In this 2023 episode of College Viability’s Top‑and‑Bottom Reports, Gary Stocker reviews Indiana’s private regional colleges using four key performance metrics drawn from IPEDS data (through 2021): full‑time‑equivalent (FTE) enrollment, 4‑year undergraduate graduation rates, admissions yield (the “popularity indicator”), and endowment size. For each metric he lists the top‑performing institutions and the bottom‑performing ones, highlights eight‑year trends, and interprets what those trends imply for institutional viability. He notes strong growth at schools such as Marian University, Trine, and Butler in FTE enrollment, while flagging sharp declines at Indiana Wesleyan and University of Evansville. Graduation‑rate analysis identifies a handful of “coin‑toss” colleges (≈50% 4‑year graduation) and alarmingly low performers (≈14% graduation). Yield data reveal selective schools with high acceptance‑to‑enrollment ratios and institutions with declining appeal. Endowment review applies a $50 million viability threshold, pointing out both robust endowments (e.g., DePauw’s ~$700 M) and precarious ones (e.g., Calumet’s $4.4 M). Throughout, Stocker stresses that multi‑year trends matter more than single‑year fluctuations, advises students, parents, and faculty to prioritize colleges with positive trends, and promotes the College Viability app (faculty/staff and executive versions) as a tool for comparative analysis. He concludes with a call for cautious evaluation of consistently low‑performing schools and invites audience questions.
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Welcome back to another episode of College Viability's Top and Bottom Reports for 2023. Today's report is brought to you by the state of Indiana. And as always, my name is Gary Stocker, and we look at just 4 fields. We look at the top performers and the bottom performers across full-time equivalent enrollment, 4-year graduation rates, admissions yield, and the endowment. And of course, the data is from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. It's data the colleges themselves submit to the colleges, and 2021 is the last reported data. The 2022 data will be available later this year, and we'll have that 2024 version of a College Viability app that includes those as well. So to the state of Indiana we go, and we're looking at just regional colleges. And this is the top performers, uh, private colleges in the state of Indiana for FTE enrollment. And again, we use FTE, which stands for full-time equivalent. It's a calculation that gives the most accurate and consistent results. It's not just counting the number of students out of college, it's based on hours of courses taken and all that kind of stuff. It's the best to use, trust me. And again, we can see some strong performers. Marian University, Trine, Butler, and others have over the last 8 reported years, 2014 to 2021, showed nice growth. Not exceptional growth outside of maybe the top 3, but decent growth. And we can see a couple of just barely getting by, you know, Huntington University, Growing about 80 students over 8 years, that's 10 students per year. Not great, not awful, but just as important to put that into perspective. And let's go to the bottom. And this is from the faculty and staff version of the College Viability App that's available for faculty and staff to be able to compare their college against others. We have a full version called the Executive Analysis Version that includes 30 different reports. On the low side. And you can see on the right-hand side, in the 8-year change category, first of all, Indiana Wesleyan University, down from 14,000 to 2,500. I gotta think either they're not counting right or they changed some part of their business model back in 2015, 2016. If they've dropped 12,000 students, almost 11,000+ students, that's not good. There's probably something not accurate with that. But nonetheless, that's what they reported. If we actually start looking in 2016, they're still down about 300 students in the last 6 reported years. These are the colleges you start to have concerns about. This isn't like it's a 1-year drop. So let's take the University of Evansville, a fine college in southwestern Indiana, but to lose 560-some-odd students over the course of 8 years, that's a trend. That's a trend that you want to be cognizant of, and not necessarily because the University of Evansville is going to close, it's almost certainly not, but it does impact their capacity to offer majors, it does offer their capacity to offer amenities, and it's those things that come into play in addition to concerns about viability. And if there is a viability concern, I'll tell you, but it's the trend that matters. So if we compared DePauw, go back to Evansville, if we compare the University of Evansville, clip back up on top, Evansville is down 560, And let's look at Indianapolis, up 340. You know, if you're looking at those two colleges, one in terms of FT enrollment appears stronger. They're doing something right. And that's Indianapolis over Evansville. And let's go to my favorite category 'cause it's the one that's the scariest. And that is 4-year graduation rates. These are undergrad graduation rates, again, from the years 2014 to 2021. And the first one on the line is Horizon University. I left that in the report because, if you've heard these reports before, if a college can't complete the data, I have a lot more concerns than just viability. Horizon University, I don't know what they're doing, but skip beyond that one. And we look at a minimum threshold. And our college viability minimum threshold is 50%. And you can see some really strong performance across the board for private colleges in Indiana on the top. Of the list. And if you're eager for the bottom list to come next, not so good. And again, you've heard me talk about and write about a coin toss college. And the best case scenario here with University of Indianapolis and St. Francis Fort Wayne, Manchester, St. Mary-of-the-Woods is they are coin toss colleges. They graduate about half of the students in 4 years that started those colleges, and you might as well flip a coin to decide if that student's gonna graduate, if your student is gonna graduate or not at colleges like that. And then when we get down to the absolute bottom of the list, at Marion and Holy Cross, Oakland City and Calumet, I, what is going on? 14 out of every 100 students graduates in 4 years. Why are they even a college? Martin University, they don't even know how to enter the data for whatever reason. Let's take a look next at the Popularity Indicator. And again, that's the college viability term. Technical term, the inside baseball term, is admission yield. The admission yield reflects the percentage of students that a college has accepted that actually show up. So again, this is the top list. So let's look at Holy Cross College. For every 100 students they accepted in 2021, 40 showed up. Not a bad number. You can look at the numbers across the board here, and there's a little nuance here. There are some colleges who purposely don't accept a lot of students. They have really high standards. Some people call them selective, some people call them rejective, and that may very well apply to Hanover, DePauw, and Valparaiso. What you really look for here, maybe even Bethel, is the 8-year change. And while it's down for each of the 4, it's been relatively flat, but it's still something to look at for the top performers. Let's go look at the bottom performers. And again, what we're looking at here is the 8-year trend. Let's ignore College of St. Joseph, you know why. And even Indiana Wesleyan, if their admissions yield is down 29 points, they've got a lot more problems than just viability. Something that the market is making a decision that they have better choices than going to Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion. But again, the trend is bad for Anderson and Goshen, University of Evansville, Manchester, on and on and on. I'll reinforce again, it's the trend that matters. It's the comparison that matters. If we compare Wabash, which is down 8 points, and I'll flip back up to Oakland City, which is, um, flat over 8 years, there's a difference. Does it mean one is better than the other? I don't know. That's your decision to make. We created the College Viability App to give you access to these data points so you can compare colleges that you're considering, or in this case, faculty and staff, the college you work for or are thinking about working for, to one another. And then lastly, we want to take a look at endowment. And again, some strong private colleges, almost $700 million at DePauw. They've grown over $100 million over the last 8 years. We always include these conditional formatting items on the right. Green is good, yellow is okay, and red is not so okay. It's based on the percent change. And you can see all the colleges are above the college viability, the threshold that we use is $50 million, 5-0 million. And the other thing to look at here is I notice that 1, 2, 3, 4 of these colleges, their endowment has gone down over the last 8 years. It says 6 years, it should say 8 years. 2 things that can be happening here. The colleges either have bad investment bankers or bad investment choices, it's possible, or they're spending that endowment because they don't have enough revenue from operations to what I always call keep the lights on or meet payroll. I don't know that for a fact. It's reasonable and educated speculation on my part, but if you're looking at these comparisons and you're considering Hanover College, third from the bottom, and their endowment is down $5 million, even though it's above our minimum threshold of $50 million, it's fair to ask what's going on. It's a really small percentage of colleges whose endowment goes down. This is a particularly large percentage for this comparison here. Because even when we look at the bottom-performing endowments, we see 1, 2 colleges whose endowment has gone down, hardly down anything at all. But really it's the absolute value that we look for. Colleges like Calumet College of St. Joseph with an endowment of $4.4 million, or Oakland, or Holy Cross, or Bethel, I can teasingly say that's not much more than couch money, the money you find in between the cushions on a sofa or a couch. Because remember, the colleges don't have— we'll use Bethel, almost $10 million— it's not the principal they have, it's the earnings. That they use on the endowment, because colleges want to have assets— that's what the endowment is for— to keep it into existence, into perpetuity, for forever. And so it's just the earnings that add value. So when you only have— when you have less than $50 million, it just doesn't provide much of an earning capacity for when you do face hard times. So what kind of summary can we make on Indiana colleges? As a group, really, and as individual colleges, there are some stronger-performing private colleges in Indiana. In particular, because I look at this stuff all the time, in particular, the 4-year graduation rates are strong for 9 of these private Indiana private colleges. They're doing something right. They have the systems and processes in place to identify, educate, and graduate students. And that's what colleges are for. College isn't to go and take classes, to take courses and pay tuition. It's that piece of paper at the end of the cycle that says, "Hey, I graduated. I have this diploma." And if you're a student or a parent, I would encourage you to focus on these stronger private Indiana colleges, if that's where you're looking. But those colleges that are consistently in the bottom list should only be considered, in my mind, with aggressive questioning of your admissions representative. The old Latin phrase of caveat emptor, let the buyer beware, certainly applies in those situations. And the argument that I will make, the argument that I will make here at College Viability, if a college has a bad history, if it has a bad trend, it really is risky that it's also going to have a bad future. And if you have questions, as always, send them to me, Gary, at College Viability. I'll be certain either to respond to them by email or include those in the next Top Bottom Report that we do, or even in our weekly This Week in College Viability podcast. We'll have another Top Bottom Report next Sunday. This is Gary Stocker with College Viability.
