Gary Stocker shows how to use the College Viability App to track enrollment trends at private colleges from 2015 to 2020. Filter by state, sort by enrollment change, and see which schools are growing or shrinking. Green, yellow, and red flags signal whether a college's enrollment is healthy.
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Are you looking for information about a college's financial health? Or are you concerned a private college you might be considering could be in financial trouble or might close, or maybe just struggle to provide a quality college education? Hi, my name is Gary Stocker. For the past 5 years, I have been developing and researching the financial health and viability of private colleges in the United States. In 2020, I created the first-ever College Viability App. During this tutorial, I'll show you how to quickly and easily compare the past 6 years of enrollment data for private colleges you may be considering. I can help you become more informed, more comfortable, and more confident in your final college decision. The data I use, by the way, is from the National Center for Education Statistics from 2015 through 2020, the last year data is currently available. The version of the app I am going to show you includes only enrollment comparisons. In the description below, I'll give you a free link to the app for your own use. So let's look at Iowa as the first of the 6 states that we will use for our comparison. And you can see I've selected Iowa on the left-hand side. All 50 states are available. I could even select any combination of the, the private colleges in Iowa. I'll select regional just to give us a more manageable number. And there are 27 regional colleges in Iowa. We can look at all 27. We can also select a subset of those, and I'll just click on a couple of those. I'm pressing Ctrl-click to select a certain group. So we could just compare those 3. I'm going to deselect them. So we can look at all 27 private colleges that are regional in the state of Iowa. We can sort them alphabetically by clicking on the top header. We can sort them by individual years, not a lot of value in that. We can also sort them by the change over 6 years. So let me click on this 6-year change header and we'll see that a handful have had some positive enrollment growth. If I click on that 6-year change header again, it'll turn up and show the, the biggest declines. And we can see a lot more private colleges in Iowa have had declining enrollment growth, full-time enrollment student growth, over the last 6 reported years. We can also do the same thing for percent change. We can see those 3 that have had some decent growth, a couple have had modest growth, and then most have had not good growth at all. And then finally, you're going to see the green, yellow, and red indicators. That's just our way of letting you easily compare those private colleges for any of the different categories that we do in the College Viability apps— which ones are doing better, which ones are average, and which ones are not doing so well. So that's Iowa. Let's scroll back over here and let's grab Illinois. And as I select Illinois, Iowa will go away. If I want to include both Illinois and Iowa, I can Control-click on that, and I'll— you'll see both Illinois and Iowa colleges listed. Let's just look at Illinois colleges, and we're going to see 41 in the list. And again, they're all listed by, in this, in this case, by percent change. So a handful or more have had some decent growth. Let's click on that to flip that, and again we'll see a pattern. A lot of Illinois private colleges have had negative enrollment growth over the last 6 reported years, and that time frame is from 2015 through 2020. That's the last reported year, 2020. The 2021 numbers will come out in early 2023, and of course we'll update the College Viability App and all of its components when that happens. Let's move on to Ohio, and again we've got 49 private colleges, 49 regional private colleges in the state of Ohio. Let's just sort by the 2020 enrollment. And this gives you a feel for the size of the college. So you can see from very large, the University of Dayton, to some decent medium-sized colleges. I'm gonna click on the 2020 header again, and we can see there are some very small colleges. Really, any college with an enrollment below 1,000 is typically considered small. Any college with an enrollment below 500 is really small. So there's Ohio, Let's take a quick look at Pennsylvania. We can see the total number of colleges, and before we look at those, let's click on Terms and Definitions. So all the terms that we have— this talks about the app, what FTE enrollment stands for, and then just kind of some tips and tricks on what to look for when using the College Viability App. We'll go back to the home page. We've selected Pennsylvania, 71 colleges. Let's take a look at the 6-year change. We'll click on that header. And again, Thomas Jefferson University has grown from 2,600 students to 5,800. I'm guessing a large part of that is online enrollment, but that's a way to compare them. So if you're comparing Thomas Jefferson with, let's just do it on the side over here, let's compare Thomas Jefferson with Theo College, 'cause those, maybe those are the only two you're considering. And you can see one is considerably larger, one has had some decent tuition, excuse me, decent enrollment growth, which means probably enhanced tuition dollars, And Theo College, not so much. It's a much smaller college and they have experienced enrollment declines. Something to think about when you're making that initial college list for consideration. Let's go ahead, I'm gonna reset the search by clicking here. I'm gonna go down and grab Vermont. And of the 9 private regional colleges in Vermont, make that 7 regional colleges in Vermont, again, we can see the numbers. Vermont in particular has had a very, very difficult time. They have had substantial college closures, and you have to wonder about the long-term viability, really, of most of these in the state of Vermont, but that's your decision to make. And then finally, let's go ahead and grab Wisconsin in the Great North, and let's do that 6-year change to show you the absolute change. And again, there's about a handful or two, two handfuls of colleges that have had some enrollment growth, really just not even a handful of decent growth. You divide 95 students over 6 years, that's 15 students a year. Not a small number, but not a great number as well. And we'll click on 6-year change. And again, we can see if you're looking at these kind of colleges with substantial declines in full-time enrollment growth, it's something to think about as you make that initial college list you'll consider for making application. Use this data as an initial focal point to, to select colleges that are looking at a more positive enrollment picture over the last 6 years, as opposed to those who have struggled. The College Viability App does not do predictions. They're not guesses. It just is a tool to provide simple comparisons of the data that colleges themselves have provided to the federal government. It's all publicly available for you and for me. You and your family members deserve a quality college education. I want to give you the information so that when you're putting together that initial college list that you want to visit, find out more about in terms of tuition and majors and location, you've got a tool that will let you make a more informed decision about which colleges have done better more recently, and more importantly, which colleges may have already struggled and may continue to do so as they have issues with enrollment, with tuition revenue, with graduation rates, and much more.
