College Strategic Compass Tutorial: Enrollment Benchmarking & Using the UnGrd Enrollment Simulator

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. 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. For today's episode, we're looking at two of the modules. We're looking at the enrollment benchmark and we're looking at the undergrad enrollment simulator. And so you're looking at the sample case that we have for this university that we use for this tutorial demo. And we're going to look at the enrollment benchmarking part of the Strategic Compass app. And we can see that for this college, we're looking at this college and a set of peer groups. The peer groups can be selected by statistical component, by self-designated peers, by proximate peers, and by strong financial peers for this, for this particular college. Let's take a look. We're going to leave it at all peers, and we'll just work through the app. So total FTE, full-time equivalent students. Let's start with total FTE, full-time equivalent students. You can see the numbers for 2013, for 2024. You can see the change and the percent change. And the same thing for undergraduate and graduate students for the same time period Red is typically not a good indicator. Green is typically a better indicator. You'll see some blue numbers as well on some of the data. And again, we look at the summary of the funnel and first-time students, percent of applicants admitted, percent enrolled, and new first-time students. All these data points are available. We see the 2013 data point, the 2024 data point, the change, the percent change, and then we compare that to the 2024 expected, again, based on all the peer groups that we had from that school filter up above. And again, those peer groups can be all the statistical ones, the self-designated peers, the proximate peers, in this case New Jersey, and the strong financial peers as well. Each should get a comparison of how your college would compare to that peer group. And then we have pictures that do both. I'll focus on the one on the right. So again, the red college, the red number is for our demo college, and the blue line is always going to be for the peer institution, whatever group you have selected for that. And we can see that our demo college had some decent enrollment numbers, plummeted, and then worked its way back up in the last few years. We can see that overall the peer group has a downward trend over the last 10 or so reported years. We can apply that to undergrad enrollment. You can see the same trend. We can apply that to graduate enrollment. And then we can apply that to any other number of data points that comes from either the IPEDS data or from the audited financial statements, and all of these will show up and available, even something like FAFSA submitted to track those kind of points. Then what we have down below is the same kind of fields available, but we look at it in comparison to the peer line. And so this is where the peer group would be, and we can see that for new first-time student applicants that Drew is a little bit below. We can hover on top of that. The peer group applicant was 35, 42, and Drew was at 21, 45. And we can point on any of these colleges to see what the number is compared to the peer group for that year. We can also shorten it if 2010 is too long. We can shorten it to 2015 to see what that pattern is. If we want to look at post-pandemic, we can also shorten it from that as well. Then let's take a look at the undergrad— then let's take a look at the undergrad enrollment simulator. And what we're looking at here is again our demo university And we're looking at what the enrollment trends would be like in the future, and I'll explain that here in a second, based on the data points down below. And again, I'll cover that here in a second. What we have done with this, of course, this is the peer group. This is our demo college. And we have used something called an imitator to make sure that the pattern that we showed historically using the simulator model is somewhat accurate. And we can see the trends are accurate. And so we can assume that based on the modeling, that the future trends based on these data points that I'm about to show you shows a reliable trend based on changing these data points. So let's look at that. Zoom out just a little bit here. So the number of first-time applicants, this is all the years in the data point. This is the most recent year. And based on all these data points, this is what the enrollment simulator will show for this college in the upcoming years. We can see 4,600 first-time student applications. We can see they had a lot higher number in 2011. And if they were to get to that number, which was 5,500. Again, as you would expect, the enrollment simulator shows a much higher trend in terms of future enrollments. Let's go back and reset that to 2024. And the same logic applies to all these other— all these other components of the undergraduate simulator, undergraduate enrollment simulator. And again, the number was 66 incoming students in 2024. If we look at the highest number, which happened to be 2020, Again, as you would expect, the enrollment trend projection goes up. Let's reset that one to 2024 and let's take it down. Let's say what, what the worst number of incoming transfer students were. And again, we can see this impact on the projections for future data, for future undergrad enrollment out to the year 2030 and beyond. Let's reset that one and let's just do one more. Let's look at, um, let's look at selectivity. Let's look at the percent of applicants admitted. And we can see that in 2024 this college admitted 69%. But again, 10 years ago, give or take, they admitted 85%. And again, to get back to that number or something between the number now, which is 69%, you can see the impact there, essentially flat. And back to a reasonably higher number— I use 2010 this time— you can see the impact on enrollment. So What do these components mean for the Strategic Compass? You have seen, if you've watched the other tutorials, you'll have seen all of the different components showed, all the different parts, the different reports. You'll have seen the different benchmarks shown in the Strategic Compass. Use this data if you decide to acquire the Strategic Compass. You'll use the peer dataset, you'll use your own self-selected dataset, approximate dataset, and then a financially strong dataset to compare your college across all the parameters that we've shown and the Strategic Compass. To schedule a custom demonstration of the product, I'll leave some contact information in the show notes on how you can reach out to me, and we'll schedule a time to give you a one-on-one private demo of the Strategic Compass. For College Viability and for Perspective Data Science, I'm Gary Stocker.