2024 College Viability Top-Bottom Reports for Minnesota Private Colleges (Regional)

Hi, it's Gary Stocker back with the top-bottom reports for private colleges in the United States, and we're actually going to be using the 2024 Private College Viability App, and we're going to be looking at the executive analysis version Before we actually do the top/bottom reports for the private colleges in Minnesota, just a quick look at the app. I've already selected Minnesota. I've selected regional and religious colleges, and there are 24 of those. You can actually scroll down this list to see what they are. Standard kind of approach. We can also then look at the data, and there are 32 total reports buried in here. For your graduation rates, there's all of the private colleges in Minnesota. We can flip them to see who has good 4-year graduation rates. Really strong numbers up through here or so. And of course, we can flip that to see who has really bad graduation rates and some really bad numbers here. And we can see the 8-year change, the percent change. This year we've added data. So even though it's kind of busy with 24 colleges, you can see we've got the 50% threshold and you can quickly see which colleges are not getting there or getting there very often at all. And then navigation is easier this year. Let's take a look at enrollment, for example. Everybody likes that. Again, there's the data. We can see the 8-year change. The college is not doing so well. The percent change, we of course can flip it the other way, see the colleges who are doing okay. And of course, looking at the data as well. One more thing on the data, on the data itself, is that we actually considered average. So for these 24 colleges, the average 8-year change is down 208. So you can actually compare your college, whether it's above, above, or below that average. So that's the 2024 Private College Viability App, the executive analysis version. Let's take a look at the top 10, top and bottom, for the Minnesota private colleges. So let's look at the top-bottom report from the 2024 College Viability App for private colleges. And of course, today we're focusing on Minnesota. You can see the data we're going to compare. And I play around with this a little bit. I've changed some of these for 2024, and I may continue to change those a little bit. And of course, the data source is the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. We always use 8 years. The last 8 reported years are 2015 to 2022. Let's look at the data. So I was going to start on with enrollment because folks like to focus on that. And we start with the top, and you can see the top Minnesota private colleges with enrollment gains from 2015 to 2022. You can see their enrollment numbers for 2022 to give you a feel for size, and then the 8-year change on the right-hand side for those enrollment numbers. And those are the top 10, I believe. Again, these show some growth. You don't always see as many as 10 private colleges in a state with growth, so Minnesota's got something going there, but When we look on the bottom side, they also have colleges with issues. I think there were 23 or 27 colleges in Minnesota. Look at all the ones with negative enrollment growth, decreased enrollment growth over the last 8 reported years. That's not a good indicator for lots of reasons. So as you're doing these comparisons, whether you're an executive, whether you're faculty and staff, whether you're a student, parent, these are the patterns that should be concerning because it's over the course of 8 years. And while I won't go over each of these individually, some of them have had decreasing enrollment for each each and every one of the last 10 reported years. Let's move on to 4-year graduation rates. And again, Minnesota's got some good numbers here. The minimum threshold that we use at College Viability, if you follow our reports and our data, is 50, 5-0%, and you can see 10 or 11 colleges here in Minnesota with 4-year graduation rates in excess of 50%. And again, I don't see that often, and I look at a lot of this data. So some colleges that are strong, they're getting it done in terms of having systems and the processes to graduate students, and even the students with the capacity to graduate in those 4 years. But for every top, we have a bottom, and these are the private colleges in Minnesota that aren't doing so well. And you can see each of the 10— each of these Minnesota colleges have 4-year graduation rates below 50%. And here at College Viability, we have a name for that.

We've coined the phrase coin toss college because for these colleges that can't graduate even 50% of their students after 4 years, you might as well flip a coin to decide if a student's gonna graduate or not. Let's move on, let's look at Popularity Indicator. Again, this is a phrase we have coined at College Viability. The IPEDS, the official name, the inside baseball, inside higher education name is Admission Yield, and it simply reflects the percentage of students that a college has accepted that show up, pay tuition, and attend classes. So you can see the 8-year change. That's what I've highlighted here on the right-hand side. Uh, Herzing University, Minneapolis, that's quite a jump, but they submitted the data, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt. And you can see that most of these colleges have had a positive number, but notice at the bottom, even the top group of Minnesota private colleges has had a decreasing pattern of admissions yield, fewer students accepting their offers of admission than we have seen in previous years. There are reasons for that. We can talk about that another day. But let's look at the bottom piece. And again, there's a couple things going on here. Bethany Global down 38 points. If that's true, that's not good for lots of reasons. You can see though that Bethel and North Central and the others have had significant downtrends in percentage of students accepting their offer. The final thing I wanna show on this screen, and I see it way too often, there are some colleges, these look like two religious colleges, that don't even have the capacity to regularly submit the data. So the -88 and the -79 are not valid. We'll give Bethany Global, again, the benefit of the doubt that that data is accurate, but that concerns me that they don't have the resources, the expertise to even submit the data. Percent admitted, I'm just showing the top level on this, and this is a reflection of colleges who admit a large percentage of students who apply. And anything above 80%, I would make note of. Anything above 90% is concerning because it gets closer and closer to a mindset, and this is my term, not theirs, of, you know, Herzog University accepting 94 out of every 100 students, It's possible their internal motto is have heartbeat, will admit. They're entitled to do that, nothing wrong with that, except it's going to be a reflection, uh, reflected in the graduation rates. It's also an indication, can be an indication, that that college is desperate for tuition revenue and they will accept students whether they're prepared for college or not. And then the retention piece, again, some really strong colleges here in Minnesota. You can look at the numbers on your own. Some highly recognized and regarded colleges here. And on the downside, not so much, uh, you know, these here, not these down below, are not a big deal. But these are numbers, you know, in that 30 to 40% range. That's, that's not good. Looks like they're both religious colleges as well.

And then as we wrap things up, the unfunded institutional grants. These are typically all called by colleges merit scholarships, are called presidential scholarships, are called thanks for coming here scholarships, but they're not funded. That's why they're called unfunded institutional grants. They're effectively discounts from the list price of tuition, just like you and I get discounts for cars and clothes and computers and all that kind of stuff. But here's where we get some concern.

We'll just start at the top.

University of St. Thomas went from $96 million in unfunded discounts in 2015 to $158 million and change in 2022, an increase of $61 million, almost $62 million, just to get students in the door. Now, their decision, that's fine. Nothing wrong with the decision to increase that. It's great for the students. But these universities, especially the private ones, rely so heavily on tuition and fee revenue for solvency, for viability, for financial health, that if they're really increasing this number by a lot, that's a concern. On the other hand, there are some colleges, as we see on the last slide, that have made the conscious decision that we just can't afford to give away the store with all these tuition discounts. So we can see Concordia at Moorhead has gone from $32 million down to $16, almost $17 million. They've made the decision we've gotta get students to pay or we're gonna have issues. Again, you know, these right here, Bethel, Dunwoody, Northwestern Health Sciences, essentially flat over 8 years. You know, not a big deal to increase that number over the course of 8 years. But it's an interesting observation on those things. So what do we do with this data? I think there are 27 regional and religious private colleges in Minnesota. I posted about the top 10. Sometimes there's ties, so there's more than that. The full version of the College Viability app, and I'll include that in the show notes, will let you compare all the private colleges in Minnesota. And the executive version has 30+ reports. The faculty version, the version I've created for faculty and staff, has 9 reports. And this year there's a new version for students and their families that just includes 5 reports that will help them compare colleges at a more— at an easier level, at a more comforting level than all the reports for the executives. And as a student or parent, if I'm in your shoes, I would encourage you to focus, focus on those stronger private Minnesota colleges. You can see them from the data. Those colleges that are consistently at the bottom of the list should only be considered, in my mind, with aggressive questioning. Why did the enrollment decrease so much? Why is your endowment so low? What have you done, what are you doing to improve your graduation rates? Be aggressive with your questioning so you can make an even better informed decision. And it's kind of the old Latin phrase caveat emptor. It's a let the buyer beware scenario in those situations. I can make the case, and I do on a regular basis, that bad financial history, bad enrollment history, bad graduation rate history is almost always indicated as a bad future in all those areas as well. If you have colleges or states you want me to take a look at, drop me a note to Gary, that's G-A-R-Y, at CollegeViability, that's one word, Gary@CollegeViability.com. This has been the first 2024 top-bottom report for private colleges in the United States. We'll do it again next week.