Compare colleges' financial health and viabiity - College Viability App Tutorial

This is a tutorial for the College Viability App. Instructions are on the left-hand side of the home screen. Users can select different private colleges by state, and all 50 states are shown. Users can include types of colleges, and the types of colleges are defined on the bottom left-hand portion of the screen: elite, regional, religious, specialty, and super elite. Users can also use search by college name. You can type in the characters of a college you might be searching for, or you can select multiple states with Ctrl-click on the mouse and keyboard. Let's go up to state and grab some colleges in Iowa and in Kansas. Let's make them regional colleges. And let me just grab a couple of colleges for each of those states. And you can see I've selected 8 total colleges. If I want to start again, I can reset the search with this button in the bottom right portion. Once you've selected the colleges, you can simply go to the navigation panel on the right-hand side of the screen. Let's look at the 6-year changes of the 8 private colleges that we have chosen. You can see the 8 are listed. We can alphabetize them by clicking on the header. We can also sort them by any of the 6 fields that you see listed across the top. Let's look at the ones and sort them by 12-month enrollment from 2013 to 2018. So we can see Allen College had 63 more students in 2018 than they did in 2013. At the bottom of the list, Baker University had not done so well with their enrollment. We can look at these other headings across the top. We can compare how much expenses have changed with how much revenue has changed, and we can see in some examples when expenses have gone up revenues have gone down, would be a good example of a college that doesn't necessarily compare well over the 6-year period reported. And finally, we can look at the endowment assets, those finances that are effectively gifts from others supporting the organization. And again, we see a scenario where one of the colleges has a negative number, negative $3.8 million in endowment. That's not nearly as good as one of the organizations that has grown their endowment by almost $16 million. We can do the same for tuition and fees. We start to add some graphic images at the bottom. The line always represents the 50th percentile, and you can see each of the 5 of the 6 years represented here. And all the sorting features that we saw previously are available as well. Endowment, individualized graduation rates are shown, core expenses in individual years are shown. And again, we can see Briarcliff had an increase of almost $5 million in expenses, and Baker University had a decrease of a little over $4 million in expenses over the 6-year period reported. And then finally, the last button is Understanding. What we have done is provided a brief summary of how you can look at each of the navigation tabs and the data behind it, and what each of the results might mean in terms of helping you make the best selection possible of private colleges you are considering. In the event you'd like access to the application, navigate to collegeviability.com. There are a bunch of news stories about private colleges, uh, here, and then you can click on this College Viability app. And the College Viability App is available at no charge through June 30th, 2020.