Gary Stocker analyzes eight financial and academic metrics across Wisconsin's 17 public four-year colleges using 2024 data. Only one college exceeds a 50% graduation rate. UW-Parkside's institutional support costs jumped 191% between 2015 and 2022, while admission yield declined broadly across the state.
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Hi, it's Gary Stocker with this week's edition of top and bottom reports from the College Viability App. And for the first time, we're doing reports from the 2024 Public College Viability App, and it's brought to you by the great state of Wisconsin. And we're going to do top and bottom comparison for the 17 public 4-year colleges in the great state of Wisconsin. And we always start with enrollment. And again, we provide this, feel free to pause the YouTube video to look at the data more closely. You're looking at top to bottom and we've got it properly notated there. And you can see that the 17 colleges, I believe, in Wisconsin, you can see those that have had solid enrollment growth and you can see those who wish they had had solid enrollment growth. You'll want to be concerned about those on the bottom of the list, and you'll want to be particularly concerned about those public, and for that sake, for that matter, private colleges that are always on the bottom of our top-bottom report lists. And we go to graduation rates, and you'll, if you listen to these top-bottom reports on a regular basis, you'll know that here at College Viability, we have a minimum threshold at 4 years of 50%, and you can see just one public college in the state of Wisconsin exceeds that threshold. The remainder are below that 50% threshold. You can look at the numbers on your own from 2015 through 2022. And of course, this data comes from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database, and it's for the last 8 reported years, and those are the years 2015 through 2022. And you can always look at the far right-hand columns to see the 8-year change as a percentage. And you can see the percent change as well. And let's move on because we also have pictures in the 2024 version of the Public College Viability App. In all versions, we have a chart that shows a 50% threshold, and you can see that horizontal line on your screen. And as we just mentioned, you can see only one public college in Wisconsin exceeded that for all 8 years. You can draw your own conclusions. We provide the data. You do the comparisons. That's the way it works. And then let's look at admission yield. And for those, again, that follow these reports, these top-bottom reports on a regular basis, you know, the admission yield represents the percentage of students that a college accepts that actually show up and pay tuition. And you can see for the year 2022 that, for example, at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, For every 100 students they accepted, 43, 43% showed up, paid tuition, and attended classes for that first year. And then you can see what I've highlighted, the 8-year change. And what I see across the board with both public and private colleges throughout the country is those admissions yield, I also call it a popularity indicator for obvious reasons, almost all, a high percentage, I don't know what that number is, but a high percentage have a negative trend over the last 8 reported years. I have some reasons for that. And if you'd like, tune in to the regular Monday episodes I have of This Week in College Viability, and I talk about some of the reasons I think are there for the consistent decreases for admissions yield. And I've jumped up to graduate enrollment, and it's just kind of an indicator. You can see the column I have highlighted looks about like a little bit more than half of these colleges have grown their graduate enrollment. I tend to see that somewhat consistently across public and to some extent across privates as well. The graduate enrollment seems to be a little bit more stable and growing than the undergraduate, but of course not all colleges offer graduate enrollment. You can again pause the video to look at the data more closely and draw your own conclusions. Retention, you can see I've sorted by the year 2022 from highest to lowest, top on top, bottom on bottom, and And again, some decent numbers, the top 3 in particular. The middle set, you know, in the 70-plus, not bad. The bottom 3 is almost 70%. Overall, not bad. I don't always see those numbers on the private college side. There's something going on that when a student commits to a public college, in general, they tend to stay. I don't know what's going on with that, but that's an interesting observation. And then the last 2 that I want to talk about are ones that I haven't used before, and I don't use these on the top-bottom reports for private colleges. And you can see in the top left-hand corner, kind of in a lime green color font, the institutional support cost per student. FTE is full-time equivalent student, and this is essentially the salaries and wages and probably benefits of non-academic folks— the president, the CFO, the marketing leadership, the admissions leadership all those folks not involved in teaching classes. And what we can do is we can look at the value per student. You can look at that for each of the 8 reported years. Again, this is per student. And you can see we've sorted by, we've sorted by 8-year change. And you can see that UW-Parkside has had an 8-year change of almost $3,500 over those 8 reported years. That's up 191%. When I see such a big growth, I have to question whether the data was properly reported. But again, that's a story for another day. But again, draw your conclusion. Which of these is jumping the most on the non-academic cost? Because on the next slide, in the final top-bottom comparison, we look at instruction expense costs per full-time equivalent student. And again, the numbers tend to be higher, as they should. But you can compare the institution, institutional support cost per student here, with what it looks like on the instruction side as before. And I'm guessing with future versions of the app, we're probably going to create some ratios that track the ratio of institutional expense to instruction expense and some other ratios as well. So what do you do with these data comparisons? As I mentioned, there are 17 public 4-year colleges in Wisconsin. I posted top and bottom across 7 comparison reports, I think. The 2024 Public College Viability App, the executive analysis version that I use for this report, will let you compare more than 30 reports. We just looked at a handful or so here. As a student or parent, focus on the stronger, whether it's private or public. And I say I've got private there, it should say public. Focus on the stronger private colleges, the ones you see on top. Common sense. If, if you're really intrigued for whatever reason with those public colleges in Wisconsin that are regularly on the bottom of the list, ask them tough questions. Why is your enrollment down? Why are your graduation rates so high? I'm sorry, why are your graduation rates so high, or why are your graduation rates so low? But ask them tough questions. 'Cause I can make the case, if a college, whether it's public or private, large or small, if they're regularly on the bottom of these lists, that bad history in almost all cases means a bad future. And if you have questions, comments, observations, you can send those to me at gary@collegeviability.com. That's College Viability, one word. And I do have 3 versions of the 2024 Public College Viability App, so be out the week of March 18th, and I'll include a link in the show notes for this on how you can get access to those. And again, this has been the Public college top-bottom reports for the state of Wisconsin. My name is Gary Stocker with College Viability.
