Gary Stocker demos a new web app that tracks graduation numbers across 1,300 private colleges by major, using data from 2020 to 2022. College leaders can spot enrollment trends and decide which programs to cut or expand. Prospective students can see which majors are shrinking and might disappear.
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Hi, it's Gary Stocker with College Viability. Thanks for taking a few minutes to preview this college program completion app that I'm developing. This is the first-ever demo of an app that will let users compare the number of students graduating from a program or major in a given individual college. This version is for about 1,300 private American colleges. The data source, of course, is the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database for the years 2020, 2021, and 2022. Well, who would use this information? Well, for college leaders and their faculty, you'd want to use this to compare your college's strong enrollment programs and majors with your competitors. And you might want to use it to make decisions about programs to add at your college, and maybe for programs to cut when your enrollment volume is low. For students and families, you might want to use this to make sure the programs or majors you are considering, or your child is considering, are not low-enrollment majors at the colleges you are considering. And here's why. Colleges in their process of cutting back on low-enrollment majors. You don't want to choose a college that will subsequently eliminate the major that you're thinking about. So this app will let you compare which colleges have strong enrollments and which ones not so strong. The demo is going to be from just 5 states. It's going to be from Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, and Missouri. And we're just going to look at 5 of the 19 programs in the app. We're going to look at biology, business, education, health professions, and social sciences. Let's take a look. Let's start with biology programs and biology majors, and I've pre-selected, pre-sorted the 2022 bachelor's degrees for colleges, private colleges in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. And you can see the top performing, or the top number of enrolled students in 2022: Loyola, University of Notre Dame, Northwestern, and others. We can also flip that and see which colleges don't have many biology majors, and we'll see some that don't have any at all. There's not always value in that particular sort, but we can see, you know, Hannibal-LaGrange University in Missouri, is there really a program when you have one person graduating with a bachelor's degree in Missouri, bachelor's degree at that college? And we can also look at the 3-year change to see if there's a pattern in this, and we can see again that there's been growth at Loyola, sorry, at Lake Forest, Logan University, Loyola, and others. And again, to see which colleges have had decreasing enrollment growth, we can look at those as well and see the enrollment at Augustana College has gone down from 125 to 86. What does that mean? I don't know. It certainly presents you with data you can use to ask the good folks at Augustana College why their biology enrollment has dropped so much in the last 3 years. You'll note many, but not all of these report views have master's degrees. We're not gonna focus on that today. Know that that's part of the app and you can look at that as well. So after biology, let's take a look at business. Again, we can see the same pattern. Let's look at 2022. You can click on any of these headers to sort by highest to lowest and lowest to highest. So let's look at 2022, and we can see that, um, you know, DePauw, Loyola, Park University, the numbers they have in business and business marketing and management programs. And many colleges have strong performance. We can again flip that and see which colleges don't have much. I'm just going to kind of scroll through to get a feel for the numbers. And again, I can make the case at Calvary University or Bethel College or Saint Mary of the Wood or Saint Augustine, they have really low numbers compared to the other colleges for Business, Marketing, and Management. And you can make the decision, you know, is 16 at Urschan College an acceptable number for you to participate in or not? And again, the master's level is there. We can look at the 3-year change, and we can see Maharishi University has gone up 68, and you can see on and on and on down the list. Let's take a look at education data. And anytime you can pause this video to look at the data more closely. The app isn't ready for release yet, but it gives you a feel for what it will be like when it is released later this spring sometime. Here's education. We can do the same points. I'll click on the 2022 bachelor's degrees, and we can see those with strong bachelor programs in education. We can also look at the 3-year change in the bachelor's level and see programs with growth. And clicking on one more time, programs with decreases in the education bachelor's degree. And there will be subspecialties, submajors in these. This is at the program level for right now. Let's take a look at health professions data. And again, the same pattern. Let's just, just do the difference. Click on— let's do this differently. We'll click on 2020 bachelor's and see what that number looks like. And we can see, you know, Loyola was strong in 2020 and they continue to be strong in 2022. They're down just a little bit. There's lots of ways you can sort the data. We can see a lot of programs, a lot of colleges have graduate-level, master's-level programs in health sciences. And finally, let's take a look at social sciences. And I pre-sorted this. Go ahead and sort this by 2022 numbers. We can see the strong programs in social sciences. We can see the programs that are growing through here. We can see the programs that are not growing through here. And if we can also, just a quick sidebar, we can see those programs that have master's levels degrees in these, this discipline, and we can see what connection they have to their, to their bachelor's level as well. So there's lots of ways to use this data both as college insiders or as students and their families as they're making decisions on colleges. So what does this all mean? If you have followed any of my college viability media, you are well aware that higher education is in a major market adjustment. Arguably, the era of Moneyball— and of course that references baseball— the era of Moneyball has reached higher education. The data presented here is just another example of how accessing and presenting data in a usable decision-making capacity can help both the providers of higher education and the consumers, the students and their families, more cognizant, more aware of some of the factors that can have a major impact on both the colleges themselves and their students. So we'll continue with this series for different states, different combinations of majors as we continue to develop the 2024 College Viability Program Completion App that will be out sometime later this year. My name is Gary Stocker with College Viability. Thanks for listening.
