College Viability Top-Bottom Reports for Kansas and Oklahoma Private Colleges (Regional)

It's January 2nd, 2024. This is, of course, our first College Viability Top and Bottom Report for this year, and we're looking at private colleges today in two states. Kansas and Oklahoma, and we're looking at the regional private colleges in both those states. Hi, my name is Gary Stocker, and as always, we're looking at the 4 fields you see in the middle of the screen. We're looking to compare top and bottom colleges in Kansas and Oklahoma for FTE enrollment, for 4-year graduation rates, admissions yield, and endowment. And of course, the data is from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database for 2014 to 2021. So Sometime this month, IPEDS should be releasing the final parts of the 2022 data for colleges across the country, and we'll certainly be updating all of our stuff at that point. So let's get to the data, and we always start on top, and we always start with our FTE enrollment, and that's what we're looking at today. We've got a couple things different as we start the new year, and we are pre-highlighting all of the things we think are important to look at for each screenshot. And again, this screenshot is from our 2023 College Viability App. And as you can see at the top of the screen, it's the faculty and staff version. It's the same data, just fewer reports as part of that. And so we're looking at enrollment change, and you can see we've noted the 8-year changes for about 10 or so colleges in Kansas and Oklahoma. And you can do your own quick comparison on which state has the most or fewest top and bottom colleges. We've also added a cutoff, and you'll see that on the far right-hand side of the screen. And it's really our subjective, albeit based on research and experience, the cutoff we would recommend that folks use when considering colleges to not go below the cutoff that we have for any of our top/bottom reports. Of course, it's your decision, but we can offer some rationale for most, and really for all the cutoffs that we choose. And so we can see for the top colleges in Oklahoma and Kansas, that there are 5 or 6 that have had decent growth. And we put our cutoff at Cleveland University in Kansas City at 116 students over the last 8 reported years. Right below that is Kansas Wesleyan, the same number. So use your own judgment, but we can make the case that Randall and Bethany, even though they had positive growth over those 8 years, it's a pretty small number. And in combination with the intense pressure on tuition discounting, that may not be the kind of growth I'm sure they were hoping for, and it may not be the type of growth they need for the financial stability that all are looking for in this day and age. Let's move on to the bottom, FTE. And again, we can see every one of these colleges. We're not going to have a cutoff for bottoms because they're all not doing well. And you can see all of these colleges have lost hundreds of students over the course of the years. You can see we have our Consol— our Conditional formatting, and all of these are red. If I click back up on the top enrollment numbers, you can see we've got a combination of green for good, yellow for, eh, okay, and then of course in the bottom all are red. That's not always the case, but generally it is. And you can look at the numbers for your own. University of Tulsa started at 4,300 and is down to 3,500. Make your own judgment, but these are the bottom performing in terms of FTE enrollment for colleges in Kansas and Oklahoma. And again, quick clarification, we use FTE enrollment there are other types of enrollment out there, because we think it is the most standardized approach to measuring and comparing enrollment of college students in this day and age. Let's move on, and we always talk about graduation rates, and you've heard me before say graduation rates are the hidden trauma, the hidden tragedy, if you will, in colleges across the United States, and we're measuring the 4-year undergraduate graduation rates, and our threshold has always been 50% or higher, If you can't, if a college can't graduate 50% or more of its students, we call it a coin toss college because you can just as easily toss a coin to see if your student will graduate or not. And you can see that 3 of the colleges in this report, Newman University, Oklahoma City, and the University of Tulsa are above our thresholds, not significantly so, but again, it's above our thresholds, so there's where we have the cutoff. Anything below 50% we think is not where you want to look strongly because if they can't graduate their students, why are you going there? And when we go to the bottom, that's just going to reinforce that. And you can see, and you can look at the colleges on your own on the left, this is the bottom report. Not a one is even close to graduating 50% of their undergraduate students in 4 years. We also track the 6-year graduation rates. We don't put that in our top/bottom reports, and our threshold for that is 70%. But if a college doesn't meet the 4-year, in almost all cases, it doesn't meet the 6-year 70% threshold as well. And you can see the 8-year change. If your graduation rate is going down over 8 years, that ain't a good thing. And again, you can see our conditional formatting on the right-hand side, and it's based on the percent change, so you're gonna see a mix of green, yellow, and red on that. Let's move on to the top for popularity indicator, and again, we play with the terminology here. The true term for this is something called admissions yield. It's an inside baseball, inside higher education term. We call it a popularity indicator because it reflects the percentage of students that a college has accepted that actually show up and pay tuition, show up for classes on the first day and pay tuition. And we measure this, we like to monitor the 8-year change. And so you can see, even though Bacone College is about to close, they have had an 8-year change of 37 points. Was 23 in 2014, is up to 60 in 2021. These, these, these factors are not always strongly predictive of closures, and clearly that's the case here. And you can see the growth in acceptance, popularity. Oklahoma Wesleyan has gone up a lot. Now it's so much that I even question their capacity to report the data accurately, but nonetheless, that's what's shown as a comparison. It's always the comparison that matters. Any individual data point in and of its own is not really valuable. It's that 8-year or more comparison, trend comparison, that's really important. You can look at the data yourself. And when we go to the bottom of popularity indicators, and again, that's a big drop for Barclays. Maybe it's real or not, but if so, they've got a lot of problems. I'll have to look at that in more detail. But down 54 points, and you can see if the trend goes down, maybe from you know, from Kansas Wesleyan on down, if I were to have a cutoff, and I don't do that for bottoms, you know, it would be 18%, down 18 points over 8 years. Not good, but it's reasonable data points really for all of these. I question the depth of these drops, but we'll live with them for right now. And then finally, let's take a look at endowment values. And of course, endowments are the gifts from alumni, friends, and others of a college. And you can see the range is significant. Our cutoff, our minimum threshold for an endowment is $50 million. And you can see just 3 colleges in Oklahoma and Kansas, 3 private colleges in Oklahoma and Kansas, meet that minimum threshold. And if a college hasn't generated $50 million or more in its entire existence And I see this all the time. Colleges say we're going to raise $20 million in the next 3 years and they haven't raised $20 million in the entire existence of the college. That's just not feasible. But you can, again, compare the capacity to raise money from gifts. You can make a decision on which one meets your threshold or not, but we use $50 million. And then when we go to the bottom, it's not just that none of these are even close to that minimum threshold. But a couple of them actually, you can see I've underlined the 6-year change, should be 8-year change. The 8-year change for Donnelly College and Bethany College is a negative number. And one of two things is happening here. Either they have really had a bad investment guidance on their endowment, or they're taking money out of their endowment. They're taking principal out of their endowment to keep the lights on and meet payroll. My terms, not theirs. But again, you can see if they haven't raised that minimum threshold— I use 50, you can pick whatever number you want— it's not reasonable to think they ever can. So how do you use this data? There are 27 regional and religious private colleges in Kansas and Oklahoma. I need to check that number. I posted the top and bottom 10 for the most part. I play with that number a little. The full version of the College Viability App, and I'll link that in the YouTube notes, will let you compare all the colleges, all the private colleges in Kansas and Oklahoma. And depending on the version, you can compare up to 30 different reports. But as a student, and most importantly as a student or parent, focus on the stronger, the top private colleges in Kansas and Oklahoma. Those colleges that are consistently in the bottom list should really, in my mind, only be considered with aggressive questioning. You know, why did the enrollment decrease so much? Why is your endowment so far below that $50 million threshold, or whatever number you choose? And if their graduation rate is below 50%, what have you done, college that I'm looking at? What have you done to improve your graduation rates? Ask the tough questions. Because this is really the old Latin saying, caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. I can make a case that in most, almost all situations, a bad financial, a bad outcome, a bad enrollment history equals a bad future. And our work with the College Viability App is a tool, a resource, to let you be able to compare which colleges have good trends and which colleges do not. If you have a specific set of colleges you would like us to look at, drop me a note at gary@collegeviability.com, that's one word. Or if you'd like to suggest some reports that you'd like to see, please feel free to drop me a note. I'll be happy to do that for you. And until next time, when we add the next top-bottom report, the second one for 2024, this is Gary Stocker with College Viability. We'll talk to you next time.