2024 PUBLIC College Viability App tutorial for Faculty and Staff

Hi, my name is Gary Stocker. I founded College Viability and developed the College Viability series of apps. This tutorial on the 2024 Public College Viability app for faculty and staff will review the 10 reports available on the app. The data is from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database for the years 2015 to 2022. You'll see how to compare your public college with more than 1,500 other publics around the country. Let's get started. Here is the homepage for the 2024 Public College Viability App for faculty and staff. And we'll go through all of it here in a moment. You can see the 10 reports, the comparison reports that we'll look at. You can see the filters that we'll use to select colleges, and you can see the all, the clear filters button as well. The college is selected. I'll show how all that works. And for each page, there is information that talks about how to navigate the page and the reports that are on the page, and that's on each report page that we'll see in the next few minutes. While all of the colleges are, all of the states are listed here, I've selected Connecticut because it's got a nice manageable set of colleges, and you can select not just the state or combination of states or individual colleges, but you can select from all these options as well. We're just going to grab the public 4-years in Connecticut. There are 7 of them. There's the list, and you could again take some subset of those. We're not going to do that, but you could select some subset of those 7 to compare for your purposes. Let's then go ahead and move on to each of the 10 reports. And the 4-year graduation rate, this is the navigation, this is the report format for everything. You can see the colleges listed, you can sort by any of these column headings alphabetically, you can sort by any of the years from top to bottom or bottom to top. And I'll just click on the year 2022 and we'll look at the bottom. So these colleges graduated 30-some-odd percent of their students in 4 years, not good. And you can see the 8-year change and you can see the percent change. In almost all of the reports in the faculty and staff version, we have a chart so you can actually see an image of the 8 years reported in the app. And for the 4-year and 6-year undergraduate graduation rates, we have markers for 50% for the 4-year rate, and as you'll see in a moment, for 60% on the 6-year rate. So let's go ahead and do the navigation. It's these 3 horizontal bars up here on top. And I'll quickly click on the 6-year graduation rate. Again, the same format that we've seen before. You will see on occasion colleges don't submit the data. That's what we see for Charter Oak. Same format, same chart. And again, the threshold that we have at College Viability for 6-year graduation rates is 70%. You can set up whatever threshold that you want. Let's move on to the next report, Admissions Yield. And again, that's the percent of students that a college accepts and actually show up, attend classes, and pay tuition. You can see the data for the colleges, you can sort it. I like to look at the 8-year change, and we'll see that of the 7 colleges reported, really all of them had zero or negative numbers, negative patterns in the admissions yield. That's something I see across most of the country. And again, the percent change, the chart— you've seen one chart, you've seen them all, but I'll do one more— gives you a quick look at the admissions yield for those colleges. You could actually grab an image of this, a screenshot of this, and use for your presentations. We did admissions yield. Let's look at enrollment. That's a biggie. And again, we can see the, we can see the colleges with large enrollment. The University of Connecticut's gonna be on the top with almost 19,000 students, and it's up about 300 students, not a lot, over the last 6 years, or over the last 8 years. That may be controlled growth or not, I don't know. You can see the percent change, but you can also see, let me flip that one more time, you can also see the colleges that had negative enrollment growth. So you can see the colleges that are struggling the most and the percent change, because of course some of these have different enrollments. So that's how you can use to compare the enrollment. Now I use FTE, which is full-time equivalent enrollment. I do have a total enrollment that I track on the full version, the Executive Analysis version that has 30-some-odd reports, not the 10 in the Faculty and Staff version. And finally, there's the chart. As we've seen before, there's the information icon that describes what's going on in the report. Navigation. Let's look— I'm gonna come back to these institutional instruction expenses. Let's go to retention, and I'll quickly go through those. You can see same format, same layout for retention. Revenue from tuition and fees. Now this is paid revenue from tuition fees. You can see the numbers on your own. There's no chart on this one because the numbers are so disparate, the chart gets kind of crunched. You can see the data for each of the colleges. Let's take a look then at state appropriations. There's your data. There's a little bit of horizontal scrolling involved here to see the percent change. You can see the 8-year change. There's disparities for sure, um, inside your organization, inside your state, inside your region. You can have those discussions about whether that's equitable or not. That's beyond the scope of our discussion today. And then finally, before we look at the last two, look at total expenses. And again, you can see 4 of the states didn't even report total expenses. I don't know why that is for Connecticut. You won't normally see that in the colleges that are reporting. And then lastly, I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to go home. This is the navigation button to go home. You've seen that before. And I am going to add a state. I'm going to add another smaller state. Let's go to Arizona. So now we're going to look at the colleges for both Arizona and Connecticut. Let's go back. I'm going to look then at the instruction— I'm sorry, the institutional support costs per full-time enrolled student. We can sort it by state if we want, and I'll do that. There's all the Arizona colleges, public 4-year colleges. There's the Connecticut ones. And we can see how much is spent per FTE student for each of the 8 reported years. We can see the 8-year change. We can see the percent change. Again, we can click on these headings to see, compare inside of states, outside of states, whatever the pattern may be. And we can look, of course, at the charts as well. When we look at the institutional support costs, that's of course the costs that a university has that are not associated with direct academic teaching, with direct teaching. Administrative costs, staff costs, those kind of things. And you can use that for your own comparisons and for your own purposes. The College Viability app simply provides you with the comparisons in whatever form or fashion that you want. And then finally, we'll take a look at the instruction expense costs. Again, same format that we've seen before. You can sort those in any ways. We'll sort by 2022, and we can see that the Coast Guard, as expected, spends a lot of money per student, per FTE student, and that number changes throughout the course of these 12 colleges listed. So that's a quick look at the 2024 Public College Viability App for faculty and staff. What does all of this mean for colleges' faculty and staff? There is a common chorus of concern and even complaints from both public and private college faculty that they don't have access to needed information about their organization's financial health. The faculty and staff version of the College Viability App is an independent resource that uses the IPEDS data that colleges submit— colleges themselves submit to the National Center for Education Statistics. These 10 reports can form the basis for you and your colleagues becoming not only more informed about your college, but able to compare any set of public colleges across similar reports. If your college is strong in an area, you'll know. If your college is less than strong in an area, that's also important to know. The public, the 2024 Public College Viability App for faculty and staff retails at $300. If you do the math, the cost is 23 cents for every one of the 1,500 colleges and 8 years of data in the 10 reports I show you. I'll have a link in the YouTube description on how to acquire the app. I'm Gary Stocker with College Viability. Thanks for making the time to watch. Mm-hmm.