Twelve colleges account for more than 10 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, and the study behind that statistic says removing the rich-student admissions boosts would barely change the family backgrounds of those CEOs. Half the top-earner gap is the students. The typical student gains modestly at most. What is left is lottery odds, priced for…

On the money side, the study everyone cites in the prestige debate measured earnings only. It never subtracted cost or taxes from those earnings, or discounted them. Add what prestige costs and Dale and Krueger’s famous finding gets stronger: in my model, at full sticker price, 40 of the 81 scoreable colleges that admit fewer…

Georgetown’s underemployment report admits what the field rarely says: nobody has settled how to measure it. It proposes an adjustment, and the right response to a real idea is a test. Read its own tables down the column and the spread inside one degree is wider than the premium for having it. The $24,000 row…

A new college-value study making the rounds fixed three flaws skeptics spent years flagging, then stopped before the money math. Discount its own headline number at my 7.8 percent rate and $86,806 becomes about $24,800. The debate is not over. It finally has its real starting point.

Sort Georgetown’s ROI rankings by the forty-year column and the lowest number in it is positive $361,000. In their most recent year, the ten-year column runs to negative $157,000. Same schools, same data. The sign is the window, not the school. Ask the question the table never does: compared to what?