The week's best financial advice

Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial advice, gathered from around the web:

When elite schools aren't worth it

Don't assume that attending a prestigious school automatically translates into a higher salary after graduation, said Eric R. Eide and Michael J. Hilmer in The Wall Street Journal. An analysis of the salaries of thousands of college graduates a decade after they got out of school found that prestigious diplomas do boost earnings significantly for business and other liberal arts majors. However, in fields like science, technology, engineering, and math, "they simply don't make a difference." The average starting salary differs by less than $1,000 for engineering graduates of the Ivy League's University of Pennsylvania and those of Texas A&M, for instance, but the tuition difference is more than $167,000. That means STEM students could be ringing up unnecessary debt going for a brand-name degree.

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The subscriptions you forgot about

A new online service helps cancel all those subscriptions you're no longer using and forgot that you're paying for, said Ron Lieber in The New York Times. Trim, a personal finance startup, will scan your credit- and debit-card statements for recurring charges. Then, if you'd like to cancel any of the subscriptions, Trim will reach out to the service provider on your behalf. It can't fulfill all requests. Some companies need to hear directly from customers, or require sensitive information — like Social Security numbers — that Trim won't touch. Trim says the services that customers are most likely to axe are credit-monitoring services, gym memberships, and in-flight Wi-Fi passes.

Winning with 'superstocks'

You've probably never heard of Balchem Corp., the best-performing U.S. stock over the past 30 years, said Jason Zweig at The Wall Street Journal. The obscure chemical company's shares are up an incredible 107,099 percent, making it the leader of a group of 44 "superstocks," including Apple, Home Depot, and Nike, with returns of 10,000 percent or more over the past three decades. But don't "drop everything" to buy Balchem or its superperforming peers. The lesson here is the value of index funds. Most "superstocks" have gone through a "near-death experience"; Balchem and Apple, for example, both lost more than 50 percent of their value in the 1990s. Most professional stock pickers would unload their investments at that point, but index funds "cling to their holdings through even the worst downdrafts." So when a stock becomes a superstock, index investors are there for the upswing.