The system says a bachelor’s degree means $1.2 million more in median lifetime earnings. A New York Times essay says business school, one of the biggest parts of higher education, should be abolished. They can’t both be right. They can both be wrong, in the same way: each reads research from too high up, and the student at the margin stands to pay for a finding about someone else.
In 1982, In Search of Excellence studied only what it called America’s best-run companies. When an analyst checked the worst, the winners’ record proved no guide to what came next. The $1.2 million college pitch makes the same mistake. It leaves out the students who enrolled, borrowed and left without a degree. Did anyone check the failures?
California’s taxes look nearly flat. Look inside the total and you find a steeply progressive income tax offset by a sales tax and a rent estimate that fall hardest on the poor. That changes one argument around the 2026 billionaire tax.
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.
Families make one of the largest financial decisions of their lives on the strength of someone else’s story, usually told with affection by someone it worked for. Here is what the story leaves out, who pays for the gap, and the six questions any family can ask to close it.
Michigan said it will cover first-semester grades, and the internet answered in a day. Some replies were careful, most were not, and nobody could tell them apart without doing the work. That is a market failure with a Nobel Prize behind it. It explains why good arguments go unread, why I chose to argue without standing anyway, and what anyone with an audience can do about it in about a minute.