Gary Stocker shows how to use the Parents College Viability App to screen private colleges by enrollment, graduation rates, and admissions yield from 2014 to 2021. The tool uses green, yellow, and red flags to highlight financially healthy schools versus struggling ones, helping families avoid institutions at risk of closure.
Chapters
Hi, this is Gary Stocker. This is a tutorial on using the 2023 Parents College Viability App the Essentials version. And the Parents College Viability App is designed to help students and their families rule out financially challenged private colleges from their initial application list with 4 financial indicators. And I'll talk about that as I show you how to use the app. You can see on the left-hand side that all 50 states are involved. We'll select on those in a minute. And over 1,300 private colleges throughout the United States are also listed. And we have some categories, and you can read them on your own, but for the most part, we'll be looking at regional colleges, which is a majority of all these colleges. There is a category for religious colleges and for specialty colleges like business colleges, allied health and healthcare colleges, those kind of things. And you also note the elite and super elite private colleges. Those are essentially the top 50 private colleges in terms of 2021 endowment. But let's take a look at the app itself. And let's go ahead, I'm just going to grab the state of Iowa. So I'm going to click on Iowa, and I just want to look at the regional colleges, so I'm going to look at regional. And 26 colleges. So here's a couple ways to use the app to navigate. If you want to look at all of the colleges in Iowa, there's 26 of them. And we do the navigation from this bar here in the middle of the screen. So I'm going to click on 8-year changes. And what we'll see then is for those 26 colleges, the changes associated with these column headings across the top. And so it meant it's tracking 8 years from 2014 through 2021, the values in enrollment and admissions yield and graduation rate and 6-year graduation rate and percent admitted. And you can actually sort all of these by colleges. You can do it alphabetically by clicking on the college heading So it goes from A to Z. You can sort each of these by largest to smallest like you can in any database. So Moriahsha had a large increase in enrollment. Um, we can also do it the other way around, click on it again and see a lot of colleges in Iowa had decreasing enrollment growth over the years. So we've looked at that, that's too many colleges. What am I going to do with that? Let's go back to the home page and really I'm just interested in a handful of colleges. So I'll just grab these first 5. And to do that, I'm pressing Ctrl-click. So I've now got 5 colleges. See that number adjusted right here to 5 colleges. And now I will go to a different place. We're going to go to— we'll go to enrollment quickly. So I'm going to click on enrollment, FTE enrollment, and all the definitions and the way to do the analysis and interpretation is on the right-hand side. So we can see these 5 colleges and that we can see Allen College over the course of 2014 through 2021, uh, had enrollment growth of about 80 students. The other 4 colleges had a decrease in enrollment over those 8 years. And again, we can click on that to see the numbers over 5. It's not that big of a deal, but more importantly, we can see the percent change. The last thing you'll notice is these color indicators on the right-hand side. This is a comparative resource, a comparative tool that I put in there, and it's going to make sense. It's green, yellow, red. Green are the top performers in any given category. Yellow are those middle-of-the-pack kind of performers. And red are the ones for this category, enrollment in this case, whose numbers are not that good. So we've looked at enrollment. Let's go back to the home page where we navigate everywhere else. Let's take a look then at— we'll just look at 4-year graduation rates for the same 5 colleges. Again, we can see that we'll pick Clark University. Their 4-year graduation rates have essentially been flat over the 8 years reported. There was some movement in between those 8 years. We can look at Buena Vista, who's had some significant improvement in their 4-year graduation rate. And again, I offer some guidance on how to interpret these data over here. For example, for 4-year graduation rates, I use a threshold of 50%. If a college is not graduating more than 50% of its students in a 4-year time frame, I call that a coin toss college because it's not any better than flipping a coin to see whether it's heads or tails, whether your student will graduate or not. So that's one way to look at it. That's explained thoroughly here. Let me go back to the home page to navigate to the last one I want to show you. And that, the sixth year, has the same kind of numbers and some similar kinds of interpretation. Let's look at admissions yield for these same 5 colleges. Admissions yield represents the percent of students that a college or university accepted that actually show up on day 1 and pay tuition. So the higher the number, the better. Now you can see some of these folks aren't doing a particularly good job of reporting the data. You'll see that from time to time. We can look at, you know, Central College, Buena Vista, Clark, University, and you know, the analysis over here. But from my perspective, you know, a 22%, uh, yield, admissions yield, also known as a popularity indicator because it reflects how popular a college is with the students that have been accepted. 20, you know, 23%, not bad, not good, but not bad. Anytime you get into a teen number or lower, you have to worry maybe that the market is saying, yeah, I think I have better options. And so let's go back home to the home page. So I'll click on the home page there in the upper right. Let's go ahead and clear the search because we want to do many different searches. So we'll clear the search. It will give us all 1,300 colleges back again, and we can just go to Pennsylvania as an example. Click all the, all of the regional colleges in Pennsylvania. And this is an example when you, you've got 72 colleges, there's lots So let's just look at the enrollment in Pennsylvania. And you know, with 72 colleges, you're not gonna get them all on one screen, and it's unlikely many of you will be looking at 72 colleges for your student or students. And again, that search function, that sort function exists. We can look at those that have performed well. Look at the 2021 data. We can see how big these colleges are. So Drexel at almost 20,000 is by far the biggest. We can click on that again to see the smallest, and we can see that Grass College— Gratz College is at 232, the smallest. One more time, then we'll click on the percent change to reinforce and show again the green is a good indicator, the yellow not bad but not great, and then as we scroll down, you'll see a lot of colleges in Pennsylvania and really private colleges throughout the country with really bad enrollment numbers. And finally, let's go back home. And I want to show you a more thorough definition of the terms and definitions used in the College Viability App, the Essentials version. So one of the navigation buttons is Terms and Definitions, so we'll go there. And you'll see I provided some guidance. It's a little bit more in-depth, more detailed about not just the individual fields, but about the College Viability App itself. And the app does not predict whether a college will close. But it's a tool I would encourage you to use as the first resource to determine if you want to put a college on your selection list, application list, or not. We live in a time when there are regular closures of private colleges. It is reasonable speculation there will continue to be more closures, consolidations, cutting of classes, faculty, staff, those kind of things. And I know from the research that I have done that when a college closes, be it public or private, the trauma to the students and their families is substantial. So as you look at making that college list, I would offer the College Viability App is the first place to go. There are different versions. I've shown you the basic version right here, the, the Essentials version, and use it to prepare your list of initial colleges for consideration for your student or students. This is Gary Stocker with College Viability.
