In this weekly video, Gary Stocker presents the 2024 College Viability top‑bottom report for Georgia’s 30 regional and religious private colleges, using IPEDS data from 2015‑2022. He walks through a series of key performance metrics—full‑time‑equivalent (FTE) enrollment, enrollment change, 4‑year graduation rates, admissions yield, percent admitted (selectivity), retention, and unfunded institutional grants (discounts). For each metric he highlights the top‑performing schools and the bottom‑performing schools, explains why relative comparisons matter more than absolute numbers, and points out data quality concerns. He interprets the patterns (e.g., declining enrollment, low graduation rates, low retention, high admission yields) as warning signs for prospective students and parents, urging them to focus on stronger institutions and to interrogate weaker ones with specific questions about enrollment trends, endowments, and graduation outcomes. The video concludes with a call to use the Private College Viability App for deeper analysis and provides a contact email for custom requests.
Chapters
Let's do another weekly episode of the College Viability's top, top and bottom reports for 2024. Hi, my name is Gary Stocker. Today's top bottom report is brought to you by the state of Georgia. And you can see on the screen the fields that we're going to look at. And the data, of course, is from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. For the years 2015 to 2022. And as always, let's start with FTE enrollment. And as always, you can see the top performing schools, colleges, in terms of FTE enrollment over the last 8 reported years from 2015 to 2022. Individual years are available on the actual app itself. You can sort these by year, you can sort these by any of the column headers, and you can see the Savannah College of Art and Design has done well. Emory and a few others have done well. In terms of enrollment growth. Let's take a look at the bottom 10, and not so much. You can look at the numbers, and this is just an absolute number, so it doesn't hurt to compare to the 2022 number. That's a big drop from about 1,000 to 660, over 300 students. It's just a comparison, and as I say time after time, it's not the absolute value that matters, it's the comparison to other colleges. So if you're comparing Piedmont University which has lost 280 students over the last 8 years, and I'll go back up to the previous screen, to Clark Atlanta, which gained 355. That's a comparison. Something is happening at Clark Atlanta University that's not happening at Piedmont, and it's good at Clark for whatever reason. Let's take a look at my favorite and the most traumatizing, I think, and that's the 4-year graduation rate. We can see some really strong numbers at the top of the list, and again, I'll remind listeners that the minimum threshold that we have at college viability is 50, 5-0%. And so while there are certainly a handful plus of colleges that meet that, look at that, even in the top 10, looks like top 12, we've got some same numbers here, 5 of those, a handful of those are below 50%. So you can guess as we go to the bottom list, a couple things happening. You can see Taco Falls, Toccoa Falls, Shorter University, Thomas, and some others. Not even close to graduating half of their students in 4 years. We call that a coin toss college for obvious reasons. And some of these up here clearly don't know how to report the data. It's all over the place, so I wouldn't add much credibility to that. I leave it in there for the sake of showing that. If you're at Payne College, I hope you're not, and that number's accurate, that's not good at all. Let's go to the other end of the spectrum and look at admissions yield. And what we're looking at here is a percentage of students who, once accepted by a college, actually show up, attend, and pay tuition. It's important to look at the 8-year change. That's the pattern that we're looking for. And some good strong numbers here. Again, some of them don't appear to know what they're doing, but, you know, if it's accurate for Herzing University, up 38%, they're doing something right. Up 12 points for Reinhardt, and Emory up 10. Bruton Parker, I don't know what's going on there. You know, some decent numbers for some of those, but it's just, you look at all the data to draw the conclusions. As we go to the bottom list, in every single case, the top 10 or 11 decreased admissions yield, and I call it the popularity indicator for obvious reasons, decreased yield across the board. Now, this is not unique to Georgia. This is common across colleges throughout the nation, and it's a combination of things. Students are making other choices after applying, clearly, and I also, this is pure speculation on my part, believe that a lot of students are applying to college or colleges, more than one, and not going to any of them, and that's of course gonna lower the admissions yield for a larger number of colleges. Let's move on to percent admitted, and that's really a reflection of selectivity, and nothing really alarming here. When you get over 80%, you're not very selective at all. So a couple of these colleges, you can see the names, are essentially admitting anybody with a heartbeat. My definition, not theirs. And you can see that really Covenant, now that I look at that, those are some outrageously high numbers. That's really accepting anybody who applies almost. That's not a good practice. And where you see that reflected is the graduation rates. If we were to go back and look at the 4-year graduation rates for Covenant and Truett McConnell, they're gonna be low. They're gonna be really low. Let's look at retention, how many students stay. Some good numbers here. Emory, of course, one of the top colleges in the country. Some really strong numbers here. Again, it's the comparison that matters. Look at the bottom 10. If it says top, that's wrong. It should be the bottom 10 for retention. And again, you know, that's a really bad number, 36 for Thomas University. Not much better at Wesleyan College, LaGrange, Payne, Takoa Falls. If they're only retaining 6 out of every 10 students that started, Oof, there's something going on that's not good. And then finally, we look at something called unfunded institutional grants. And this is essentially the discounts. They're often called merit aid. It's often called many forms of scholarships are just discounts. And this is essentially the dollars that, the unfunded dollars that colleges offer students just to get them enrolled. Now, colleges like Emory can afford to go up $200 million over the course of 8 years, but some of these others are spending a lot of unfunded resources. There's no actual dollars behind discounts. It's just that, same kind of discount you and I get for cars and clothes and computers and that kind of stuff. It's concerning when some of these more smaller and more troubled, financially troubled colleges are giving away so much of the store just to get students enrolled. And so finally, what do we do with this? There are 30 regional and religious private colleges in Georgia, and I posted the top 10 and bottom 10 depending on ties. And the full version of the 2024 Private College Viability App will let you compare all the private colleges in Georgia in any form or fashion that you want depending on which version of the app you purchase. So as a student or a parent, focus on the stronger, focus on the stronger private colleges in Georgia. And for those colleges that are consistently In the bottom list, I believe they should only be considered with aggressive questioning. For example, why did the enrollment decrease so much? Why is your endowment so low? What have you done to improve your graduation rates? It's, it's one of those scenarios where you want to let the buyer beware. Make sure these colleges are answering your difficult questions, because I can make the case, and I do every time I do, why one of these top-bottom reports, a bad history with enrollment and graduation rates and retention and admission yield and endowments, it's a bad future in almost every case. So we'll do it again next week. If you have questions or specific colleges or regions you want me to focus on, send me a note at gary@collegeviability, that's collegeviability, one word,.com. I'll be happy to put that on the top of the list and add those to next week's version of top-bottom reports from the 2024 Private College Viability App. My name is Gary Stocker.
