College Viability Top to Bottom Report for West Virginia private regional and religious colleges

Welcome to another version of the College Viability Top Bottom Report, Private College Reports, and today it's brought to you by the state of West Virginia. Looking at both regional and religious colleges. Hi, my name is Gary Stocker, and today's request comes from a listener who dropped me a note last week and said, Gary, would you mind looking at West Virginia colleges? So you ask and you shall receive. And as always, we're going to look at enrollment, we're going to look at 4-year graduation rates, admission yield, and endowment. And of course, the data is always from the National Center for Education Statistics. And it's IPEDS database for the years 2014 to 2021, the last date data was submitted. So let's jump right in. Now there's one different approach here for West Virginia, and that is there's only 8 private colleges in West Virginia in both the regional and religious categories, and so I've just listed all 8. So you see I've got both the top and the bottom logos, bottom words on each screen. Instead of having 8 comparisons, we're gonna have 4. And we'll just kind of quickly go through what we see. And as we see in most states, for the 8 colleges in West Virginia, the 8 private colleges in West Virginia, one you could say had decent growth in enrollment. I would point out that 200 students over 8 years only averages out to about 25 students per year. If the college is netting $10,000 per student, for every $10,000 and every 25 students, that's a quarter million dollars. That's a little bit more than, than the couch money. But over the course of 8 years, when you think about cost of living increases and hiring new folks, that's probably not much at all. And then across the rest of the private colleges, you can see decreased enrollment over the last 8 years. Never a good thing. And you can see the conditional formatting that we have on the right-hand side, and 6 of the 8 have the red indicator, which of course is not good. And we'll quickly move on to graduation rates. And you'll recall the college viability threshold, minimum threshold for 4-year graduation rates for undergraduate students is 50%. And in the state of West Virginia in the year 2021, only one college, Appalachian Bible College, met that threshold. The others are miserably below that minimum threshold of 50%. And again, I'll make the case like I always do. If you can't graduate more than 50% of your students, we're gonna call you a coin toss college. These are all worse than a coin toss college except for Appalachian Bible. And don't tell me that you admit everybody, you enroll anybody because you're an equal opportunity admitter. Colleges don't exist to admit. Colleges exist to graduate. If you can't graduate students, I am always going to ask the question, what are you doing in the business? Let's move on to admission yield. And again, you see I call this the popularity indicator. Admission yield is kind of the inside baseball name. And this is the percent of students, the percentage of students who, once accepted by any given college, actually show up and pay tuition. And what we typically look for here is the 8-year trend, the 8-year change you see in the next to right-hand column. And you can see 3 of the colleges have been flat to small increase in popularity, small increases in admission yield. But the last 4, West Virginia Wesleyan, University of Charleston, Wheeling, and Bethany College, not doing so well. And even Alderson Broadus, they're closed. So even though they had a slight increase in admissions yield, they closed here in the last few months. Wheeling University is in all sorts of financial trouble. Their long-term viability. Their short-term viability is in question by many, including those of us here at College Viability. And let's take a look then at endowment, the value of the endowment assets. And again, our threshold here at College Viability is $50 million. Others use different numbers, that's just ours. And so we see only West Virginia Wesleyan College is above that, and the others, while 3 of them are close, will remind you that if you haven't raised $50 million in an endowment over the course of decades, and in some cases centuries, then don't ever tell me that when you're in a financial strait and you're watching your last dollar circle the financial drain, that you can go out to alumni and community supporters and raise $10 million or $20 million or $30 million in the course of a year or two. It's just not a likely scenario. And so what does this all mean? So, a couple things going on here, and as you can read the bullet point yourself, the West Virginia private colleges are not thriving. None of the 4 basic data points we use for the Top Bottom Reports here at College Viability are consistently strong. Most are consistently weak, and you see I've crossed out the last one because there is no bottom list for these colleges because there's so few of them. But the trend is not good. And it's not just West Virginia. If there is any pattern, it's the Northeast has particular acuity with financial challenges and viability issues, and the Midwest as well. So we'll conclude that with another issue of the College Viability Top Bottom Report. We'll have another one for you next Sunday evening, posted by next Monday morning, and we'll talk then.