In this episode of the "5 Colleges in 5 Minutes" series, Gary Stocker of College Viability evaluates five private Iowa colleges—Allen, Briar Cliff, Central, Buena Vista, and Clarke—using six financial and performance parameters drawn from the National Center for Education Statistics IPEDS data (2015‑2020). He walks through enrollment trends, tuition‑and‑fee revenue versus expenses, endowment size (highlighting a $50 million minimum for financial health), four‑year graduation rates (using a 50 % benchmark), and admissions yield as a popularity metric. Stocker notes that most schools have declining enrollment and tuition revenue, with expenses generally following those declines. Endowments have fallen for three schools, and only Buena Vista and Central exceed the $50 million threshold, suggesting fundraising challenges for the others. Graduation rates are above 50 % for three schools, while the others hover near that mark, leading him to label low‑performing institutions as “coin‑toss colleges.” Admissions yields are low (low‑20s) compared to higher‑yield institutions, indicating limited student commitment. Throughout, Stocker frames these data points to assess each college’s long‑term viability, warning that declining financial indicators and modest graduation/yield metrics raise concerns about sustainability.
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Welcome to another episode of 5 Colleges in 5 Minutes. My name is Gary Stocker with College Viability. In today's episode, we're going to look at 5 private colleges in Iowa, and you can see them listed over here on the left-hand side. And we're going to look at, at 6 different parameters that you can see, and you can see them across the top. And they're for the time period from 2015 to 2020, and And this is all data from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. That's kind of inside baseball stuff, but it's actually information that colleges themselves have submitted. And let's take a look at enrollment. And we can see 4 of the 5 over the course of the last 6 reported years have had decreased enrollment. When we take that to the next category and look at tuition and fees, we can see again that most, 3 out of the 5, had decreased tuition and fees revenue. Why is that important? Private colleges in particular are heavily dependent on the revenue they receive from tuition and fees, room and board, that kind of stuff, to stay viable, to stay open. And when that number goes down over a long period of time, you have to have concern. We can then look at that revenue piece with the expense piece, and it's interesting in many cases that I watch here, as the tuition and fee revenue has gone down, in many cases, probably most cases, The total expenses have gone down as well. Tells me one major thing, and that is these colleges expected decreased revenue and tried to drop their expenses in association with that decrease in revenue. That's fine, that's good business, but it begs the question: if I'm a college and I'm cutting my expenses, am I providing the type of high-quality college education that students would like? And then we'll take just briefly look at the endowment from this generalized, uh, 6-year changes screen. And you can see the endowment for 3 of the 5 went down. That's really not a good thing because as the endowment goes down, that suggests these colleges are using the endowment funds to keep the lights on. Indeed, maybe their investments and their endowments have gone down, but that's generally not what my experience has been. Let's look at the total endowment amount for these colleges. You won't see me click on the screen, and let's just kind of look at the numbers from 2020. And when I look at the financial health of colleges, private colleges in particular, I'm looking at a bare minimum endowment threshold of $50 million. So let's just look at the 2020 numbers for these colleges, and we can see that Buena Vista did all right. There are over $120 million. Central College, not too far off. But the other three—Allen College, Briarcliff, and Clark—all had endowments below $50 million. Here's what that suggests. It suggests that they have had and continue to have a long-term problem developing the systems and processes to get gifts from alumni, friends, and others. That's an important financial consideration. Let's look at graduation rates. I'm going to bring up the 4-year graduation rates. You're not going to see the 5th college here because sometimes they don't always submit data. That's not a good thing. But let's look at the numbers. Actually, let's look at for all 5 years for these colleges, and let's just kind of do some generalizations. The minimum threshold I use when looking at colleges for a 4-year undergraduate graduation rate is 50%. And we can see that 3 of these 4 colleges, uh, Buena Vista, Central, and Clark, you know, not bad at all, um, above 50%. You know, Briarcliff is in the ballpark. But here's how I would use this. If I'm looking, for example, at these 4 colleges as a place for my child to go, I'm really going to ask the question Do these colleges show a historic ability to graduate their students? That's what I'm paying for. I'm not paying for the courses. I'm not paying for the tuition. I'm not paying to keep the grass green. I'm paying to get a degree. And if only 44 out of every 100, or about half, not even half, don't graduate, you know, the term I use in that is that it's a coin toss college. Whether they graduate or not is kind of the same thing as as tossing a coin. And finally, I wanna look at admissions yield. And again, some of those aren't submitting that data, that's concerning me. And when I look at these 4 colleges, 3 colleges together, you know, the low 20s number, and here's what admissions yield, also known as a popularity indicator, represents. It shows the percentage of students who after accepted by a college, Central College maybe for the first case here, actually showed up. So for every 100 acceptances that Central College had, 22 students showed up. It's a comparative number. There's no absolute value that I use for this one, but you're going to see some colleges with admission yields in the 70s, 80s, and on rare occasion, 90%. This is a way to compare the popularity of colleges based on students who actually showed up. That's it for this episode of Five Colleges in Five Minutes. My name is Gary Stocker. We'll be back with further episodes in the coming weeks and months.
