How to Navigate the 2024 Private College Viability App - Tutorial for College Faculty & Staff

Hello, my name is Gary Stocker, and I'm the founder of College Viability and the College Viability app. I'm guessing you opened this YouTube video because you were intrigued that there was a resource you might be able to use to compare your private college with others in your market area, and even to gain access to data about your private college and others that's not readily available from either your leadership or any other source outside of IPEDS. In 2022, that changed. The first versions of the College Viability App for both private and public colleges was released. This year marks the third year of the College Viability series of apps. Why is there a dedicated version of the app for faculty and staff? In my experience following higher education news stories from around the country, I consistently find that faculty have limited access to important information about their college's financial health and even its viability. In this tutorial, I will show you how to use the 2024 Private College Viability App for Faculty and Staff That's the easy part. I will also provide guidance on how to use the app to provide a data-driven comparison to almost 1,300 private colleges throughout the United States. The data used in the College Viability Series of apps is from the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency, and its IPEDS database. For the 2024 versions, Data from 2015 through 2022 is used to show trends across 9 different IPEDS reports for the faculty and staff version of the app. Is it worth your time and an investment, $300 at retail, to be able to compare your college across 9 critical financial graduation rate outcome and enrollment data points? That's a question for you to answer. I will share the 9 reports available in the Private College Viability App for Faculty and Staff at the start of this tutorial. Let's get started. So this is the home screen or the home page for the 2024 Private College Viability App for Faculty and Staff. It's a dedicated version with 9 reports focused on the data needs for faculty and staff as we have determined at College Viability. The navigation is pretty straightforward. I've pre-selected to save some time colleges from 4 states. You can see the 4 states listed there. There are a variety of types. I've selected regional types. There are closed, closing, religious, specialty colleges, elite, super elite, and more. And each of the colleges selected, you show here. If I wanted to add a college to the list, I simply select it. It'll show up on the list over here. There's Allegheny College. It went from 13 to 14. And to deselect it, I'll deselect Allegheny College, and we go back down to 13. So when we look at the 9 reports, I always want to start with the FTE enrollment because that's what most media reports follow. That's what most faculty, staff, and leadership follow. Not always the best approach, but that's what happens. So let's take a look at the fall enrollment. And we use the FTE, the full-time equivalent data, at College Viability because we think that's the best standardized comparison to measure enrollment from period to period. Let's take a look at one of the data screens. So again, full-time equivalent enrollment. You can see the 8 years reported. And we typically have an 8-year change that we monitor and the percent change. And we'll talk about that here in the next few minutes. But you can see the data points. We can sort it by state so we can look at all the state groupings. We can also do it alphabetically by clicking on the college, or we can sort by any of these years listed across the top. Let's start by looking at the 8-year change. So I'm going to click on that, and we're going to see over the last 8 years from 2015 to 2022 that Wilson, Oberlin, and Allen Colleges had some growth. Allen is hardly worth noting, but 4 students over 8 years, not a big number. And even, you know, 70 students over 4 years. While growth is not great growth. But let me flip this. Let me click on the 8-year challenge, 8-year changes again. And look at all the colleges in this sample set of 13 colleges that have had negative FTE enrollment growth over the last years. And you can see the percent change on the other side to give a more relative comparison. The overall average for this select group, and if you selected your own group of 10 or 12 or 20, whatever it is, it'll calculate the average. So the overall average was down 310. So in this group of select colleges, 310, somewhere right here, was the average. So you can say, well, these 4 colleges— Waynesburg, Beloit, Notre Dame, and Concordia, Wisconsin— were worse than the average. All right, fair enough. That's one of the assessments that you can make. We've also added this here. We're looking at the Data tab here. We've also added pictures. So now we can click on Chart and get a quick view of these 13 colleges. And easily, one of the patterns you can see is downward trends in many, many cases. Not substantial in some. Allen is all over the place. Defiance down overall. Westminster, this is the Westminster in Pennsylvania. Wilson went up for a little bit and started trending down. You can also roll over each of these column charts, and we can see in 2015 that Wilson College had an enrollment of 631, and roll over the top of 2022, and it was up to almost 900. And you can do that for any of these. So that's the FTE enrollment. That's the basic layout of the College Viability app. Let's work our way through the 8 other reports. We're going to look at both the 4- and 6-year graduation rates. So let's click on that. And I've, I've already selected the 2022 values. And at College Viability, we have our own threshold. Agree with it, disagree with it, but we have a threshold that we believe that if a college cannot graduate 50% or more of its students over the course of the traditional 4 years, we have reason, lots of reason to be concerned. So as we look at this sample set of 13, we can see about half, 6, have, are above our threshold, the 50%. You can pick whatever threshold you want. Parents will choose their own threshold. College leaders will choose their own. Media will choose their own. But that's, the data's there for you to do the comparison. But we can make the case that Mount Mercy, Concordia, Wisconsin, and the others, not even graduating half their students, and if you follow my media at all on social media, I've coined the phrase, these are coin toss colleges. You might as well flip a coin to decide if your student's gonna graduate or not at these colleges with 4-year rates below 50%. You can see the percent change, you can see if there's any trends here, and we can look at, even though it's a bad number, Concordia, is up 11 points over the last 8 years. We can see that Westminster, Pennsylvania is down 12 points. Ask questions. If you're Westminster College in Pennsylvania, why is your graduation rate down 12%? That's 12 percentage points, 17.4% is the total percentage. And again, the 8-year change average is up 0.2, and the average for these 8 college, for these 13 colleges was graduating just over 50% for the 8-year period. And again, there's a picture that goes with it. We've drawn a 50% line to show which colleges don't even get there, and you can quickly identify which colleges never get there, which colleges are doing well with that threshold. And again, choose whatever threshold that you want, but this tool provides comparison. When we quickly look at the 6-year graduation rate, same data, but now it's 6 years. Our threshold is 70, 7-0%, and we can see it looks like just 2 of these colleges meet that, maybe 3 of those colleges meet that threshold. They graduate at least 7 out of 10 students after the course of 6 years. And when you look at these right around 50%, Wilson, Defiance, and Notre Dame, after 6 years, don't even graduate half of the students who start there. Draw your own conclusions. Moving on, let's take a look at admissions yield. And not everybody follows this. There's kind of an inside baseball term to this. I've coined the phrase popularity indicator, and here's why. The admissions yield is an indication of the percentage of students that a college accepted that actually show up, attend classes, and pay tuition. The higher the yield, the better. And we can see here, we'll look at the 2022 data, and we can see, you know, some numbers in the low 20s and the high teens. We can see Notre Dame. I'll talk about Allen here in a second. Defiance, Beloit, on the low side. Of course, colleges would want that admissions yield to be as high as possible. You know, anything above 20% is generally accepted to be okay, but that's a soft number. It's the comparison that matters more than the actual number. If I'm comparing just these 3 colleges, or I'm comparing Wilson to Defiance, there's a big difference. 9% to 20%, whatever that is for Wilson College. That substantial. Allen College, and I think this shows up in a couple other fields, doesn't even report data for some of these fields. Now I'm drawing my own conclusion based on the number of colleges that do report the data and report it correctly, that colleges that can't even report the IPEDS data correctly don't have the systems, processes, or resources to even do that. And again, draw your own conclusions. That's a concern. And even the 100% data in 2021, there's a rare college that gets an admissions yield of 100%, but Allen College almost certainly isn't one of them. So it's just a data reporting error. So admissions yield, the chart's available for a quick glance to see what those patterns are. And again, pretty consistent, but you can see the outliers, they jump up at you pretty quickly. Let's move on. Let's take a look at— we talked enrollment already. Let's go back up here to expenses. And actually there's 2 reports. In total, there are 11 reports in the faculty/staff version. I just report 9 just to be conservative. And we look at total expenses and we look at core expenses. Uh, iPads treat those slightly differently, but you can look, for example, at Allen. The numbers are very similar, but for those looking for important differentiation, I included both of those. There's even charts for both of them, so you can take a look. And you'll be looking at colleges that had significant growth in expenses. Concordia, Wisconsin— and I'll use this occasion to note their expenses went up, their enrollment was down more than any other college, 2,200-some students over the 8 years. Big, big issues there. And if you're faculty, staff at Concordia and you don't know that, well, now you have a resource to do know that. I follow the media on Concordia University and other colleges as well. Now you've got the data because I know the folks at Concordia are not happy. They're not happy at any college where they have financial challenges. But this is a resource you can use to take concrete data over the last 8 reported years to make your case, for better or worse, on how to respond to those data challenges. Let's move on. We looked at the enrollment. Institutional grants is another kind of an inside baseball, inside higher education comparison. And there's two we're gonna look at. That's one of the extra reports that we don't actually count. The funded institutional grants, and we'll pick on Oberlin 'cause they're doing pretty well. Oberlin has per student in 2022 about $18 million in institutional grants. Per FTE, per student. So for example, it could be the John A. Smith Nursing Scholarship. Somebody gave $1 million a few years ago, and the earnings from that supported nursing scholarship or 2 or 3. Oberlin has $17 million. Let's flip that 2022 number, and you can look at the other years on your own in the app, and it goes down to Defiance and Waynesburg and Mount Mercy, who have substantially less. Draw your own conclusions, but that's one of the ways you can compare the data. And then we do look at the total number. And this is the unfunded scholarship— I'm sorry, the unfunded institutional grants. And this is the merit aid. This is the unfunded tuition discounts, the unfunded scholarships. These have no dollars behind them. Colleges essentially use this data, use these— it's not even funds, it's discounts, just like you and I get for cars and clothes and computers and everything else is a discount. And so we can look at the change. So let's look at the 8-year change. I'm going to click on that data point, and we can see that Oberlin went from $44 million to $80 million, up $35, almost $36 million over the 8 reported years. That is incentive they used, unfunded, $80 million per year in unfunded merit aid scholarships, whatever you want to call it, to get students in the door. There's the 8-year change. I'm going to click on that again And there's patterns that we see. Now, Notre Dame College, in serious trouble, already looking at a merger partner, took theirs down from $18 million to a little over $1,700 million. That's because they realized they needed the cash to stay awake, to stay alive. But you can compare these numbers to see what colleges are trying to do. I'm gonna flip it one more time. These colleges here have substantially increased They're unfunded tuition discounts just to get students in the door. And yet, for example, I'll pick on Concordia, Wisconsin again, up $14 million over, almost $15 million over 8 years, and their enrollment is down over 2,000 students. They used the incentives and it didn't work. A quick sidebar example, Iowa Wesleyan University closed in 2023. Their enrollment actually grew 300 students over the last 8 reported years from last year, but they had given away so much of the store, so many unfunded discounts, they didn't have the cash to continue to operate. And then finally, tuition and fees. And this is total tuition and fees collected, and I pre-sorted this. And look at all the colleges who over the course of 8 years have tuition and fees that are negative, are lower in 2022 than they were in 2015. Some colleges, I'll flip this, some colleges have been successful in increasing tuition fee revenue. Compliments to them. But again, we look at the case Concordia, Wisconsin. They grew the revenue, but at the expense of students because they tried to keep the tuition up. And there's lots more going on at Concordia University, but this is an example of looking at the data to look for patterns, look for trends. The overall average of tuition fees was down almost $2.5 million over the course of 8 years. And I did notice I skipped percent admitted. Quick look at that. Again, let's look at the picture on this one and draw your own conclusions, but in my mind, anything over 80%, a college's motto is more or less, have a heartbeat, we will admit you. I don't know, I'm taking poetic license with that, but that's my perception. And there are colleges who manage that up and down over the course of the 8-year reported period. And again, you can roll over the top to actually see what that number is for these colleges. And then the data just reflects the same thing. We can see what the pattern has been. If there is any pattern, it's colleges in trouble tend to admit more students. And you can see, for example, right here on top, Wilson College went from 45% to almost 95%. 40, almost 50 percentage points over the course of 8 years. I can make the case they were doing that to grow their tuition and fee enrollment. Am I right? Probably. Do I know that for a fact? I do not. So that's the 2024 private college viability app for faculty and staff. It's reasonable to operate under the assumption that higher education is facing many business headwinds, and the reasons can be discussed and debated in other forums. As a faculty member or staff member at a college, do you need the Private College Viability App for Faculty and Staff? You probably don't need it in your daily work life. If you are looking for more certainty, good or bad, regarding your college and your career, the app provides that. Could you recreate the app on your own? Probably. It's important to note it's taken more than 3 years to get to what you just saw, so probably not overnight. If you want the comparisons today, then yeah, the 2024 Private College Viability App for Faculty and Staff is available for you now. The app retails for faculty and staff at $300. Through March 31st, 2024. The promotional release is priced at $200, and I will have a link to that app posted in the YouTube comments section below. It's also important to note that there is a version of the app for students and their families. It contains just 5 IPEDS reports, and that's important because your students and their families can now also compare your college's financial health and outcomes and enrollment to other colleges they are considering. And there's also an executive analysis version of the app with more than 30+ IPEDS reports for college leadership. You're welcome to purchase that. It will be included in the, in the show notes down below, but it's much, much more expensive. And finally, as part of that promotional release, for those that purchase the faculty and staff version of the app prior to March 31st, 2024, I will also send the 2024 public College Viability app for faculty and staff at no cost. And that version, that public version of the app, will be out sometime in March of 2024. This is Gary Stocker for College Viability. We'll talk again soon.