How to Navigate the 2024 Private College Viability App - Tutorial for Students & Families

What is a College Viability app, and why am I looking at one? Hi, my name is Gary Stocker, the founder of College Viability and the creator of the College Viability app. And your response is common: What is a College Viability app? Why would I need one? Traditionally, students, when they're looking at colleges, and their families, look at a college's majors, at the campus, at the faculty, at the amenities, at tuition rates, and much more. Yet in 2024, most, but not all, public and private colleges in the United States are facing serious financial, operational, and cultural challenges. Many private colleges have closed, almost one per month, since 2016, and public colleges regularly announce layoffs and cutbacks. As you go through the selection process for colleges, you want to be aware of colleges that are challenged in today's very tight college market. And we know that almost all students and their families have always completed the FAFSA form, and there's challenges in 2024 that's in the media all the time. And of course, that FAFSA shares a family's finances and ability to pay with colleges. The Private College Viability App for Students and Families is kind of a reverse FAFSA. It provides students and families with information about colleges.

It's only fair.

And this can include items like comparing colleges' financial health and their graduation rate outcomes, enrollment trends, and much more. You certainly don't want to choose a college be it private or public, that may close, and that mostly focuses on private colleges, or a public college where a major you may be looking at has low enrollment and about to be closed by a college. So let me take a minute and show you how to use the 2024 Private College Viability App for Students and Families and how it can help you make a more informed decision about the colleges you want to consider. So here is the 2024 Private College Viability App for students and families. There are other versions I'll talk about later, and you're seeing the home page, the main menu. And let me just kind of quickly step you through the navigation, then we'll go to these 5 reports and I'll step you through ways to look at the college finances, enrollment, and outcome issues. So we have selected— I've pre-selected 4 states. There are almost 1,300 100 private colleges in the database. I've selected, pre-selected 4 states. There's different types of colleges. I've selected the regional.

There are religious, there are elite, super elite, specialty colleges, and others in there as well.

And you can also pre-select, not pre-select, but select any colleges that you want, and then that list shows up over here. So for example, I can select Allegheny College. It will show up in the list on the right-hand side.

It goes from 15 to 16, and then when I deselect Allegheny College, of course goes off. So that's the way to select the colleges that you want.

Most folks are going to, are going to select between 5 and 10. I selected a slightly larger number to give you a better perspective on how you can compare these private colleges.

We took a little artistic license with the menu, and these are the 5 reports that you can use as part of the 2024 Private College Viability App for students and families. The 4-year graduation rate, we'll look at each of these. The admissions yield, I will show and explain that. The average net price, same thing, the endowment value. And I want to start off with the FTE enrollment, because when we watch media reports, it's always focusing on the enrollment, up or down, always focuses on the enrollment. So I'm going to click on that. The whole item, the whole rectangle here is the menu item. So I'm going to click on FTE fall enrollment, and we use FTE, which stands for full-time equivalent. It's a standardized measure that we believe at College Viability is the best measure of a college's enrollment trends. And you can see the 15 colleges that we've selected, and you can see we have data for the last 8 years, from 2015 through 2022. This data comes from a federal government entity called the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. The colleges themselves submit this data, and the federal agency processes it, makes it usable, and then what you're looking at is a way to more readily present, use, and analyze the data that the colleges themselves submit to the federal government. So you can use the data, you can actually click on any of these headings and it will change from highest to lowest. So we can see Drexel is the largest in 2015. We can go all the way out to 2022, do the same thing, and we'll see, we can see that the, that Drexel continues to be the largest, but can also flip it the other way and we can see the smaller colleges as well. I'm gonna click on the state header, and you can see we have a combination of states from Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. We like to measure the change. So one of the columns that we have is we show you the 8-year change in enrollment. So I'm gonna click on that. It's gonna show you that of these 15 colleges, only one, Allen College in Iowa, had any enrollment growth. In the last 8 reported years. You can see the percent change on the right-hand side for a standardized measurement. Let's flip that. I'm gonna click on that one more time. Look at all the colleges with substantial decreases in FTE enrollment over the last reported 8 years, and even the percentage change for those that are smaller colleges. If you're looking at colleges and one or more of those colleges has had significant decreases in enrollment, and you have to determine what's significant. That's not my role. My role is to provide you the data to compare the colleges. Then you have to ask, is this college headed in the right direction for whatever reason? Now, the importance of enrollment is not enrollment for the sake of it. It's the tuition and fees revenue that comes from the enrollment. So when you see a college like Concordia University in Wisconsin lose 2,200 students over 8 years, you can do the math on anticipating how much tuition and fee revenue has gone down in that same period. And the financial challenges that Concordia University in Wisconsin must face having had such a massive decrease in enrollment. Well, data is one thing. We try not to make it too intimidating, but we provide pictures. You'll see over here on the right-hand side, we've got the Data tab, which is where we are now. I'm gonna click on the Chart tab, and now we get pictures. This provides an easy resource to compare trends. And for example, we'll just pick a couple. We can see that Westminster College in Missouri, I believe this one's from, pretty flat enrollment growth. We can see Drexel, which was the largest, was about 20,000 students. As you roll over the top of this, we can see they had 21,000 students in 2015, and roll over 2022, they had 19,000 students, so a loss of about 2,000 students. That's what the data just showed. But more importantly, you can quickly look and see Concordia's on a downward trend. You can see Beloit is on a downward trend. Baldwin-Wallace, Ashland University, for the most part on a downward trend. Alvin has been up and down. Albright College has been on a downward trend as well. So that's the first of the 5 reports that you can look at. For navigation, I'm going to click on the typical menu heading here, and it's going to be— it's going to show the 5 reports that you have access to in that 2024 Private College Viability App for Students and Families. And let's look at the 4-year graduation rate. Again, the data, we can sort them alphabetically if you want to. We can sort them by state, which is where they were.

But I wanted to look at the 2022 4-year graduation rate.

Now, traditionally in the United States, we like to think that all students graduate in 4 years. That's not even close to being the case. We can see in 2022 the, the 4-year graduation rates for each of these individual colleges. Now here at College Viability, we have our own thresholds. We have a 4-year graduation rate minimum of 50%. We believe if a college can't graduate half its students in 4 years, we have to question whether it's a valid college or not. Now colleges will tell you that their graduation rates are lower because they accept everybody. That's fine, but when you accept everybody, you're probably lowering the overall academic quality and you're gonna see a lower graduation rate. As students, as families, and as other involved stakeholders, you have the decision to make. Do I want to choose a college? Let's flip over here to Ohio.

Look in the states. Let's look at these colleges in Ohio. So Ashland's at 51%, Baldwin-Wallace at 55%, John Carroll at 73%, and Marietta College at 44%.

Do you really want to choose a college that only graduates 44 out of 100 students who started there?

Or would one that graduates 73, which is a really strong number at John Carroll, 73 out of every 100 graduate in 4 years?

It's one of the tools, one of the resources the College Viability App lets you use to make the determination if this is a sound college for you to consider, or if you're considering it, to make that your final choice. And remember the FAFSA analogy that I talked about. FAFSA gets your finances, the College Viability app gives you the finances, the graduation rates, and the enrollment trends at colleges, in this case private colleges throughout the United States. There's also a public college version of the app as well. And again, we can look at pictures, and we have drawn a horizontal line. So there's our 50% minimum threshold, and you can see which of the colleges don't even get there ever.

Um, it looks like Beloit is strong, Geneva is strong, John Carroll is strong, of course Simpson is strong, and Westminster College is strong as well.

And that might be the Westminster in Pennsylvania. So again, graphic representation. If you're looking at 4 or 5 colleges, you just get fatter columns but the same kind of data. Let's go back to the menu. Let's take a look at admissions yield. Now this is kind of an inside baseball term. Let me define admissions yield for you, and you can see on the screen I've said it's also known as the popularity indicator. Admissions yield, by definition, is a percentage of students who a college accepts for admission actually show up, attend classes, and pay tuition. So let's take a look.

We won't start over here anymore, we'll start on this side.

Let's take a look at 2022. And I, it's got like it's sort of highest to lowest already. So we can see that Geneva College, 22% of the students, 22 out of every 100 who Geneva College accepted in 2022 showed up, attended classes, and paid tuition. Let's go all the way down here to Beloit and Drexel and Clark and Albright, Albright, and they're different states. And it's a much lower number. and in most cases, colleges want that admissions yield to be higher for obvious reasons. There is one exception to that.

The really, really, really super elite and elite colleges want that number to be lower.

The Harvards, the Yales, the public land grant colleges, they want that number to be a single-digit number or very low double-digit number. Albright, Clark, Drexel, Beloit aren't even close to being in that category. The market is telling us that these 4 colleges only about 10% of the students they accept actually show up. The market is speaking. Students are telling us either they have better offers or better opportunities at other colleges, or one possible explanation is that many students are applying and they're not choosing to go anywhere, which is going to knock down all of these admissions yield numbers. And even more importantly, the one that I like to look at is 8-year change. So I've sorted that. So again, for all these colleges, only Marietta College in Ohio has had any, any positive increase in the admissions yield in the last 8 reported years. Every other college is going down. Now, this is not a unique set of colleges. I see that pattern everywhere. That's one of the reasons so many colleges face so many financial challenges, is fewer and fewer students are accepting the offers to attend college. There's one little thing I wanna show here. Allen College, and I see this on occasion. Keep in mind that I shared with you that the colleges themselves submit this data to the National Center for Education Statistics. And when I see a college hasn't submitted data or submitted goofy data, 'cause no college has 100%, or very few colleges have 100% admissions, especially in one year, this suggests to me, my opinion, that these colleges don't have the expertise in hand to even provide data for you to make comparisons. Let's move on. The next one I want to look at is average net price, and then we'll wrap up with endowment value. The average net price is really for you to look at in terms of what these colleges are reporting as the net price on average that students paid. And we're going to look at the 7-year change. Let's flip this for a second just to show this. So Beloit College, the average net price has gone down almost $7,000 per student. And you can see the other numbers as well. Let's flip that one more time. And you can see about half of these colleges— you can see again, Allen isn't even submitting the data, that's not good— have increased tuition. Now, nothing wrong with that. And from a, from a, from a selection process, I don't know that that's a, that big of a factor other than to tell you The colleges with a positive number have been successful in raising tuition, but as we saw on the FTE enrollment, their enrollment goes down. Matter of fact, let's take a quick example of that. Baldwin-Wallace raised their tuition $7,000 and change over the last 8 reported years. Let's go back to the main menu. Let's go back to FTE Fall Enrollment. Let's look at Baldwin-Wallace. I'll sort it alphabetically. Baldwin-Wallace lost almost 600 students over the last 8 reported years. One can make the case that they did successfully raise tuition rates, but they paid for that in part with decreased enrollment. And then finally, endowment. And endowment really is the indicator that suggests, indicates, not even suggests, but indicates a college's capacity to raise funds from alumni, from friends of the college, from students, and, and many other stakeholders. We actually got it presented two ways here. There's no charts for this one, there's too much data, but this is the endowment assets in each of the 8 reported years per student, per FTEs, per full-time equivalent student that we talked about just a second ago. And we can see— let's flip this, let's sort this, and I'm gonna start from high— so we can see that below— I'm sorry, that John Carroll University has $34,000 and change, almost $35,000 in endowment assets per student. And then when we go down here, let's sort this and look down here at John Carroll. We can see that in 2022— slide over a little bit— in 2022, John Carroll University had more than a quarter of a billion dollars in endowment. They've done well. This is the per— this is a standardized comparison, the per student This shows a college's capacity to raise funds, and the minimum threshold that we use at College Viability—

it's our number, it's one that we think is valid—

is $50 million. So let's take a look. We have 3 colleges that didn't meet that threshold, and those 3 colleges that can't even raise $50 million over the entire existence of the college are Allen, Clark, and Grandview. And the others are above our threshold, although some aren't much above it. But you can see what their capacity and their systems and processes are to raise gifts from donors.

Here's a reason to focus on that a little bit. If a college is in trouble and they have a large endowment, they've got the resources to redirect some of those endowment funds.

The endowment, big endowment discussion is something for another day.

But if a college only has, we'll go back up here to Allen College, And Allen College only has not even $10 million in its endowment, and they come out and they say, "We're gonna raise $20 million in the next 3 years." That's just plain silly.

It just can't happen. If they have only raised $10 million in the entire existence, to raise $20 million in a short period of time is not reasonable. I see that happen all of the time. So back to the Home menu to wrap this up. These are the 5 reports available. On the 2024 Private College Viability Analysis for students and families. There are also versions for faculty and staff. There are 9 reports.

And there's a big version for executives and college leaders that's 30+ reports.

Similar format, but just more and more reports are there. So why do you use the College Viability app?

As I shared when we started on this tutorial, Colleges know about your family finances from the FAFSA. It's only reasonable that students and families should also be able to learn about a college's finances and even compare the financial health, graduation rate outcomes, and enrollment trends of all of the colleges they are considering. The Private College Viability App for Students and Families retails at $49, list price at $49. Through March 31st, 2024, the promotional release price is just $29. And I'll have a link posted to how to acquire the app in the YouTube comment sections below. And as part of the promotional release, I will also send anybody who orders their Private College Viability App for Students and Families at $29, I will also send the 2024 Public College Viability App for students and families at no cost to those who purchase the private college version. That public college version of the app will be out in March of 2024. Deciding on a college is a cumbersome and challenging and time-consuming task. Don't let all the work that you and your family put into looking for colleges go to waste because you didn't take the extra step to check on the financial health, the graduation rates, the enrollment trends of colleges you are considering. My name is Gary Stocker from College Viability.