Gary Stocker analyzes 2024 data for Arkansas public colleges across seven metrics: enrollment, graduation rates, retention, and spending per student. University of Arkansas leads in graduation rates while most schools show declining enrollment and admissions yield. The data flags schools consistently ranking at the bottom as worth questioning about outcomes and costs.
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Hi, it's Gary Stocker back with this week's College Viability 2024 Top and Bottom Report. This week is brought to you from the public colleges in Arkansas, and we've chosen Arkansas because as we were finalizing the 2024 version of the public College Viability app, we're using Arkansas as our test state. So we just grabbed some some of the headings, some of the data from Arkansas. So let's take a look at it. And as usual, we always start with enrollment. And these are the 4-year publics in the state of Arkansas. And you can see we've got the top and bottom always highlighted. And we've made a note around the 8-year change. So you can see that of the 10 or 12 public 4-years in Arkansas, just 3 have had any enrollment growth from the reporting period of 2015 to 2022. You can of course pause the video to look at the data more closely. Moving on from FTE enrollment, we like to look at graduate enrollment. And again, we show the 8-year change. You can see we've highlighted that with a little goldish kind of rectangle there. And you can see that interestingly, most of the 4-years have increased their graduate enrollment. There's a story there, I'm not sure what it is, but that's that pattern I see across many publics and not as many privates. I'll keep an eye on that for sure. And a couple of the universities you see at the bottom of the list are not doing something right because they've lost enrollment in their graduate programs over the last 8 reported years. And something I always harp about is that 4-year graduation rate. And here at College Viability, we always have a minimum threshold of 50%. And as you can see, only the flagship university in Arkansas, the University of Arkansas, exceeds that minimum 50% graduation rate. And most of the years, if you look at the data from 2015 through 2022, 2019, it doesn't even get to that level. And the reason that we point out the graduation rates is that's what a college is paid to do. A college is not paid just to give you classes and give you courses and send you to football games. It's there to get you to graduate, to get that certificate that gives you the income opportunities, the career opportunities, and much more. If you can't graduate 50% of your students, be careful of those kind of colleges, whether they're public or private. And as always, in the 2024 version of both the public and private College viability apps, we have pictures, and you can quickly glance at— looks like the graduation rates. And you can see, like we just saw, saw in the data, that the University of Arkansas on the far left has done a decent job of improving their graduation rates. And really, at first glance, it looks like most of the colleges, the public four-years in Arkansas, have done a decent job of improving that graduation rate. But it's still, as you can see by the horizontal line at 50%, well below what I consider a minimum threshold. Moving on, let's take a look at admissions yield, and I always define that as the percent of students that a college accepts that actually show up, attend classes, and pay tuition. I don't know why the University of Arkansas Fort Smith didn't report the data after 2015. I left that in. You can make your own judgment or ask them why they're not reporting admissions yield. Sometimes just a function of skill sets at those universities. And you can see the pattern as we see almost everywhere in that 8-year change on the far right-hand side, the admissions yield is decreasing almost everywhere. I don't know what the percentage is. I'll have to calculate it someday. But we're seeing more and more students apply and either not show up at all or attend different colleges. So it's something to watch. There's also something called a draw rate that I'm gonna start focusing on as well, and I'll talk about that in another video. So there's the, there is the, so there's the admission yield. Looks like I clicked ahead to retention. And again, I don't have an absolute threshold that we use at College Viability for the retention rate. The comparisons are always what matters. So the University of Arkansas at 86% is doing much better than Arkansas Tech or Pine Bluff or Henderson State. Draw your own conclusions, but students are staying after that first year more those colleges on the top, and you can see the 8-year change and the percent change over those last 8 reported years as well. Let's take a look at the last 2, and these are ones I'm just using this year for the first time. And there's— I'm comparing institutional support, the institutional support costs per FTE, that's per full-time equivalent student. So you can see that in the 8 years, looks like the highlighter is not quite perfect, that the University of Arkansas Pine Bluff has increased their amount of institutional support costs per FTE, and those, those are the administrative costs, the non-academic costs. There are definitions you can find online, but these are the costs that colleges are generally alleged to be spending more money on administrative talent than they are on academic talent. And so, for example, the last slide we'll look at is instruction expense. It's one of four cost, expense cost per FTE that we compare in the full version of the College Viability App, the executive analysis version. And again, you can see that Pine Bluff has increased their instruction expenses. I'll go back up to institutional. So Pine Bluff is higher at $2,667, 8-year change on the institutional support, and up about $2,800 on that instruction expense. You know, in my assessment, they've run into a lot of money to be able to increase both of those. But again, you can look at the data on your own Pause the video to take a look at the year-by-year data. Looks like the University of Arkansas System, E-Versity, somebody's trying to create something unique there and they're not gotten up to speed in reporting the data yet. So what can you do with these data comparisons? There are 12 public 4-year colleges in the state of Arkansas. I posted top and bottom comparisons across 7 reports. Again, these are IPEDS reports from the National Center for Education Statistics in the last 8 reported years are 2015 to 2022. And that the full version of the Public College of Viability app, the executive analysis version, will let you compare more than 30 reports in addition to some ratios and 8-year changes. As a student or a parent, if you're looking at this, focus on those stronger private— public, excuse me, should say public— focus on those stronger public Arkansas colleges. Those colleges that are consistently in the bottom should only be considered in my mind with aggressive questioning. Why is your enrollment down? Why is your graduation rate so low? Why are you spending so much money for institutional costs as compared to instructional costs? Questions like that. And then, you know, I can make the case that if, whether it's a public college or a private college, If the college or colleges that you're looking at are consistently in that bottom rank, it's a caveat emptor, the buyer beware in those situations. I can make the case that bad history is bad future. So we'll wrap that up with the Arkansas public college, public 4-year college comparisons from the 2024 Public College Viability App. My name is Gary Stocker with College Viability. Let's do it again next Sunday.
