Gary Stocker demos an app tracking seven Central Illinois private colleges using enrollment, graduation rates, and admissions data from 2015-2022. Illinois Wesleyan meets his benchmarks; Millikin, McKendree, Eureka, and Blackburn fall short on multiple metrics including declining enrollment and low graduation rates.
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Welcome to the first 2024 College Viability Report analysis. Hi, my name is Gary Stocker. We're going to do something a little bit different today. The 2024 version of the College Viability app is in final production. We're actually going to be looking at the working version of it that we have as we get it ready for distribution and publication. And I've selected a set of 6 or 7 Illinois private colleges. Just to kind of give you a feel for what the new 2022 data looks like. And as always, we're looking at 8 years, so this year is from 2015 to 2022. And as always, the data is from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. And you can see as we start off, I'm just going to do a couple of reports here. You can see that we are looking at the FTE follow moment, though. So the FTE equivalent is the one that we always use. It provides a more standard reporting. And you can see the colleges that we have selected in no particular order. They just happen to be in Central Illinois, Illinois in general, and the Midwest in really large general, and the Northeast are the higher risk states. So we grabbed one of those, and you can see for our set of colleges here that each and every one over the last 8 years has had a decrease in enrollment. Now, as I recall, there are some with the occasional spikes on there. I'm trying to find one. Some are a little flat. Looks like Eureka had a jump from one year to the next. But you want to look at when you see jumps like that is look at the tuition discounts. How much of the store did a college like Eureka have to give away to get students to enroll? And the reason you wanna look at that, as we saw this when Iowa Wesleyan closed in 2023, they had actually gained something like 800 students over the past 8 years, but they had given away the store, their tuition discounts, which are unfunded discounts. They're typically called merit aid. Many times they're called scholarships. They had given away so much money that they didn't have enough to keep operating, obviously. So that's an important consideration, but even more so, it's the trend. If you can't grow your business over 8 years, and only Illinois College, as I look at this, has done so, you gotta have concerns. Maybe a spike a year or two, but what's the overall trend? Now let's take that to graduation rates. And if you followed my reporting before, if you followed my analyses in previous years, the graduation rates are one that is the hidden tragedy. So let me just sort these quickly. And we can see some strong examples. And I'll back up for a second. At College Viability, we considered a minimum threshold for a 4-year graduation rate to be 50%. 5-0%. If a college cannot graduate 50% of its students in 4 years, sometimes less, that's not a good thing. Matter of fact, we've coined the phrase "coin toss college." It's the same thing as tossing a coin whether your child or you will graduate from a college who can't even graduate half of their students in 4 years. And look at the numbers here. While Illinois Wesleyan, a strong organization, Illinois College doing well, Greenville, the average isn't above 50%. They had one near 50% in 2022. But look at Millikan and McKendree and Eureka and Blackburn. Why go to a college that can't graduate its students? And let's take it one step further. Let's give them 2 more years. Let's look at the 6-year rate. Let me sort this again for 2022. We see the same pattern. The numbers are slightly higher, and really all but one graduate at least 50% after 6 years. But let's change the threshold because I always do. For 6 years, it's got to be 70%. If you can't graduate 7 out of 10 students in 6 years, what's going on? So really, we only see Illinois Wesleyan meeting our threshold. Illinois College is close. But even Greenville and Millikin, McKendree, and Eureka, over 6 years, you're barely graduating half of your students. Don't tell me your enrollment is good. Don't tell me your donations are good. Show me you can get folks to graduate. And the admissions yield is one, it's kind of an inside baseball term. I always call it the popularity indicator if you followed my stuff before. And it's really a reference of the number of students who once accepted by a college actually show up, attend classes, and pay tuition. And the numbers here, you want a number 20% or higher to be decent. But you're really looking at the 8-year pattern, the 8-year change. And outside of Illinois Wesleyan, which bumped up a little bit, the other 5 or 6 or 7 have a negative, let me sort that, the other 5 or 6 or 7 have a decreasing admissions yield popularity indicator over the last 8 years. Now if it's 1 year, nobody cares. But if it's 8 years, that's a pattern. Why are students choosing other colleges, which is one option, or applying and then not choosing any college? At all. And let's take a look at a couple more fields. Let's take a look at percent admitted. And again, I'll sort this from 2022. You know, when you're in the, in the really above 80%, it's, it's got to be that your philosophy is have breath, will admit. It's just no selectivity at all. You really have to wonder about the overall quality of students that a college accepts and what their, what their intentions are. They're accepting students because they need their tuition dollars. And you look at Greenville, you look at Eureka, stand out among them. It's reflected in the graduation rates. Because if you're bringing in students who aren't prepared for college, who aren't prepared for college, they're not gonna graduate. You're taking their tuition dollars, and in many cases, so we read in the media, you're putting them in debt, and you're not getting them to graduation. Not a good thing. And then lastly, let's look at retention. And so this is a reflection of students who show up at a college on year 1 and then show up in the second year. Now we've got some good numbers. You know, anything above 80%, Illinois Wesleyan stands out well among this group on the admissions, on the graduation piece. We're not gonna do the financial piece today, but they're doing okay. And in the central Illinois area, they're acknowledged to be a strong organization. Greenville retains about 3 out of 4. But look at Blackburn, look at Eureka. Not even, you know, below 60%. So for every 100 students that show up on year 1, only 60, or 57 to read the actual numbers, 57 at Eureka and 38 at Blackburn show up for year 2. What a waste, what a waste. So anyway, that's the quick look at the 2024 version of the College Viability App. We'll have much more of the, many more of the reports done here in the coming weeks. And we'll make that available through all sorts of social media. We're even this year gonna have a parent version, so parents can look at the important factors for them in deciding whether a college is financially strong for sure, but whether it's a college that can provide their child or themselves with a reasonable opportunity to graduate in 4 years, eh, maybe 6 years. This is Gary Stocker with College Viability. We'll talk next time.
