the Hiring Manager.” Ms. Piotrowski said she received cover letters that had no salutation at all or began with “Hey there” — not a strong start. If you want to be on the safe side, use a colon after the salutation, although some people now feel it is permissible to use a comma in an e-mail message.

Your cover letter should be short — generally no longer than three or four paragraphs, said Debra Wheatman, a career expert at Vault, a jobs Web site.

In your first paragraph, explain why you are writing — it may be that you are answering an ad, that you were referred to the company through networking, or that you learned that the company is expanding, said Wendy S. Enelow, author of “Cover Letter Magic” and a professional résumé writer in Virginia.

In the middle paragraphs, explain why you are a good candidate, and show that you are knowledgeable about the company. Then convey a clear story about your career, and highlight specific past achievements. This can either be done as a narrative or in bullet points, Ms. Enelow said.

You can also highlight qualities you possess that may not fit the confines of a résumé, Ms. Wheatman said.

She once worked in human resources at Martha Stewart Living, and recalls reviewing applications for a chef in a test kitchen. One woman had a career in manufacturing, but her cover letter described how she had grown up in a family that was passionate about cooking and where she had frequently made meals from scratch. The woman got the job despite her peripheral work experience.

Finish your letter by indicating that you will follow up in the near future (and make good on that promise). Sign off with a “Sincerely,” “Cordially,” “Thank you for your consideration” or similar closer, followed by your name and, if you like, your e-mail address.

Q. Where should your cover letter appear, in an e-mail or in an attachment?


A. You can include your letter in the actual text of your e-mail message or place it above your résumé in an attachment. If you put it in a separate attachment from your résumé, you run the risk that a harried hiring manager will not click on it at all. If you place it in the text of your e-mail message, it should generally be shorter than if you use an attachment, Ms. Enelow said.

Then, if you really want to make an impression, make a hard copy of your cover letter and résumé and send it to the hiring manager by regular mail. Attach a handwritten note that says, “Second submission; I’m very interested,” Ms. Piotrowski said. “I’ve had clients double their rate of interviews simply from doing that,” she said.

Ms. Enelow calls this “double-hitting,” and says she has seen it work remarkably well. She said a senior-level client of hers got an interview and was hired because the hard copy of his cover letter and résumé reached the company president, whereas his electronic application was rejected by someone in human resources because it did not meet certain rigid criteria.

Q. What are some common mistakes in cover letters?


A. A cover letter with typos, misspellings and poor sentence structure may take you out of the running for a job. If you cannot afford to pay someone to review your cover letter and résumé, enlist a friend or a family member with good language skills to do it instead.

Another misguided thing people do is to make the cover letter all about them: “I did this, I’m looking for, I want to ... I, I, I.” Structure your letter so that it stresses the company and what you can do to help it reach its goals, Ms. Piotrowski and others said.

Another danger is including too much information — for example, very specific salary or geographic requirements, Ms. Enelow said. It is also unwise to point out that you do not meet all the criteria in the job description, she said. You can deal with that later, if you get an interview.
Hiring managers are looking for ways to exclude you as they narrow down their applications, she said. Do not give them that ammunition.


E-mail: ccouch@nytimes.com.

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Reading the news that General Motors and Chrysler are now lining up for another $20 billion or so in government aid — on top of the billions they’ve already received or requested — leaves me with the sick feeling that we are subsidizing the losers and for only one reason: because they claim that their funerals would cost more than keeping them on life support. Sorry, friends, but this is not the American way. Bailing out the losers is not how we got rich as a country, and it is not how we’ll get out of this crisis.

G.M. has become a giant wealth- destruction machine — possibly the biggest in history — and it is time that it and Chrysler were put into bankruptcy so they can truly start over under new management with new labor agreements and new visions. When it comes to helping companies, precious public money should focus on start-ups, not bailouts.

You want to spend $20 billion of taxpayer money creating jobs? Fine. Call up the top 20 venture capital firms in America, which are short of cash today because their partners — university endowments and pension funds — are tapped out, and make them this offer: The U.S. Treasury will give you each up to $1 billion to fund the best venture capital ideas that have come your way. If they go bust, we all lose. If any of them turns out to be the next Microsoft or Intel, taxpayers will give you 20 percent of the investors’ upside and keep 80 percent for themselves.

If we are going to be spending billions of taxpayer dollars, it can’t only be on office-decorating bankers, over-leveraged home speculators and auto executives who year after year spent more energy resisting changes and lobbying Washington than leading change and beating Toyota.

I’ve been traveling all across the country on a book tour, and every evening I return to my hotel with my pockets full of business cards from inventors in clean energy. Our country is still bursting with innovators looking for capital. So, let’s make sure all the losers clamoring for help don’t drown out the potential winners who could lift us out of this. Some of our best companies, such as Intel, were started in recessions, when necessity makes innovators even more inventive and risk-takers even more daring.

Yes, we have to shore up the banking system, which underpins everything; and finding a fair way to prevent hardworking people, who played by the rules, from losing their homes to foreclosure is both right and essential for stability.

But beyond that, let’s think, talk and plan in more aspirational ways. We’re down, but we’re not out. As we invest taxpayer money, let’s do it with an eye to starting a new generation of biotech, info-tech, nanotech and clean-tech companies, with real innovators, real 21st-century jobs and potentially real profits for taxpayers. Our motto should be, “Start-ups, not bailouts: nurture the next Google, don’t nurse the old G.M.’s.”
To be fair, the stimulus package that the Obama team and the Democrats in Congress recently passed — with virtually no Republican help — goes some way toward doing just that. Hat’s off for that. Now let’s do more.

The renewable-energy business — wind, solar and solar thermal — was almost dead in this country. Most new projects stopped last fall because they depended for their financing on selling their renewable energy tax credits to Wall Street firms. As those Wall Street firms went bust or suffered steep losses, they had no need for tax credits because they had no profits to offset. The stimulus package created a mechanism for renewable energy innovators to bypass Wall Street and monetize their tax credits directly through the U.S. Treasury, for any project that starts between now and the end of 2010.

The wind and solar industries in America “were dead in the fourth quarter,” said John Woolard, chief executive of BrightSource Energy, which builds and operates cutting-edge solar-thermal plants in the Mojave Desert. Almost five gigawatts of new solar-thermal projects — the equivalent of five big nuclear plants — at various stages of permitting were being held up because of a lack of financing.

“All of these projects will now go ahead,” said Woolard. “You are talking about thousands of jobs ... We really got something right in this legislation.”

These jobs will be in engineering, constructing and operating huge solar systems and wind farms and manufacturing new photovoltaics.
Together they will drive innovation in all these areas — and move wind and solar technology down the cost-volume learning curve so they can compete against fossil fuels and become export industries at the “ChinIndia price,” that is the price at which they can scale in China and India.

That is how taxpayer money should be used to stimulate: limited financing, for a limited time, targeted on an industry bristling with new technology start-ups that, with a little push from Uncle Sam, won’t just survive this crisis but help us thrive when it is over. We need, and the world needs, an America that is thriving not just surviving.

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a·wry
adv.
In a position that is turned or twisted toward one side; askew.
Away from the correct course; amiss. See synonyms at amiss.

stream·lined
adj.
Designed or arranged to offer the least resistance to fluid flow.
Reduced to essentials; lacking anything extra.
Effectively organized or simplified: a streamlined method of production.
Having flowing, graceful lines; sleek: a streamlined convertible.
Improved in appearance or efficiency; modernized.

daunt
tr.v., daunt·ed, daunt·ing, daunts.
To abate the courage of; discourage. See synonyms at dismay.

sal·u·ta·tion
n.
A polite expression of greeting or goodwill.
salutations Greetings indicating respect and affection; regards.
A gesture of greeting, such as a bow or kiss.
A word or phrase of greeting used to begin a letter or message.
salutational sal'u·ta'tion·al adj.
USAGE NOTE    The informality of electronic mail poses a problem for the traditional norms of epistolary style. In a formal e-mail message, there is nothing out of place in beginning with a formula such as Dear Professor Fillmore and closing with Very truly yours. Since e-mail is a relatively new medium for communication, however, set phrases for informal greetings and closings are still being established. At times, the salutation and valediction are left out entirely, even when the correspondents do not know each other well. Informal salutations include common greetings like Hi or simply the addressee's name. People have been much more creative with the closing, employing terms such as best wishes and cheers, the latter term previously associated with British use and perhaps adopted because it sounds a neutral note between the kind of closings used in letters and phone calls. Still more informal is TTFN, an abbreviation for ta-ta for now, another Briticism.

fore·close
v.tr.
To deprive (a mortgagor) of the right to redeem mortgaged property, as when payments have not been made.
To bar an equity or a right to redeem (a mortgage).
To exclude or rule out; bar.
To settle or resolve beforehand.
v.intr.
To bar an equity or a right to redeem a mortgage.