Let's say your family did everything right. Your kid studied hard, got into a decent school, borrowed what it took, and walked across that stage four years later with a diploma and a handshake. That's the deal, right?

Education equals opportunity equals wealth. Except somewhere between the commencement speech and the first loan payment, the math stopped working.

We ended our last piece with a question every parent should be asking before writing a tuition check: what does this decsion actually cost in wealth-building years? But there's a second question that almost nobody is asking. It's more person, more uncomfortable, and for millions of parents, it's already to late to avoid

What does the wrong college decision cost you?

The first two articles in this series made the case most parents didn't want to hear.

The data was never meant to be comforting. But data without a framework is just anxiety. So here is the framework.

For several articles, we have been making the case — with Federal Reserve data, National Association of Realtors (NAR) homeownership statistics, and a decade of earnings research — that the conventional college promise is empirically broken for a significant share of American families. As it turns out, Congress has reached the same conclusion.