Mark Kantrowitz breeds hairless cats. He solves complicated math problems. He collects aboriginal art, folds elaborate origami, restores early battery-operated toys. And then there’s the hobby that has turned into his career: knowing absolutely everything about financial aid.
Mr. Kantrowitz, 46, is the brains behind FinAid, an encyclopedic Web site on the topic, and Fastweb, a scholarship search site. He devotes a good part of his considerable mental energy to studying the inner workings of the financial-aid machine, calling attention to its flaws, and explaining it to the rest of us.
His policy papers go out to dozens of legislative aides, among others, and his authoritative answers to the questions of financial-aid administrators have turned up on a professional e-mail list. For students and families struggling to understand aid-award letters or manage student loans, he acts as a lifeline. And while Mr. Kantrowitz associates with all of those stakeholders, he doesn’t fit in any group. At various times, he’s taken positions that align with different camps.
By his estimate, he has been quoted in more than 5,000 news articles in the past five years. That sounds like a lot. But when I call him, which I do all the time, he is often on the other line with another reporter.
While he’s technically had co-workers, Mr. Kantrowitz is really a one-man show. He works out of a big, ornate house outside Pittsburgh, oddly outfitted to meet the needs of his family and their eight pets. The laundry room, for instance, houses a three-level, custom-built cat cabinet. A fenced-in chute leads through the garage so the dogs can let themselves in and out.
The vast walkout basement—stacked high with enough stuff that it must be navigated single file—serves as Mr. Kantrowitz’s office and museum of sorts. “My commute is zero minutes after breakfast,” he says. When he sits down to work, he is surrounded by his favorite things: toy ray guns, stained glass he’s made, a two-gigabyte library of financial-aid documents. He knows his collections inside and out.
This basement is his kingdom. “I have my own little environment here,” Mr. Kantrowitz says. But not for long.
The Tuesday I went to visit, a real-estate agent and a designer were on hand, checking up on the transformation of the teal dining room and the grand foyer, until recently a bright salmon pink. We all parked in the cul-de-sac so pavers could pour a new driveway.
Mr. Kantrowitz is moving to Las Vegas. He has already walked away from his Web sites, leaving them with Monster Worldwide, to take a new job, which he hopes will broaden his reach. In the months ahead, he will begin overhauling a suite of underdeveloped college-related sites for the company Edvisors, which was recently acquired by College Loan Corporation, a former lender. More so than his original sites, he says, the new ones can be tailored to today’s Web surfers and their short attention spans.
For this Mr. Kantrowitz is leaving behind his domain, his familiar routine, and the Web sites that built his reputation. But he weighed his choice with the same rational detachment he brings to everything. He doesn’t make uncalculated bets.
Ahead of the Feds
Some of Mr. Kantrowitz’s success he owes to first-mover advantage.
As a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he used math and science scholarships to cover most of his education. He found them on his own, not on a list anywhere, so he started keeping one himself. The publisher Prentice Hall caught wind of it and asked him to write a book. When it came out, in 1993, questions about paying for college poured in.
So in the early days of the Internet, Mr. Kantrowitz, by then a computer-science graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, added a page of consumer information to his personal site. Soon after, he spun it into a separate site.
He then started working for the software lab of a Japanese company, on statistical language modeling and information-retrieval algorithms. But on his own time, he built up his site, adding more information, new loan calculators, and scholarship-search tools. In 2000, Mr. Kantrowitz made publishing FinAid and Fastweb—a service he had helped move online—his full-time job, to the tune of a 40-percent pay cut.
Students weren’t his only users. He was “the first on the block to give us aid administrators tools to use with families to make financial aid make more sense,” says Cathy Simoneaux, associate director of financial aid at Loyola University New Orleans.
Some aid administrators have been skeptical that a person who’s never done their highly technical job could possibly understand it. But Mr. Kantrowitz argues that being an outsider actually makes him more useful. Certainly, many say, he produces more research and analysis than aid administrators would have time to do.
In the late 1990s, Mr. Kantrowitz beat the U.S. Department of Education to publishing online its own information for students and families, says Dan Madzelan, who retired from the department in 2012 after a three-decade career. Even when the department caught up, its staff had an easier time finding things on FinAid, Mr. Madzelan says.
In Mr. Kantrowitz, the federal official found a kindred spirit, the rare person as fascinated by the minutiae of the financial-aid-eligibility formula as he was. But the free agent wouldn’t have been a good fit for the department, with its bureaucracy and hierarchy, Mr. Madzelan says.
Over the years, Mr. Kantrowitz shepherded FinAid through a number of acquisitions. A venture capitalist bought it, then Fastweb did; later Monster bought both sites. And Mr. Kantrowitz has clearly done well for himself. Beyond his salary, he has benefited from a successful land deal and smart stock picks—but never for loan companies or for-profit colleges, he says.
Financial aid fascinates Mr. Kantrowitz. The system, to him, is the key to solving a complex puzzle: how to make college more accessible to less-advantaged students. He sees that as the mission underlying his math. “I’m always focused,” he says, “on what’s in students’ best interest.”
Though data and analysis are his bread and butter, Mr. Kantrowitz has been known to express strong opinions on policy issues. He favors requiring colleges to send standardized aid-award letters, which puts him at odds with the aid administrators’ professional association. As for the recently doubled interest rate on subsidized Stafford Loans, which student advocacy groups have denounced, it’s “not a major disaster,” he wrote online, since most borrowers won’t have to pay much more each month.
Some observers have wondered if he has another agenda. They saw, for instance, that he let private lenders advertise on FinAid, despite his advice that students take out federal loans first.
“Folks have questioned his affiliations and ties,” says Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “But I personally haven’t seen an instance where his papers or research has appeared biased.” Ask aid administrators, and many will say the same.
As for the ads on FinAid, they’re clearly labeled, Mr. Kantrowitz says. “Ads are ads, and they don’t own the site.”
The problem solver is almost interchangeable with his Web sites: Both he and they are repositories of information and analysis. What the sites will become without him is not yet clear. A spokesperson for Monster said in an e-mail that they would continue to offer “the best financial-aid information and tools for students.”
Mr. Kantrowitz’s move to Edvisors, meanwhile, could spur more questions over where he stands. College Loan Corporation, its parent company, used to participate in the federal Family Education Loan program and offer private student loans. Like many big lenders of the time, it was part of a settlement in 2007 over improper relationships with colleges. And Edvisors’ network includes Web sites that direct students to private lenders and paid help in filing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa. Those relationships are unlikely to sit well with student advocates.
On the private loans, Mr. Kantrowitz says, his position is the same as it was at FinAid. And the Fafsa help isn’t so different from paid tax preparation, he says, so long as services file the form accurately, on time, and for a reasonable fee—and clearly tell students they can do it themselves free.
Over all, Mr. Kantrowitz isn’t concerned about his reputation: “I’d think people would have gotten to know me and my track record.”
Relentlessly Rational
What he worries about is the time he’ll lose on his 12-minute commute in Las Vegas. In the basement office, he’s used to having, steps from his desk, a laptop set up in front of his toilet, which features a remote-controlled seat with a warmer and night light.
A typical day for Mr. Kantrowitz begins with reading his e-mail and his own writing from the night before. He takes calls from families, guidance counselors, aid administrators, and policy advocates. Usually, he says, he’ll spend four to six hours answering questions from reporters. Between calls, he runs data analyses. Only later, at night, will he do “real work,” he says: writing policy papers and advice columns on consumer issues. He subsists on three to four hours of sleep a night—a bit more, he says, if the next day entails “trying to do something very technical.”
The day I visited, a reporter called to ask how student loans affect the broader economy. Something people neglect to ask, Mr. Kantrowitz replied, is what situation borrowers would be in if they hadn’t gone to college. Then he discussed how students can restrict their borrowing, including by attending a less expensive college, so long as they factor in the time it will take to graduate. Always he comes back to the facts.
He usually hears from more than 1,000 students, graduates, and families a year. For overburdened borrowers, his advice is sound, but it can seem a little harsh. A cellphone, he’ll say, is a “want,” not a “need.” He is relentlessly sensible, the kind of rational actor that economists pretend we all are. He tells prospective students to base their borrowing on their projected postcollege income.
Mr. Kantrowitz retrieves information from his head the way most people find it in a book. What percentage of borrowers have debt over a certain level? When did that policy change? Where does it say that in the regulations? His memory isn’t photographic, he says, but eidetic, meaning that he won’t remember every word on a page but will recall the basic outline of what it said and where.
He thrives on being a go-to guy, master of a given topic, financial aid or otherwise. In all of Pennsylvania, he boasts, he is one of only two people who breed Peterbalds, a Russian breed of hairless cat.
He holds several patents—including one for spelling-and-grammar correction and another for minimizing the cost of follow-up medical care—and loves the tinkering of applied science. The copier over by the pinball machine? A new one would go for $15,000, he says, but he bought his broken, for $600, and fixed it.
Right now Mr. Kantrowitz is running an experiment on his children’s college savings. Wondering if he could beat the standard graduated plan his son is in with a different strategy, he planned to invest aggressively for a longer period and then become more conservative more quickly for his daughter, who is younger. So far it’s working.
Even when he battled cancer, in 2003, Mr. Kantrowitz maintained a cerebral approach. He kept an online diary focused on medical details rather than soul-searching. In one of the more emotional passages, he wrote: “Yes, I have cancer, and yes, I now have only one testicle, and yes, there’s a good chance I may die. ... I prefer to be pragmatic and rational about it.”
While his cross-country move will be an adjustment, Mr. Kantrowitz knows that getting out of the basement will be good for him. Even a creature of habit has something to gain from venturing beyond his comfort zone. And he is slowly packing up. The day I was there, exactly one shelf of one bookcase had been cleared. And he had been selling the occasional item on eBay, only if it commanded what he considered a fair price.
In the middle of the afternoon, the real-estate agent checked in again. She showed him the decorator’s bill and brought up the basement. She added, delicately, that the decorator was also an organizer. She could help him pack up. One look at Mr. Kantrowitz’s face made clear that this was not about to happen. He likes to do things his own way.
