College Viability TOP-bottom report for North Carolina and South Carolina regional private colleges

Hi, it's Gary Stocker back with another college viability top-bottom report for 2024, and today we're headed out to the East Coast. We're looking at private regional college top-bottom reports in North Carolina and South Carolina. I don't think I've ever done those before. And of course, the data source for all of the top/bottom reports that we use and all of the College Viability apps is from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. And the last reported set of years are from 2015 to 2022. The 2023 data will be out in early 2025. That's the hand that we're dealt, and of course we'll go with it. And always, let's take a look at enrollment first. And again, this is meant as a comparison tool. I'm hesitant to make too many judgments. I might make, I might make some. This is the top FT enrollment. You can see I highlighted the 8-year changes. And this suggests those colleges that have been able to grow their revenue. This is the absolute number in this column, and this is the percent change in this column. Of course, pause the video to do comparisons that you have. By the way, there were 55 private regional colleges combined in North Carolina and South Carolina. You won't see all 55 on any given screen. I pick the, the top performers and the bottom performers just based on the numbers that come across. There's the top, and of course that means we have to go to the bottom. And we see the colleges, private regional colleges in North Carolina and South Carolina, whose enrollment has not done so well over the last 8 reported years. Draw your own conclusions. I make the case if your enrollment has gone down year after year over the last 8 years, don't tell me you can turn it around tomorrow because you cannot do that. And let's go to graduation rates, and for those of you that follow me regularly, I pontificate on graduation rates all the time. I make the case if you can't graduate at least half, 50%, of your students in 4 years, you're really not much of a college. You're more of a coin toss college. But let's start off on the top, and these are colleges doing well in North Carolina and South Carolina. And you're probably, if you're in that region or follow colleges closely, you're not gonna be particularly surprised at those doing well. And I cut this one off right at the 50% mark, so all of these graduate at least half of their students in 4 years. The 50% mark is mine. Pick whatever standard that you want. And of course, after we do the top, let's go to the bottom. And again, in some cases, Clinton College, and I don't know Clinton College that well, looks like they couldn't even report the data in the first 3 years. Draw your own conclusions from that. And look at these low numbers. I didn't go below 30% on this particular screen grab. And I make the case, agree, disagree, that if you can't graduate at least 40%, these are 30% and below, You're not really a college. You're more of a tuition collection business, a tuition collection agency. Again, agree, disagree. If you're not graduating students, why are you a college? Let's move on. Let's take a look at tuition and fees. And now this is what the colleges collect. So this is the revenue they collect. And in most cases, the tuition and fees are a substantial, substantial percentage of the revenue that comes into a college. And again, I've highlighted the 8-year changes. And you can see which colleges are doing really well over the last 8 years. Not only are they growing their enrollment in most cases, but they're able to raise tuition prices. They are in most, maybe even all cases, reasonably selective colleges. And you'll see those that aren't very selective here in a couple minutes. And of course, we always have the percent change because of the different, different sizes in the colleges. You can use that to make your comparisons as well. And again, pause the video of course at any point to look at the colleges you may be considering in North Carolina or South Carolina. And from the top, let's go to the bottom. And these are the colleges whose tuition and fee revenue has dropped, decreased drastically over the last 8 reported years, 2015 to 2022. You can see the absolute numbers highlighted. You can see the percent change on the right-hand side. And just note the percent change on some of those is really, really not good. Moving on, let's take a look then at percent admitted. We talked about selectivity a couple minutes ago. Uh, now this is a case where we're going to talk about selectivity, but this is a case where I'm just doing the absolute numbers, and so I'm showing the top percentages. This isn't necessarily a good thing. For example, those top 5 or 6—Coker, Barton, Belmont Abbey, Columbia, and Manna— I'll admit 9 out of every 10 students. And again, if you followed me before, I call these heartbeat colleges. They admit any student with a heartbeat. I've taken some grief from that, but it's still a reasonable analogy. You can see their change. And typically, I'm making a generalization, typically colleges admit a high percentage of students just to collect the tuition revenue in many, many cases to meet their budget requirements. And you can see the high numbers here, you know, kind of a Gary Stocker college viability cutoff is anything above 80% is a little on the high side. Anything above 90%, I, I think that's a desperate search for tuition and fee revenue. And from the bottom, these are the more selective colleges, and you can see the numbers for the last 8 years in all these screenshots, 2015 all the way to 2022. And Davidson and John Smith Brevard, I don't know what's up with Allen here. They couldn't even report the data for the first 4 years. That's never a good sign. Again, draw your own comparison, draw your own conclusions, make your own comparisons. Selectivity, low admission rates, low percent admitted typically is a more selective college than a high percent admitted. And a couple more, institutional grants. This is kind of an inside baseball analogy. Institutional grants, they're called unfunded institutional grants. You can see the highlight there in the black and white section. These are typically merit aid, merit scholarships if you want. Many scholarships are unfunded, and colleges use them to kind of incent students to attend college. So, for example, High Point University on the top of the list here went from providing $24, almost $25 million in unfunded discounts in 2015 to almost $70 million in 2022 of $42 million. Look at the percent increase on that kind of stuff. This is a case of a college trying to give away the store to get students in the door. Now, if you want to do a comparison, go back and look on that first, first couple screens for the FTE enrollment and see if High Point was able to grow its enrollment over the last 8 reported years, because they certainly have been giving away the store in an attempt to get students in the door. And then this next one is those at the bottom. Again, these are unfunded institutional grants, discounts, merit aid, whatever you want to call them. And these are colleges that are trying to control what they're having to leave, take off the table in revenue they don't collect to get students in the door. Again, you could go back to the enrollment numbers on the first couple screenshots to see if they have been successful or not. These folks have decreased, and again, you can see Clapham has gone from almost $6 million down to a little over $1 million. They're trying to manage revenue. And if you want me to do an analysis for me, drop me a note and I'll certainly do that for you for a college or two that you're looking at. And let's move on then to endowment value. And again, a qualifier here, this is the endowment assets, endowment value if you will, per student, per full-time equivalent student. That's what FTE stands for. I don't list the endowment in this report that I do. Because it really is based in significant part on size, not always, but usually. So we can see that Davidson, Furman, Catawba, Wilford-Salem, Queens University, you know, they all have substantial endowment value per student, per full-time student. Right there at the top of the list. Let's look at the bottom part of the list and compare that to these and how much less per student in endowment value. Of course, endowment are gifts from alumni, friends of the college, students' families, all those kind of places. Just look at the comparison. Let me flip back to the high end. You know, right here in the middle, Bennett College, $74,000 per student. Let's go in the middle back here. Charleston Southern, $8,000 per student. Again, draw your own conclusions. Make your own judgments. But these are called top-bottom reports for a reason. They compare the top-performing in all of these categories and of course the bottom-performing. And what do we do with these data comparisons? And as I said before, there are 55 private regional 4-year colleges in North Carolina and South Carolina. I posted those across multiple comparison reports from the College Viability, the 2024 College Viability app, Private College Viability app, the executive analysis version, the high-end version. And you can compare that, you can use that version to compare more than 30 reports. I just did 6 or 7. And if you're a student or a parent, focus on these stronger private colleges, the ones that show up all the time on the tops. Those colleges that are consistently in the bottom list, and there are many, not just in North Carolina and South Carolina, those colleges that are consistently in the bottom lists should be considered only with aggressive questioning. Ask them about why the enrollments decreased so much. Why is your endowment so low? Why are your graduation rates so bad? What have you done to improve your graduation rates? Why do you admit so many students? Ask those questions. It goes back to the old Latin saying, caveat emptor, let the buyer beware, because I will make the case a bad history, as we see in these top-bottom reports, equals a bad future. And then finally, the 2024 College Viability Apps. I'll leave a link in the show notes in YouTube. You can see the different versions. I've got both versions for both private colleges and public colleges, and I'll have links for all of those in the show notes. More and more students and families are buying that version because there's increasing concern about the financial health and viability of many, many private colleges in the United States. So we'll call that a wrap. This is Gary Stocker with College Viability with another edition, an episode if you will, of Top to Bottom Reports from the 2024 series of College Viability Apps. We'll do that again soon.