Most of that list, beyond the first question, is useless, or nearly so. They are great questions to ask of for-profit trade schools, but they aren’t going to be much use in evaluating selective colleges.
- The percentage of students who graduate in 4 years is going to track closely the wealth of the college and of its students. Students from affluent families don't need to work to pay for college, and don't run out of tuition money, and that's what keeps lots of students from graduating in four years. Wealthy colleges offer lots of sections of required courses, which handles another thing that extends college for many, and they provide lots of academic supports for struggling students. Finally, the colleges that really look good on this criterion are the colleges that only admit kids who are basically guaranteed to graduate on time because of their personalities. Other colleges, that may see their mission more in terms of providing opportunity to students, may take some risks, and when you take some risks you lose on some of them.
What you really want to know is what students are at risk for not graduating in four years, do those students run up additional costs by extending college, and what does the college do to help students avoid paying extra for their degrees or being stuck with debt and no degree. Those things are no so easily quantified.
- The refund policy is super-important if your child has a horrible injury or mental breakdown early in a term. If that happens, you will really wish you had known the answer to this question and somehow been able to plan for it. So, go ahead and ask. It will make you feel like a complete idiot three years from now when you don't remember what the answer was -- or the answer has changed -- and you find out that you are two days too late for your child to withdraw and get a refund for the semester's tuition. Except that for 99% of families it will never matter.
- The employment rate of graduates tells you nothing, because it combines computer engineers, who damn sure better be employed unless they decide to surf for a few months before cashing in, with fine arts majors who will only be employed someplace other than a food serving establishment if they have given up. Plus, in case you haven't heard, employment is sort of 20th Century; today it's all about the Gig Economy and the 1099.
What you really want to know is how the career services office works, and why its public information isn’t as awesome as the University of Pennsylvania’s. (Look it up; it’s awesome.)
- If you pay any attention at all, you know that there is practically no consistency from one college to the next in how they report their Clery Act data. Sometimes, there's practically no consistency within a single college. It's silly to compare isolated, well-defined rural campuses and open urban ones (and you don't need Clery Act data to know that if a college is in the middle of a poor neighborhood and not locked down like Stalag 17 it will have some street crime).
You want to know what the college does to keep students safe, and how many students get hurt seriously. You especially want to know what colleges do to keep students safe from one another, because that’s where the real danger is, and also where the problems most difficult to solve are.