In this presentation, Gary Stocker of College Viability walks viewers through a data‑driven “top‑to‑bottom” analysis of Pennsylvania’s private colleges using IPEDS data from 2014‑2021. He focuses on four key performance indicators: (1) enrollment change, (2) admissions yield (which he calls the “popularity indicator”), (3) four‑year undergraduate graduation rates, and (4) endowment assets. For each metric he displays the top 10 and bottom 10 institutions, highlights notable trends, and explains why the figures matter to prospective students, families, and the broader market. Specific examples include Thomas Jefferson University’s enrollment surge, Drexel and LaSalle’s enrollment declines, Villanova, Grove City, and Lafayette’s strong graduation rates, low‑performing schools such as Theo College and Mount Aloysius, and the stark contrast in endowment size— with a $50 million minimum threshold for viability. Stocker interprets red‑flag trends (declining enrollment, low yield, poor graduation rates, weak endowments) as market signals that these colleges may be struggling financially or academically, urging viewers to use the data when making college decisions. He concludes by noting that similar reports will be produced for other states and encourages viewers to follow the College Viability blog for updates.
Chapters
This College Viability Report, the top-to-bottom reports as we like to call them, is going to focus on a single state, and the lucky state today is Pennsylvania. We're going to look at some top and bottom colleges across the four IPEDS reports that you see on the screen: enrollment, admissions yield, something we like to call popularity indicator, the 4-year graduation rates, and and the endowment. And what we've done is we've taken the IPEDS data— remember, that's data that colleges themselves submit to the National Center for Education Statistics— and we use our own College Viability app to compile the data to make it easy for you to read and to compare. And so we're looking at the top 10 private colleges in Pennsylvania by enrollment change over the last 8 years. and you can see we go from 2014 to 2021. You can see the individual years. For example, Thomas Jefferson University has gone up from 3,000 students in 2014 to almost 7,000 students, and appreciable growth is noted on the right-hand side. We do have some conditional formatting. Green is really good growth, yellow less so, and there's red indicators that aren't present on this one. You'll see that on the next slide. Which is this one. And now we're looking at the bottom 10 private colleges in Pennsylvania. And again, you can see that I have circled the 8-year changes. So let's just start with the top 2, um, bottom 2, I guess. Drexel University and LaSalle each have lost 2,300 and 1,700 students respectively. And you can see the red conditional formatting on the far right-hand side and the percentage loss over those last reported 8 years. It's got to be challenging for colleges like this to lose so many students and the tuition revenue associated with them. How will students and their families use this kind of data? I would want to look at the enrollment. I would want to look at this slide first. I would want to look at the top enrollment and to make sure that that's what we're looking for as opposed to the bottom enrollment. Let's go to graduation rates and let's look at the top 4-year graduation rates. And again, we can see really strong numbers for the top 10 in Pennsylvania. You can see I've highlighted or pointed the arrow to the numbers for 2021. Villanova, Grove City, Lafayette, and the others— really strong 4-year graduation rates. These are for undergraduates. Our threshold here at College Viability is a minimum of 50% graduation rate. Over 4 years, you can see these, these 10 colleges clearly exceed that. Unlike these 10. And again, you can see that I have circled the 2021 4-year undergraduate graduation rates for about 10 colleges. And the data, the data system I use sometimes has a few more than, a few more or a few less than that. You can see they're pathetic. And even if we look at the bottom/top of the list, Theo College and Mount Aloysius and Alvernia they're graduating 4 out of every 10 college students that start there. And if you're at Clark Summit University, if you're at Rosemont, Drexel, and some of the others, you really have to question the quality of their systems and processes and maybe even their education if they can't graduate anybody. Here's another field that we use regularly on these top/bottom reports, and I left Thomas Jefferson University in here. It concerns me sometimes that colleges don't know how to report this data, as we see for the first 4 years in this field. But the popularity indicator is my term. IPEDS uses the term admissions yield, and this is simply a reflection of the percentage of students who actually show up to a college after they've been accepted. So we can look at Villanova University, and you can see for 2021 that for every 100 acceptances that Villanova sent out in the mail or electronically, 29 students showed up. That's a good number. You can also look at the trend, and you see the red arrow I have down here. The trend is what we're looking for. We can see, we have to ignore Thomas Jefferson, they have some data they just didn't report. We can see that again, Villanova, pretty good trend in the right, in the correct direction. Their admissions yield, their popularity indicator's gone up. A little bit less so for Elizabethtown, Haverford, and Lebanon Valley. The others, it's at least staying flat. Unlike the next slide. And again, if this popularity indicator or admissions yields slide shows anything, it's at Clark Summit and Wilson and Bryn Athyn and Keystone and Alvernia. The market is telling these colleges, hey, I've got better offers. And so if you have a student or you are a student looking at these colleges on this list, you really have to wonder why so many are not are being accepted but not showing up to these colleges. And again, I'll remind you, the market is telling you something. Something's not good about these colleges, and students are choosing to go somewhere else. And then finally, let's look at the endowment assets. And the reason I use this one is it shows a private college's capacity, ability to raise funds from alumni, from students, from friends, from stakeholders. And you can see I've circled both the 2021 values and the change over the last 6 years— should be last 8 years. And you can see each of these has really, really strong endowments, and really without exception, they've grown their endowments significantly over the last 8 years. Anything above $50 million is our minimum threshold for end-of-year endowments. And we're going to see on the bottom of the list, look at the really, really really low and sad endowments for these colleges. And I make the argument that over the course of their existence, and in many cases it's multiple decades, in some cases centuries, and the college still hasn't been able to raise their endowment to at least $50 million. Not good. And if colleges like this— we just have Pennsylvania here— have financial challenges and they say to the market, they say to the world, we're going to raise money through donations. Don't believe them. They haven't been able to raise money over their entire existence. What makes them think that anybody—donors, alums, or others—will want to have good money chasing after bad? And so that's Pennsylvania. That's the 4 fields that we track right now on bottom and top reports. We'll have another of these bottom and top reports sometime soon. And keep an eye on this blog page. We will keep those posts updated for you on a regular basis. This is Gary Stocker with College Viability.
