Gary Stocker compares three Illinois private colleges—Quincy, Bradley, and Greenville—using financial data from 2013-2018. He scores them on the REGRET model (revenue, enrollment, graduation rates, tuition, expenses, endowment) and AIIS/ACE model (per-student spending), finding Bradley strongest and Quincy weakest. Financial health is one factor among many when choosing a college.
Chapters
Are you concerned the private college you are considering may close? Or maybe it will just struggle to provide a quality education. During this video, I'll share with you how to, how to quickly and easily compare the financial health of private colleges you are considering. I can help you become more informed, comfortable, and confident in your final college decision. I make no predictions, no guesses, just comparison of data colleges themselves have provided. You deserve a quality college education, and I want to help you make the best possible college decision that includes comparisons of a private college's financial health and viability. This episode focuses on Quincy University in Illinois and compares it to two other private colleges in Illinois: Bradley University in Peoria and Greenville University. I have created two methods to easily compare a private college's financial health and viability. The first is the REGRET system. I use data from the National Center for Education Statistics to compare total revenue, enrollment, graduation rates over a 6-year period, tuition revenue, total expenses, and total endowment. In each case, we are looking at a 6-year trend for each college we compare. This video covers the most recent data available from 2013 to 2018. Granted, it's old, but in almost all cases, the data show clear trends. Some are good trends, some are not so good. Each college in our set of 3 is only compared to the other 2. Red is the worst result, yellow is next, followed by the green color for the best result for each of the regret items reported. Let's specifically look at Quincy University and how it compares to Bradley and Greenville. The quickest way to compare these 3 colleges is to count the number of red, yellow and green indicators for each. For Quincy, it has 3 reds, 2 yellows, and 1 green for a slash score of 3-2-1. It is the highest slash score for the 3 colleges and thus the one with the less positive, less favorable results. Greenville is 2 reds, 3 yellows, and 1 green, and Bradley University is 1-1-4. Let's make some general observations. Quincy University is down $18.2 million in total revenue, has 373 fewer students in 2018 than it did in 2013. You can note that the university has clearly tried to lower its expenses to the tune of decreasing them about $3.4 million over these 6 years. Looking at both Quincy University and Greenville University, their 2018 6-year graduation rates both hover around 50%. Not a good number. So look at it this way: for every 100 students who started at either of those universities in 2013, only about 50 ended up graduating from that university 6 years later. And finally, let's look at the endowment for each college, and it shows clearly that Bradley has a more substantial number. We'll talk about endowments in a future video. Next, let's look at how each of these three Illinois private colleges has allocated its support dollars for its students in the 2013 to 2018 time period. We'll look at this data from a per-student perspective—how many dollars were spent for each of these four categories per per student. We're gonna use a system called AIIS, A-I-I-S. It stands for academic support, institutional support, instruction support, and student services. And some examples for academic support are things like tutoring. For institutional support, costs for salaries and support for administration costs, the president, the CFO. Human resources, marketing, things like that. Instruction support would be mostly for faculty salaries. And then student services support would be for things like counseling, recreational facilities, things like that. We use the same red, yellow, green slash line to compare Quincy, Greenville, and Bradley Universities. And I have noted in parentheses whether it's good to have a higher number or a lower number for each of these 4 ACE categories. The ACE scores for the 3 colleges are 301 for Quincy, 103 for Greenville, and 40 or 040 for Bradley University. Of these 3 colleges, Quincy University has the highest or least desirable score of this set of colleges. They have too many reds and not enough greens in comparison, and that's important, in comparison to Greenville University and Bradley University. We can see that Quincy was spending $149 less per student in 2018 than they were in 2013. They really slashed institutional support by about $2,600 per student over the same time period. And then both instructional support, instruction support, and student services support were also down over that time period. QU, as we can see, was spending fewer dollars in 2018 on all four of these categories than they were spending in 2013. For a final comparison, I have also totaled the red, yellow, green scores from the regret model and the ACE model into one number. You can see that the total college viability comparison slash lines for these three colleges is Quincy University, 622, Greenville University, 337, and Bradley University, $154,000. And finally, here is the College Viability App that I have created that will let you be able to customize the colleges you are considering for yourself, for your child, for your family member, whatever the case may be. You can see that it's for 6 years, from the years 2013 to 2018. I will still grant you that the data from the national federal government is slow old. As soon as the 2019 data is posted, we'll get it up there for you. But you can see again, I've taken the 3 colleges that are part of this video—Quincy University, Greenville, and Bradley. You can see many of the numbers we saw below in terms of enrollment, the graduation rate changes over the 6 years, and then what they've been able to do in terms of managing expenses and revenues. And then the 2 screenshots down below are simply the annual listings of the full-time enrollment each of these colleges had. And you can see that Bradley started off with 5,200 in 2013, they're up to 5,700 and change in 2018. And for Greenville, 1,400 down to 1,100, and Quincy from 1,500 down to 1,100 as well. And then finally, the graduation rates. If there's any, if there's a single important indicator in all this, it's that graduation rate. And again, like we saw on the comparisons, you can see that Bradley University has a much, much, much higher 6-year graduation rate. And for example, for Greenville University, it shows a 47% 6-year graduation rate. That means in 2013, for every 100 students that started at Greenville, only 47 had graduated in 2018 as a percentage. So how do you use this information as part of your college search? It's the comparison of individual colleges that's important. There is probably not an absolute winner or loser in any case, but your comparison of a college's— private colleges in our case— financial health, along with looking at things like tuition and campus environment, faculty, majors, courses, and all the rest, it'll all come together to help make that final decision. Be careful not to fall for something called the college fit. There is no single college that will be the only one that can provide you with a successful education. There will be many on your list that can do that. I just want to make these comparisons as easy as possible. Drop me a comment down below if you have some ideas on how to make them better, how to make them more useful to you. I will be grateful. And if you found this video helpful in providing you with more information on private colleges you're considering, make sure to click on the like below as well. And so don't let the risk of a financially unhealthy private college damage that opportunity for you. Look at their finances, but more importantly, compare them to other colleges that you're considering. So this has been the first in what will be a series of private college financial health and viability comparisons. Stay tuned for additional episodes in the coming weeks and months. I'll look forward to seeing you then.
