Gary Stocker ranks private colleges across Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, and Wisconsin on admissions yield, enrollment change, graduation rates, and endowment size. Marquette and Loyola show low yields by design due to high selectivity, while some schools' negative endowment changes suggest spending to cover operating costs.
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Welcome back to this episode of the College Viability Top-Bottom Reports, this one for Region 6, brought to you by the states of Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. And for today's comparisons of top and bottom private colleges in those 5 states, we're going to look at enrollment, something called admissions yield, their 4-year graduation rates, and endowments. And as always, let's go right to the data. And the first we're going to look at is the top. This is the top 10. It's always going to be give or take. Top 10 in something called Admissions Yield. That's the official name for it. I call it the Popularity Indicator because it shows what percentage of students that a college accepts actually shows up. So we've got some good strong numbers here. I, I was kind of generous with Divine Word. They appear to have some issues entering the data correctly. They're probably not going to have that range of admissions yields. If so, something's going wrong, but I left them in there just for the sake of being thorough. But you can see that, you know, some of these colleges, they do a good job. So for example, um, Belen, Belen College in Wisconsin, for every 100 students it accepts, 76, they report, show up and pay tuition. Let's move on. Let's take a look at the bottom of the popularity indicator, also known as the admissions yield. And before I do that, I want to point out two universities: Marquette University here and Loyola University, they're on our list of bottom admissions yield because they want to be. Both Loyola University and Marquette envision themselves as very selective colleges, and they are, and so they want a low admissions yield. They're not quite like the very top selective— some folks call them rejective colleges— the Harvards, the Princetons, the Yales. Their admissions yield is in the vicinity of 4%, 5%. 6%, something like that, with intent. For the rest, it's an indication that the market is telling them that these students have other options. For example, Wartburg College, they just announced this past week they are lowering their tuition by 45%. That's a side story. But only 12 out of every 100 students they accept actually show up at Wartburg. So you can make your own judgment on these top, bottom colleges in Region 6, which is just our College viability definition of regions. Let's take a look at enrollment. And what we're looking at here really is the top, the top 10 I think it is. And this is the 8-year change. Keep in mind that on the College Viability app that we track 8 years worth of data. So we're looking at 8 years of change. And we can see that Maryville University in St. Louis and others have done quite well. They have grown their enrollment appreciably. You can see the color indicators on the right-hand side. Those are our conditional formatting. Green is good, yellow okay, red not so good at all. And you can look for yourself at which colleges are doing all right. Let's go to the other end of the spectrum and look at the bottom 10. Again, 5 states in the Region VI, call it the Midwest if you want. You can see the data, and we'll look at Columbia College up here from $12,000 and change to $4,000 and change. Not good. You can look at the others as well. Cardinal Stritch has closed. Upper Iowa University is in serious trouble. But you can see some of these colleges are having trouble enrolling students over the last 8 reported years. Now some will continue to do well because they have the resources to survive. The Websters, although they're run poorly, probably not gonna have issues. Lindenwood University's in a strong position. Columbia College in Chicago, not so much. Drury, tough to tell because they're kind of in a rural area, but you can look at these for your own. Let's take a look then at graduation rates. And if you've heard my other podcasts or my YouTube videos or some of my blogs, this is kind of the sleeper, kind of the field that really is gonna jump up and scare people. These are the top, I think, 15 colleges in our 5-state region in terms of 4-year graduation rates. You can look at the numbers yourself. I just sorted them by the year 2021, and it's the last reported years in the IPEDS database. You can see the pattern also for them. Divine Word, again, maybe they've gone up 50 points. I sometimes question the data because of these points right here. But overall, these colleges do a gosh darn good job of getting students graduated in 4 years. The college viability threshold, the minimum threshold, is 50%. We also track the 6-year graduation rate. That's not included on these top/bottom reports. And the bottom. And again, I've included some data even though I question its validity, and I really hope that the folks at Concordia Chicago, East-West, and Rankin don't have single-digit 4-year graduation rates. If they do, there's a lot more problems than just graduation rates. But you get a feel for these colleges that are struggling— looks like I blocked off Rockford— were struggling to graduate such a small percentage of their students. I can make a reasonable argument that colleges are there to graduate students, but yet they make a big, big deal out of enrolling them, and way, way, way too many don't graduate. Endowment assets— I made this a longer list. This is the top 25, just to give you a handle on those colleges that have done a good job of seeding gifts and building relationships with alumni, friends, and others to raise significant endowment funds to assist and help the university with financial needs, projects across the board. And you can look at the list on your own. You can see the mix of states, the colleges, and the amounts, and even the 6-year changes over here. When you see a college have a negative number over a 6-year change, like we see for Illinois Wesleyan, that's kind of a flag, even though they've got, they've got over $200 million as of 2021, that somebody would take their endowment down. Either they've had really bad investments Or, and this is more likely, they've been spending that endowment, in my words, to keep the lights on, to make payroll, to make— to pay the regular operating expenses. That's not confirmed, but that's typically what I see. And we'll wrap that up as this edition of Top Bottom. This was for Region 6 and includes 5 states in the Midwest. We'll continue to make these available in the coming days, weeks, and months. This is Gary Stocker with College Viability.
