Every mutual fund ad that touts returns must warn you: past performance does not guarantee future results. College is one of the largest purchases most families make. It is sold largely on past performance, and the pitch carries no such warning. Worse, at selective schools the track record is built from hand-picked students. Learn to…

The Department of Education put the softest possible earnings warning on the FAFSA, after the list is set, for a thin slice of students. A quarter of those who saw it moved. Imagine what an honest one would do.

A low acceptance rate is mostly arithmetic, and it tells you far less about quality than it seems. How the ranking trap steers families away from the right schools.

The famous college payoff is $1.2 million. A study that controls for who goes to college cuts its own estimate of that payoff by about 30 percent. Price it like an investment and the median degree turns negative. Even some of the smartest people in the field, evidence in hand, were so convinced of the…

The discount-rate fight decides only whether the median graduate wins. A degree cannot be discounted like a Treasury bond, and even a generous 3 percent rate leaves nearly a third of four-year colleges underwater at full price. The problems underneath never move with the rate.