Applicants

The Obama administration's new plan to stimulate refinancings of FHA mortgages is likely to help large numbers of homeowners — even those who are deeply underwater — cut their monthly costs by switching to a loan with a rate below 4%. Here's a quick overview of the "streamline refi" program and what it will take for you to qualify. First, the baseline criteria: Your current home loan must be FHA-insured and must have been put on the Federal Housing Administration's books no later than May 31, 2009.

The number of eligible California high school graduates entering the state's public four-year universities has plunged in the last five years, as budget-strapped institutions increasingly adopt practices to reduce enrollment, a new study has found. At University of California and California State University campuses, enrollment rates dropped by one-fifth, to fewer than 18% of all state high school graduates in 2010, from about 22% in 2007. The report, released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California, found that these declines have occurred even as demand has risen: The number of high school graduates in California reached an all-time high of 405,000 in 2010; the number of seniors who completed college admission requirements increased dramatically, as did the number of students taking and passing Advanced Placement exams.

The student's admissions essay for Boston University's MBA program was about persevering in the business world. "I have worked for organizations in which the culture has been open and nurturing, and for others that have been elitist. In the latter case, arrogance becomes pervasive, straining external partnerships. " Another applicant's essay for UCLA's Anderson School of Management was about his father. He "worked for organizations in which the culture has been open and nurturing, and for others that have been elitist.

That stereotypical image of the American teenager glued to the phone needs an update. A new study from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project found that 37% of Internet users ages 12 to 17 participate in video chats using such applications as Skype, Google Talk and iChat - and girls are more likely to engage in them than boys. "As more and more devices in our lives have video capabilities - as laptops and computers come with built-in video cameras, and many smartphones have cameras that allow for video chatting, for taking videos - teens are taking advantage of that," said Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist with Pew Research Center.

Even though the labor market is improving, thousands of unemployed Californians are caught in a bind: Some employers only want to hire them if they already have a job. Some companies state that plainly in employment ads. Others are more discreet, screening out jobless workers during the initial application process. Discrimination? Perhaps. But so far it's legal. But it won't be if a bill introduced this week by Assemblyman Michael Allen (D-Santa Rosa) is approved by California lawmakers.

Want to sink your chances of landing a job? Here are the top reasons applicants made bad impressions during interviews, according to a survey of 2,400 employers by the CareerBuilder online job website: •Answered a cellphone or sent a text during the interview •Dressed inappropriately •Appeared uninterested •Appeared arrogant •Spoke negatively about a current or previous employer •Chewed gum •Didn't...

Hundreds of legal immigrants in Southern California who have been waiting years for citizenship will have their cases resolved as a result of a settlement with the federal government, attorneys announced Monday. The immigrants were stuck in lengthy delays as they waited for the FBI to complete their security name-checks and for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to approve their citizenship applications. The settlement, approved Friday in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, sets a six-month deadline for the government to decide on hundreds of citizenship applications from Los Angeles and surrounding counties.

The Supreme Court reinstated a discrimination ruling Monday in favor of 6,000 black applicants for Chicago firefighting jobs in the 1990s, saying they had properly sued after it was clear that an entry-level test had a "disparate impact" based on race. The ruling leaves public employers in a pickle if they are required by law to use tests for deciding who should be hired or promoted. After two Supreme Court decisions with very different results in the last year, public employers can be sued for using tests that screen out most blacks and other minorities; they also can be sued by high-scoring white applicants if the test scores go unused.

Jane Applegate's column on employment background checks ("Checking Up on Job Applicants," Dec. 26) was troubling from a privacy perspective. One background check company was quoted as saying, "We find some form of negative information in about 25% of the individuals screened." What the article does not point out is that the computer databases which such companies use to compile dossiers are far from error-free. And even if accurate, such reports can contain misleading information that could harm applicants' chances of getting hired.

The Times reported a press conference by Alan Nelson, commissioner of the Federal Immigration and Naturalization Service, and a press conference held by the regional commissioner, Harold Ezell. In The Times' report, Ezell is quoted as saying that INS officials have "done everything we can" to attract applicants (for legal resident status). We beg to differ with Commissioner Ezell. The best thing INS officials can do to attract applicants is to "deport" Ezell back to the thing he knows best how to do: stuffing wienies with his previous employer.

Question: I just renewed my passport. Why does the U.S. Department of State send the new passport and the old passport separately? I know the Postal Service needs all the business it can get, but two mailings instead of one seems wasteful. Daniel Fink Beverly Hills Answer: Like Fink, I just got a new passport and was puzzled about why it arrived in one heavy envelope and the documentation I had provided in another. I was smugly certain it had to do with security, and in my smugness, I disregarded the lesson of Ockham's (sometimes spelled Occam's)

WASHINGTON — How do you stack up as a potential mortgage candidate in this year's increasingly tough underwriting environment? Do you have the right stuff — credit score, debt-to-income ratio, equity or down payment — to get you through the minefield? A new statistical analysis, based on a large sample of all mortgage applications approved and denied in recent months, offers valuable benchmarks for anyone thinking about financing a home purchase or refinancing an existing loan.

Facebook has been on a bit of a mobile spending spree lately. The world's biggest social network has acquired the team of developers behind customer-loyalty application Tagtile; the start-up said on its website that Facebook was "acquiring substantially all of our assets. " Financial details of the deal weren't released. "It's a huge opportunity for us to take our goal -- helping businesses grow -- and do it on a much, much bigger scale than we could have on our own," Tagtile said.

Criminal background checks conducted on prospective employees routinely contain errors, mismatch people or misclassify criminal offenses, according to a report by the National Consumer Law Center. The report, released Wednesday, said that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, employers increasingly have conducted background checks on prospective hires. That has created a booming industry of Internet companies that cull public information databases for employers. But the information produced by some of those firms is often riddled with errors.

WASHINGTON — A little-noticed mortgage rule change that took effect April 1 could create hassles for significant numbers of home buyers who plan to use low-down-payment FHA financing this spring. The change affects anyone with one or more "collection" accounts buried away in national credit bureau files. These include medical, student loan, retail and other debts reported as unpaid — correctly or incorrectly — by creditors and subsequently sent to collection agencies. In a reversal of its previous policy, the Federal Housing Administration says it will no longer approve applications when the borrowers have outstanding collections or disputed accounts with an aggregate of $1,000 or more of unpaid bills.

­The Obama administration is proposing to make it easier for illegal immigrants who are family members of American citizens to apply for legal permanent residency. On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security will post for public comment an administrative change intended to reduce the time illegal immigrants would have to spend away from their families while applying for legal status, officials said. The current system requires the applicant to first leave the U.S. to seek a legal visa, but under the proposed change illegal immigrants could claim the time apart from a spouse, child or parent would create “extreme hardship” and allow them to remain in the U.S. as they begin the process.

Re: "Trapped: It's hard to get a job if your credit is bad," June 7: Employers really couldn't care less what kind of financial problems their job applicants are having. But with hundreds of applicants for one position, credit checks are an easy way to reduce the number of applicants. However, people who are planning to go to college should be aware that college may actually keep you from getting a job, because many employers won't accept your application if you have a student loan default on your record.

Re "How many blacks are enough?" Opinion, June 21 Has UCLA failed to increase black student matriculation? The answer is a definite yes. Is this due to being lax or because white elitism has always depended on black marginalization? Absolutely not. Having served on the UCLA dental school admissions committee for 20 years, I can say that we were always trying to have a diverse student body to serve all Californians. We looked for reasons to accept students rather than reject them.

Be careful about the personal information and opinions you broadcast online, we are wisely and repeatedly told. Anyone from a prospective employer to an insurance company might be interested in details that you'll regret divulging someday. But employers cross a bright, hard line when they demand, as some do, that job applicants divulge their passwords to Facebook and other social media sites, or have them log on so the interviewer can scrutinize their likes and dislikes, their relationships, their photos, their friends' personal information.

Your smartphone: It's not just for texting, tweeting, waging war against little green pigs and - oh, right - calling people. It's also for making yourself a happier, less stressed-out, more self-aware person. Really, there's an app for that. Any number of apps. They come with names like Mood Swing and CBTReferee and BrainFreqz, and at their best, they offer users "'treatment' in the palm of their hand," says Dr. John Luo, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA.