A woman came to me genuinely upset. Her daughter had been admitted to a good list of schools, NYU among them.

The aid offers came back at zero.

Not small. Zero. Nothing. Nada.

She ran a successful contracting business, she's sharp, she'd filled out the forms herself, and she could not understand what had gone wrong. She hired me essentially to look over her shoulder. I told her honestly I couldn't promise anything.

I found it almost immediately.

She had reported what her business was actually worth.

That sounds like the correct thing to do. In the real world it is the correct thing to do. On the FAFSA it's the wrong number, because the FAFSA does not define business value the way you and your accountant do. For most families, the value of a business they own is treated as zero on the FAFSA.

She had equipment. She had real assets. She had a real, valuable company. And none of that was supposed to go on that form.

So we corrected the figure, and my wife Pearl refiled the applications to ...