Gary Stocker analyzes 31 Illinois private colleges by enrollment, graduation rates, and admissions yield. Lake Forest and Methodist hit the 50% graduation benchmark; ten schools face steep enrollment losses. Augustana's merit aid jumped from $43M to $63M, eroding revenue, while schools with lower discounts like Benedictine stay competitive.
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This week's episode of College Viability's Top and Bottom Reports are brought to you by the private colleges in Illinois, and we're looking at the 30+ regional private colleges in Illinois. And as always, let's start with enrollment, and you're going to see I've highlighted the sections to look at. And there are some private colleges in Illinois who've shown significant enrollment growth, and some like Illinois College with modest growth, but growth nonetheless. Because you know what happens when we look at the bottom list. So when we go to that bottom list, colleges not doing so well, um, I'll let you read the list on your own. You can always pause this YouTube video to check it. But of those 10 private colleges in Illinois, all have had significant losses in enrollment. You can make your own determination whether that pattern is one that you're interested in or not. Let's take a look at graduation rates. You always hear me talking about the importance of graduation rates. Here at College Viability, we have a minimum threshold of 50— that's 5-0— for 4-year graduation rates for undergraduate students. And you can see not even a handful of Illinois private colleges meet that threshold. Some do, Lake Forest doing well, Methodist College doing well. When we go to the bottom of the list, I don't even know why I include some of these with zero. I don't even know that they know how to report the data. But you can see toward the bottom, Roosevelt and Concordia Chicago, who's having all sorts of problems. Blackburn College, what are you doing? You're graduating such a small percentage of your students in 4 years. I make the argument all the time, it shouldn't even be a college. If you can't graduate your students. Let's move on to admissions yield. That's the inside baseball name. I call it the popularity indicator because it reflects the percentage of students who, once admitted to a college, actually show up. And I like to track the 8-year change. And so we can see that some of these colleges, and I'll let you look on your own, have done well. Their admissions yield has gone up. They've either developed some programs that students like, found a better pricing structure, a better tuition discounting structure, but for whatever reason, the numbers have gone up and you can see Methodist, UChicago, Benedictine, maybe Northwestern fall in the category of significant increases in admissions yield. As we go to the bottom, there's that dash, there's that negative indicator in front of every one of those. This is suggestive that these colleges, for whatever reason, the data doesn't tell you why, it just tells you it's happening, students that are accepted to these colleges— Lincoln College is already closed, so it doesn't even count— are going elsewhere, or they're choosing not to go to colleges at all. Retention is a good indicator of a system's, of a college's systems and processes to keep students there.
Some strong numbers across the board.
You can look at those colleges on your own. These are the top 10 of 31, I think, regional private colleges in Illinois, and as you can guess when we go to the bottom, There are some issues. There are some issues with some of these colleges. Blackburn, we've seen a couple of times. Eureka College can't even keep 6 out of 10. Concordia, essentially the same kind of number.
How do you use this data?
I mean, it suggests that students are starting and leaving. Don't know why, but when you compare 'em to the colleges above, they're doing well.
Those students are starting and staying.
So if you just chose retention as your sole indicator, these are the colleges you would consider, these are the colleges you would say, eh, not so much.
The unfunded institutional grants, if you follow these top/bottom reports on a regular basis, those are—
that's again the inside baseball term is unfunded institutional grants.
You may know them as merit aid, merit scholarships, the presidential scholarships.
Almost all, but not all, scholarships are associated with tuition discounts. That's not what they're called, but they're unfunded. So the college is effectively walking away from revenue, and they're welcome to do that, walking away from revenue in the form of unfunded discounts.
So we can look at Augustana College on the top. From 2015, they were, they were giving $43 million in unfunded grants.
Now it's up to $63 million. I'm going to make the case, because I know how this stuff works, is that they're giving away more dollars, more tuition discounts, just to get students in the door. Again, nothing wrong with that, that's fabulous for students themselves, but it's hard on the colleges because that revenue from tuition and its associated fees and its associated room and board is what keeps these colleges, keeps the doors open.
At the bottom of the list, interesting set here because you can see both strong and struggling private colleges.
Going on both ends of this unfunded institutional grants and just tuition discounts.
And you can see some of these colleges— I'll pick on Benedictine on the top— they've gone from $33 million in 2015 to $30 million in 2022. From my experience, it suggests that they realize they can't continue to give away the store to get students in the door, so they have kept those discounts, unfunded discounts, lower each each year, at least over this 8-year period. Now, the challenge with that is if you keep those discounts lower, students are gonna find better deals, better tuition rates someplace else, and go there. So it's a very challenging catch-22, and it's not just Benedictine, it's most private colleges in the world, in the country, are facing that. And then lastly, you know, hey, look at this stuff.
31 regionals, some are doing well.
I post top 10 and top bottom on all those reports. The full version of the app will let you compare all the private colleges in Illinois. I'll show you how to get those here in a minute. And if I'm a student, if I'm a parent, I'm focusing on the stronger private colleges, private colleges in Illinois. Those at the bottom of the list, be careful. Be really careful. Give them some tough questions. Why is your graduation rate so low? Why has your enrollment gone down most of the last 8 years? Why is your endowment so low? Why are you giving away the store to get students to enroll? If you have specific questions or you want to, want me to focus on a specific state of either public or private colleges, you can drop me a note. You can see the address there. And then a reminder, just a couple weeks ago, I released the first 3 versions of the 2024 Private College Viability Series of apps. And there's one for executive analysis for college leaders, board members, stakeholders, reporters, those kind of things. One for faculty and staff, because in America today, most faculty and staff don't have ready access to comparing their institution to others, there's a version for them. And then the student and family version is a smaller version, as is the faculty and staff, fewer reports, but focuses on those reports that help students and their families compare colleges to make decisions on ones they should consider, and of course, decisions on ones they shouldn't consider. All this is available at collegeviability.com/collegeviabilityapp. And there's some promotional pricing available through March 31st, so I would encourage all of you to get out there and do that. Hey, let's call that a wrap for the March 4th Top Bottom Report for College Viability. My name is Gary Stocker. We'll do it again next week.
