Gary Stocker analyzes 68 private colleges in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan using eight years of enrollment and financial data. Carleton has over $1 billion in endowment per student while others like Clareau have far less. Graduation rates range from 65% at Concordia College of Moorhead to 40% at Lakeland, and Stocker warns that no single metric predicts viability.
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Welcome back to this week's Top Bottom Report, brought to you by the 2024 College Viability Series of apps. Hi, my name is Gary Stocker. This week we're doing private college reports, and for the great states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. And as always, our data source is the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. From 2015 to 2022. And we'll look at a whole series of reports for you today. And as always, let's start off with tuition fees. And we're looking at this today— we have done the, these states before with their, with their enrollment. And today we're going to start with tuition fees. And we can see the top, and we'll see in a second, the bottom colleges from those 3 states of Minnesota Michigan and Wisconsin, and we've highlighted the 8-year change. This shows the tuition fee revenue growth, or lack thereof in a moment, for these colleges. And again, you can pause the video to look at the data on your own. The data goes from 2015 all the way through 2022. The College Viability app can let you sort this any way that you want. And I've added question marks this episode to show you colleges that are on for some reason or another. And interestingly, Northland College who is probably going to announce its formal closure soon, in the next week or two. They should have announced it much sooner than this. Actually showed a small revenue growth in the last couple of years. Let's take a look at the bottom list, and these are the colleges over the last 8 years whose tuition and fee revenue is at the bottom of the list of those 60-some-odd colleges, private colleges in those 3 states. And you can see, um, the question mark that I had are colleges that have had at least, looks like about $15 million or more in losses, about $2 million or more per year. Goes all the way up to Baker College, which has all sorts of issues. But you can, again, get a comparison. And that's what this is all about. There is no single data point, no single value that lets you show a college is gonna be successful or not. It's the comparisons that matter. So if you're looking at Beloit College, compare it to Calvin University. If you're looking at Alverno College, compared to Aquinas College. That's the way this works. Then you can make your own decisions about the colleges that are going to be successful or not. And let's move on to top, and the top of the endowment value. And you'll see I've highlighted the endowment assets per FTE. This is a standardized comparison. And you see endowment assets per student. Again, you can see the highlighted area that I've got is over 2022. That's the best comparison source. You can see the 8-year change on your own. Again, pause the video as appropriate for the colleges that you want to take a look at in more depth. But again, it's comparisons that you want to focus on. There's the top. Let's take a look at the bottom. And you can see it goes— I'll flip back up— from, you know, Baker College at $108,000 per student, Hope College at $93,000 down toward the middle, Kalamazoo College at $181,000. And we go to the other list, you can see how much smaller their endowment per FTE student, full-time equivalent, and student is. It's a big deal if a college can't raise gifts from faculty, alumni, staff, community holders, and friends in its history, and then they're not going to be able to raise those funds in a pinch. And that's the kind of pinch that we're in now. This is just the total endowment value, and you can see in the middle of this one, that $52 million number, that's the average for all of these 68 private colleges in Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin. We can see that Carleton is on top with a billion and change, and you can see the numbers on your own all the way down. This is the top 20 or so in those 3 states. And when we go to the bottom, the average is going to stay the same, but look at these colleges. I mean, Clareau University doesn't have much more than couch money in its endowment. And again, these are the colleges that are going to struggle to be able to provide the resources that they need for their students, for their college, and 4 more. And then if you follow my posts at all, you know I always focus on graduation rates. Here are the top 4-year graduation rates, undergraduate students, for these colleges, private colleges in these 3 states. And you can see the threshold, the minimum threshold we have at College Viability is 50%, 5-0%. You can have whatever threshold that you want. The app actually shows a graph that we created that shows that 50% minimum threshold and shows you the colleges below it, which are too many, and the colleges that are above it, of which there aren't enough. Again, pause the video to look at the colleges you're interested in. There's 68 total colleges. You're only seeing about two-thirds of them between the top and bottom screen. I'll talk about the app and how you can get access to it here in a moment. Here's the bottom. And just go down to Lakeland, 40%. I'll flip back to the other screen. Concordia College of Moorhead, the lowest of the top at 65%. Would you rather consider attending a college or being involved in a college with a 65% graduation rate over 4 years or one that only graduates 40 out of every 100 students who start there? Your decision, but this College Viability app lets you make those comparisons. So here's what you can do in terms of using the College Viability App. All the data that you saw is from those apps. There are two basic versions. The Private College version is of course the one we used today because we were comparing private colleges. There are almost 1,300 private colleges in the country. The Executive Analysis version has 32 reports, and that includes ratios and 8-year comparisons. The Faculty and Staff version has 8 reports. It does not have comparison, it does not have ratios and 8-year numbers. And the student and family version has 5 reports. Same kind of layout for the public college version on the right-hand side. About 1,600 colleges are reported in the College Viability App and 35 reports for the Executive Analysis version. And again, that includes ratios and 8-year comparisons. The faculty and staff version has 10 reports and the student and family version has 6 reports. I'll make a link available to you to purchase those versions of the app that are appropriate to you. And there are also some special promotions going for most of those. So 68 private 4-year colleges. And I posted 4 or 5 reports that should compare each of those colleges. And as a student or parent, if I'm in your shoes, I focus on those stronger private colleges first. It's not the campus, it's not the tuition, It's not the faculty. It's not the majors. The first question should be, "Will this college have the financial resources to, number one, stay in business, and number two, provide the resources that I want for myself or my child as they go to college?" And then those colleges that are on the bottom, I would encourage you to only consider those with aggressive questioning. Let the buyer beware. Caveat emptor is the old Latin phrase for that. Because I make the case that if a college has a bad financial history, a bad graduation rate history, a bad enrollment history, that's going to make for a bad future. But that's your decision to make. Mine is to provide the information for you to compare those colleges. If you have questions or specific colleges or regions you'd like me to compare, send me a note at the address shown here, and we'll do this again next week when we do the weekly Top Bottom Report from the College Viability App. My name is Gary Stocker. Thanks for making time.
