College Viability's 2023 Top-Bottom report for Illinois PUBLIC Colleges and Universities

Welcome back to another episode of the College Viability Top Bottom Reports for 2023. Today we're doing the first ever public 4-year college top and bottom report. And it is lovingly brought to you by the public colleges in the state of Illinois. The data we're gonna report to you is a little bit different than what we do for private colleges, and you can see what those data points are on the screen. I won't read those to you. But it is important to note that the data source is from the National Center for Education Statistics, and it's IPEDS database for the years 2014 through 2021. That's the last reported years. That Illinois and all states have reported their IPEDS data for both private and public colleges. When the 2022 data comes out here in a couple weeks, I'll of course be updating the app, and we'll have a 2024 version available sometime in early 2024. So let's get on and start looking at the comparisons, the top-bottom comparisons for the public colleges in Illinois. And we'll start off with FTE enrollment, and FTE stands for full-time equivalent. It's our belief that this is the best approach to monitor enrollment. There's some inside baseball behind that that I will spare you today, but you can see that the top 2 performing colleges in Illinois, public colleges in Illinois, are the University of Illinois-Chicago and that one, the UI in Champaign-Urbana, and you can see they have been substantial growth. What's interesting is in the top 5, the bottom 3 in the top 5 have negative growth. Now Governor State is relatively flat, but both Illinois State and the U of I Springfield show substantial, not catastrophic decreases. But when we go to the bottom, FTE enrollment public colleges in the state of Illinois, it ain't good. You can see the numbers for yourself. And let's just do a little math to put this in perspective. And let's say one of these colleges, Western Illinois, right there in the middle, lost about 3,800 students over the course of 8 years. And if we do the math, and let's assume that each student provides $10,000 in total tuition and fees, that's an estimate on my part, but it makes the math easy. So 3,800 students times $10,000 per student is about $38 million in lost tuition and fees revenue over the 8 years reported. Now the fair question to ask is what could Western Illinois University and the others you see on this page and elsewhere, what could they have done or what didn't they do when they didn't have that revenue. None of these colleges are going to close, ever, but all, and in particular Northern Illinois recently, have announced cutbacks for faculty, staff, programs, majors, and whatnot. That's going to happen, and that's going to happen a lot. That's what you want to watch for with public colleges who have issues with enrollment and other things that we'll see here in a minute. Let's take a look at total enrollment, and I just use this because it shows a different look. And total enrollment counts every student enrolled. Whether that student is taking 3 credits or 15 or 18 credits, they're counted the same. Where that FTE, that full-time equivalent that I shared previously, is a better reflection. It has to do with college credits divided by the number of students. It's just a better reflection. But you can see the same kind of pattern here. And I'll let you look at the data on your own. Note that we always provide conditional formatting. Green is good, red not so much, and there's a yellow indicator not shown on the screen that says, eh, it's okay. So there's the top for total enrollment, and again, we look at the bottom, the same kind of pattern. It's just different numbers because it's a different way of counting. And as we move on, let's take a look at 4-year graduation rates. And I have historically harped on this, I will continue to harp on this, this is the hidden tragedy in American public and private colleges, and too, too, way too many have graduation rates, 4-year undergraduate graduation rates, below 50%. And you can see that here in Illinois, public colleges, only one is above that, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, generally recognized as one of the top public colleges in the country, and it's reflected in the graduation rates. Now, the top 5 in Illinois only really has top 1 in my mind, but let's take a look at the bottom. So these are the bottom 5 4-year graduation, 4-year undergraduate graduation rates. And let's pick on Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Over the last 8 years, they haven't even averaged right around 30%, maybe a smidge below that. So for every 100 students who started at Southern Illinois University, say in 2018, 30 graduated within 4 years. That's not even a coin toss college. You can flip a coin and sometimes get better odds than going to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and graduating in 4 years. And Governor State, Chicago State, Northeastern Illinois, huh, they're not gonna close, but what are they doing? Is it a function of systems and processes? Almost certainly. Is it a function of the students they admit? Absolutely. And I am starting to make the case increasingly that it's not just the college's fault. There's a high school role here. But colleges are admitting students to gain the revenue, not to provide the degrees in too many cases. And they're leaving students with varying degrees of college debt and no degree because they're accepting students who just can't cut it for all sorts of reasons. And let's move on. Let's take a look at percent admitted. And I just used this one and I'm not sure I'll continue to use it, to show the difference between ridiculously high percent admitted rates. For example, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, I'll continue to pick on them, in 2021 admitted 98% of the students who applied. I'm guessing maybe their informal motto is have breath, have heartbeat, will enroll, what percentage of that 98 out of 100 had no business being at any college, Southern Illinois, University of Edwardsville, or any other? And Carbondale and Illinois State, you know, similar kind of numbers. Educated speculation on my part, but a lot of that enrollment is based on the need for revenue, not on any reasonable expectation that a significant percentage of those students will graduate. And let's, you know, let's take a 25%. Let's go to the bottom list first. Let's take a look at the bottom list. And I'm gonna pick on somebody here. So the percent admitted for the bottom list, you can see a little bit lower. It is important to note that some colleges like really low acceptance rates. They're called restrictive colleges. Some call them selective. That's not really the case here in Illinois because the restrictive ones admit 5, 10% of the students. Out of the tens of thousands that apply. We're talking Harvard, Yale, Michigan, places like that. So a 60% for the University of Illinois-Champaign is probably a pretty decent number reflecting on the type of students that they want and the type of students that apply there. Let's move on to retention, and let's look at retention. This is out of every 100 students, how many come back for the second year. And again, U of I-Champaign Urbana Fine job. Even Illinois State, not bad. Chicago, not bad. But let's just, just go back to, let's not, let's pick on the Southern Illinois system. Let's go to Eastern Illinois. 74%, let's round that up to 75%, do some math. Let's say that there are 5,000 students, which is close to that, I think a little bit lower, that go to Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, and they have about a 75% retention rate. That's exactly what they had in 2017. So do the math, and after each and every year, of those 5,000 students who enrolled, who were accepted, 1,250 leave. Year after year after year, and not just Eastern Illinois. You can do the math for any college that we look at, but the retention rate reflects our capacity for systems and processes, for sure, to help students. But I think it also reflects on the overall academic and intellectual quality of the students colleges are accepting just to meet the financial needs of the college. The low end, you know, half students, do the math on 5,000, 2,500 students leave Governor's State if they have 5,000, and I think they do, every year. Burdened in most cases, it's fair to say, burdened in most cases with some level of college debt. And without the degree to get the job to help pay for that debt, these students are burdened. And you read this in the media all the time, year after year after year, and we're not doing a good job at all of addressing that. Admissions yield is a reflection of popularity. Now here's a trend I want to look at. This time I want to look at the 8-year change. So you can see the top 5 and their changes, the admissions yields, you know, not bad for the top 4 for sure. Western Illinois is a little low. But look at the change. All 5 had a decreasing admissions yield. Not a big number. The big numbers come when we go to the bottom. And look at the pattern for, it looks like 7 private colleges, public colleges, excuse me, public colleges in Illinois, each of the top colleges colleges and the bottom colleges have a decreasing yield. So there's something going on here, and I, I'm, again, the admissions yield is a percentage of students once accepted by a university actually show up, pay some tuition, and take classes. But I have to wonder, seeing this trend in the public colleges in the state of Illinois, if there's a system to track students who don't enroll anywhere. If Northern Illinois accepted me, and I went to Eastern Illinois, Eastern Illinois gets a bump because I went there. But if I didn't go to either Northern or Eastern Illinois or any college, is there a system to track students who don't enroll anywhere? Because my speculation based on my experience, based on my research, suggests that a large component of that decreasing admissions yield is from students who just say, hey, I'm not doing college at all. And we see that in the media, this might be an indication that that's accurate. And then finally, I did, I did add one other enrollment tracking comparison, top and bottom. And this is total entering, first-year entering undergraduates. Again, we're gonna see the same pattern, Eastern Illinois jumps to the top of this list. These are essentially freshmen each year, and you can see the numbers on yourself. Illinois Springfield down a fair amount, look at the percentage in particular. Illinois State down a fair amount based on the percentages. And the bottom list, again, as you would expect, all red indicators. Look at the numbers going down. Look at the numbers going down. And what can you do with these comparisons? The top bottom for public colleges in Illinois? There is but one dominant successful public college in my mind in Illinois. And the others just simply don't compare favorably across many IPEDS data reports, not just the ones I'm showing you in the top/bottom comparisons. So, as a student or a parent, I encourage you to focus on the stronger, the single stronger public colleges in Illinois. Those colleges that are consistently in the bottom lists in our top/bottom reports should only be considered in my mind with aggressive questioning. Why is your enrollment decreasing? Why is your graduation rate so low? Why is your retention rate so low? Why is your percent admitted so high? Isn't that bringing in a level of student that I don't want to be with? And, you know, the old Latin phrase, caveat emptor, let the buyer beware, that's what applies here. I can make a reasonable argument that a college with a bad history of data, like we've just talked about, is equal to a bad future. Maybe not in every single instance, but in most. If you have questions about this report for Illinois public colleges, or if you want to suggest a public or private college comparison, top-bottom comparison for a given state, drop me a note at gary@collegeviability— that's one word— gary@collegeviability.com. I'll add it to the list and make sure we get your top-bottom report done in the coming days, weeks, and months. Until then, Gary Stocker with College Viability.