Gary Stocker demonstrates College Strategic Compass, a tool that analyzes college applications, housing, student income, enrollment geography, and degree programs using nine years of financial and enrollment data. It benchmarks institutions against peers, tracks eight-to-ten-year trends to spot outliers, and compares 16 financial and operational metrics across reports.
Chapters
Hi, it's Gary Stocker, founder of College Viability. This tutorial is the 6th of 7 on the College Strategic Compass from Perspective Data Science and will cover these 4 modules: Applications and Housing, Student Characteristics, Market Share, and Degree Programs. The data used in the Strategic Compass comes from a couple of different sources: a college's audited financial statements, IRS Form 990s, and the IPEDS data submissions to the National Center for Education Statistics. The time period is from 2016 to 2024. Perspective Data Science uses an AI technology that captures images of financial statements and 990s and converts those to an optical character recognition software program. These data points become the basis for all the Perspective Data Science products available. Let's take a look at these modules: Applications and Housing, Student Characteristics, Market Share, and Degree Programs. The first of the 4 modules we're going to look at today has to do with applications, and simply it shows which of the colleges— our sample college, our example college, and its peer set— use the Common App. Those are in blue. You can highlight over those, and those that do not use the Common App. The second set of, of graphics I'm going to show you has to do with housing. And there's a couple dropdown options. I'm going to stay focused on institutionally controlled. You can see our demo college has a little over 1,000 seats, a little bit higher than the mean. And you can see interestingly our demo college is in red, our peers always in blue. Quite a variation in the amount of housing available. And you can see quite a bit of variability in the amount of institutionally controlled housing units for our demo college, especially when compared to its peer group. The next module that I want to look at is Student Characteristics. And I've got a couple things I want to show you here. There's a long list of options. We can select different types of student groups. We're going to look at Student Group 2 using the app here, full-time freshmen. And right now we're going to look at Group 2 students awarded Pell Grants. We can see the numbers from year to year from 2010 all the way out through 2023. The 2024 data will be out soon. And again, we can compare it to the blue line, which is Here's the peer group. And again, our demo college is all over the place, from a large percentage to a really small percentage, and now it's working its way back up. One can speculate that that's based on the need to generate additional revenue. They're taking more Pell students. Here is the dot matrix that we use. Let's turn off the peer schools. And we can see again, like we saw on the line graph, over the course of the years, the percentage of students that are offered Pell Grants for this college. Take one, look at one other item. I'm going to go down here and we can look at the students based on compensation, based on family income. Let's go down and look at one other option where it's a group of students with family incomes. I'll pick the $75,000 to $110,000. And again, we could turn off the peer schools to see our group. Our college, our demo college, is considerably below that regularly. You can see where the peer group ranges for each year and the number for that year. We can also look at that trend. The trends right here, again, our college has been going down, lower and lower with that demographic group of 75,000 to 110,000. Let's take a look at market share for our demo college. And you can see market share by state is where we are. And there are graphic representations across the country for all of the fields that you see here. Market share, first-time freshmen, state total first-time freshmen, and percent of an institution's domestic freshmen coming from that state. All represented here. You can see the definition chart on the right-hand side. The table shows, uh, the same kind of field report that we saw above, and we can see that for Guilford College, and we can see this for all the demo colleges and for all the PIERCE-AC colleges, in North Carolina, 73% of their students come from North Carolina. That's up 19 points. We can also see that in Georgia, the percentage of students down percentage of students is down 67%. Now, it's a small percentage to begin with, but in a second I'll show you what that looks like graphically. That might be an opportunity for Guilford to focus on that area. Same thing for Virginia. And we can actually scroll down to all the other colleges. And now let's look at the percent, again, the same fields. Let's look at the percent domestic freshmen coming from the state right here. We're gonna start with North Carolina, and an increasing percentage has gone up, increasing number. Let's take a look at South Carolina. An adjacent state, and kind of all over the place, trending upward a little bit the last couple years. I want to go to Georgia though, and we can see maybe this is an opportunity using this data for this college to have some growth opportunities. For whatever reason, starting sometime around 2017, the Georgia numbers declined. Now, is it statistically significant? Not my decision to make, but the data gives you a resource to look at that and say, hey, Maybe this is an area that we can focus on. And finally, let's look at degree programs for our demo college. And you can see a long list of degree programs. We're going to keep it kind of at a bigger level. We've got Business, Management, Marketing, and you can see all the subcategories that are there. Our demo college doesn't have a lot of these, so I'm going to keep it at the big level— Business, Management, Marketing, and Related Support Services. And again, we can turn off the peer group to see where our college is, and they're trending down below. And on the y-axis we have bachelor's degree awarded and full-time equivalents to give a comparison standard. And on the right-hand side we have again the trend. And for our demo college, we can see in relationship to the peers, it started off with strong numbers on business management and has trended downward ever since then. And the table simply reflects that data. You can look at all of the different disciplines here. You can look at the CIP code And then you can look at bachelor's. There's also master's listed. And finally, we can look at predicted degrees based on the peer group, what our college actually awarded. And finally, you can actually look at the predicted degrees for our college based on the peer group, what they actually awarded, and then the difference for those items over here. So how can you use the College Strategic Compass? There are 3 ways, basically. You can compare your financial staffing and admission data, and much more with either a statistically similar peer group or your own proximate peer group. You can look at this 8 to 10 year trends to learn how others have performed in the same period and see areas where you're off, where you're strange, where you're weird compared to that peer group to make adjustments accordingly. And you can do these comparisons across 16 different reports on your college's finances and its operations and more alongside that statistical peer group. Hey, thanks for making time to watch the College Strategic Compass tutorial for Applications and Housing, Student Characteristics, Market Share, and Degree Programs. Reach out to me to schedule a private demo at gary@collegeviability.com.
