2024 Private College Viability TOP-bottom Reports for 5 states. (IA, IL, IN, KS, MO)

Hi, it's Gary Stocker back with this week's episode, this week's edition of the College Viability 2024 Top and Bottom Reports. This week we're going to do it a little bit differently. We're going to look at 5 different private college states in Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, and Missouri, and we're just going to have a smaller subset of reports that we look at. We're going to look at tuition and fee revenue, and of course this is from the time period 2015 to 2022. And of course the data is from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database for that same time period. And we're going to look at endowment, both the total endowment and endowment assets per student. And we're going to look at the 4-year graduation rate, because if you've listened to me at all on these, I spend a lot of focus on graduation rates. I make the point, if you can't graduate students, why are you a college? Let's start off with, again you can see the 5 states across the top. You can see there were 135, in the top right corner here, there are 135 private regional colleges in the states of Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, and Missouri. I've selected the top and bottom 20 for each of the 4 different sets of reports that we're going to look at. And you can see tuition and fees, and these are the top tuition and fee private colleges in those 5 states. And these are the colleges that have been able to drive an increase in tuition revenue over the last 8 reported years. Now, tuition revenue is good for the colleges for sure. They can either do that by increasing enrollment, or they can do that by increasing, increasing the rates they charge for tuition and fees. And it doesn't really matter that much. What we're looking at from a business aspect is these colleges' ability to grow their revenue source, their main revenue source, which is tuition and fees over the 8 reported years. Because when we look at the bottom set of colleges, you can see not so much. You can see from Oakland City University in Indiana down to Indiana Wesleyan, those 20 colleges have all lost, have all had decreased tuition and fee revenue. And there are more, not just these 20. Have all had decreased tuition and fee revenue over the last 8 reported years. It's almost always because they have not been able to grow enrollment. Why does that matter? Well, if a college isn't able to grow its revenue base, it has trouble meeting payroll, it has trouble keeping the lights on, it has trouble attracting talent, it has trouble keeping up with technology, it has trouble keeping up with marketing costs, and many, many other aspects. So when you're looking at colleges and then look at a list like this, There's reason to be concerned for colleges that over the last 8 reported years have had a decrease, overall decrease over 8 years from 2015 to 2022 in their tuition fee revenue. Now some just have had a bad period of time. Some have strong revenues, some have strong endowments, some have a lot of debt. That's not good. Some have lower debt. That is good. But this is one of the factors that you want to look at. Let's take a look then at the endowment. Now this is the endowment assets per FTE. Look in the left-hand corner here. This is the endowment per FTE, or full-time enrolled student. So we can see Principia College in Illinois has $1.7 million in endowment value— endowment revenue, excuse me— in endowment value per full-time equivalent student. It's effectively a student who takes 15 credits. And you can see the other colleges with strong numbers, not as strong as a top 5 or 10, but something to look at. That means they've got some assets, they've shown the capacity to have systems and processes to raise gifts from alumni, friends, and other stakeholders. When we go to the bottom, again, I'll look at— let's look at the numbers for 2022 and let's compare right in the middle here. Let's look at St. Mary's College in Indiana right here, and we can see they had $209,000 in tuition, sorry, in endowment assets per student. Let's look at the top. So the bottom of the list, not top, Benedictine only has $11,000. St. Augustine, I'm not even sure what's going on here, but look at these low numbers. These are reasonable indicators of a college's ability to raise endowment dollars, gifts as I described earlier, per student. Now sometimes these colleges can have large increases in enrollment and not such large increases in endowment, and the value, the endowment assets per FTE won't grow as much or will go down. But that's, it's still an indicator. And as you listen to me do many of these media broadcasts that I do, it's always the comparisons that matter. Comparing one or more colleges against each other, that's what you want to look at. There is no single indicator that says a college is strong or a college is weak. You look at the comparisons across these reports, and many, many others that are available through the series of college viability apps. We have one for executives, we have one for faculty and staff, and we certainly have one for students and their families. So endowment value at the end of the year— again, this is a small number here. You just have to be concerned that by comparison that these are so much smaller than the others. Then I want to look at the graduation rate, and this is the top list. So we can see that Divine Wood College, all right, they graduate 100%. I questioned the data because it started at 10%, then to 11%, but it was in the database. The college themselves submitted it, so I left it in there. But 82— I'm sorry, 79% for Wheaton, all the way down. You know, the threshold we have at College Viability, the minimum threshold is 50, 5-0%, of your students graduate after 4 years. If not, we call it a coin toss college for obvious reasons, and you might as well toss a coin in determining whether a student will graduate from a college or not. And then the bottom. Draw your own conclusions. Now, it's hard to believe that St. Augustine and Trine University have zero. Again, some colleges just don't have the resources to, I believe, complete the data correctly. Even East-West University, those are really strange numbers. Martin, the same thing. But you can compare them. It's the comparison that matters. If I'm looking at East-West University and I see they went from 0% and up, I guess, up to 4 or 5%, What are they doing? What kind of students are they bringing in if they graduate such a small number in 4 years? And even the University of Dubuque, Barclay College, University of St. Mary, they're graduating 3 out of every 10 students who enroll there in 4 years. Draw your own conclusions, make your own decisions, but there's reason to be concerned when a college can't graduate its students. And finally, what do you do with these comparisons? As I mentioned before, there are 135 private 4-year colleges in these 5 states. I posted TOTM reports across just 3 comparisons. The full versions of the 2024 Private College Viability App, the Executive Analysis has more than 30 comparisons. There's one for faculty that has, I believe, 9 or 10, and the one for families has 5 comparisons. And the reports, the app versions of those reports are focused on what is important for those groups. And you'll see a link on the show notes in the YouTube description as to where to get access to purchase those versions of the app, and you can see a reference down below. And I'll conclude with just a reference. And as a student or parent, or even a faculty member or executive, when you're looking at this data, Look at the stronger colleges. They're stronger for a reason. But those colleges that are consistently in the bottom of the list, if you're a student or family member, should be considered only with really, really tough questions. It's kind of like the old let the buyer beware, caveat emptor, in those situations. Because I can make the case, because I look at this data enough, if a college has a bad history it is more than likely to have a bad future. And in this era of college closures, you want to be really careful. Hey, thanks for making time to watch this version of the 2024 Private College Viability App Top and Bottom Report. My name is Gary Stocker. We'll do it again next Sunday.