Ithaca College Ranking | Finances Questioned by Faculty. | Here are the actual reported numbers.

This is Gary Stocker. Students, faculty, and many others are upset about the proposed faculty cuts at Ithaca College in New York State. Today we are going to look at 6 years of financial, enrollment, and outcome data for Ithaca and compare it to 8 other private colleges in New York State. I will tell you at the start that the overall financial situation at Ithaca is not as bad as many of its peer colleges. However, you will see in our data, and this is data reported by Ithaca College itself, there are, there are some troubling patterns worthy of being of concern to the leadership in that organization. Since we do private college financial health updates regularly, don't forget to subscribe down below to stay updated. If you want to be notified of our updates automatically, just make sure to click on the bell icon down below. I have done research on the financial health and viability of private colleges in the United States for the last 5 years. The College Viability app that I developed lets users easily customize and compare the financial health of private colleges they are considering. The data I use is from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. So let's take a look at the College Viability App and let's compare Ithaca College to 8 other regional private colleges in the state of New York. And you can see on the selection screen, and this is available to you through the CollegeViability.com website, I've selected New York State and regional colleges. Let me click on the 6-Year Changes screen, and you can see the 9 colleges selected for this comparison. And we're going to focus on Ithaca College. You can see the list of the 8 other private colleges here. And we'll compare these initially with 6 categories. The first is the full-time enrollment change over the last 6 years, and the reporting period is the years 2014 to 2019. I always make note of the fact that these reports from private colleges through the federal government are always slow, but nonetheless they still give us, in this case, 6 years' worth of comparisons. We can see good trends and we can see bad trends. So we'll look at the enrollment change, we'll look at the change in collected tuition and fees, we'll look at the 6-year graduation rate, and then we'll compare the change in expenses with the change in core revenues. This is one of the areas that you'll see that there will be some logical concerns for Ithaca College. And then we're going to compare the endowment for the last 6 years and most importantly the last couple of years for each of these 6 colleges. Let's go back and look at the enrollment change. And then I've already sorted this. I've already sorted this from high to low. So we can see that over the last 6 years, these 2 colleges, Adelphi and Clarkson, have done better better than the other 6. Let's see where Ithaca looks in this group, and we can see that it's down about 200 students over the course of 6 years. Not a monster number. We'll look at their total enrollment in a minute, and you'll see it's, it's a sizable number. But nonetheless, any time enrollment goes down over a long period of time, it's like any other business. You're not selling as much as you would like. And again, this is a 6-year pattern that we're looking at. And you can see some of the colleges have done much worse. Almira, Bard, and Canisius not doing well at all in terms of enrollment over the last 6 years. Let's take it a step further and compare these 6 on tuition and fee changes. Let me sort this from highest to lowest. And again, you can see which ones have grown the most tuition and fee revenue over the last 6 years. Adelphi and Clarkson are doing well. Let's go down to Ithaca, and we can see this is where legitimate concerns develop. We can see from the reporting periods 2014 to 2019, tuition and fee revenue is down about $8 million. You can compare it to its peer competitors and see it's not competing well in return in terms of tuition and fees. One can reasonably speculate that Ithaca College is needing to discount tuition a lot in order to get students enrolled. We see that everywhere. In smaller to medium-sized private colleges. Let's jump over then. I'll come back to 6-year graduation rates. Let's jump over, and I want to compare expenses to revenues. So let's just go ahead and sort this by expenses. The most growth in expenses has been at Adelphi College, at a little over $37 million. But look who comes in second. So expense growth has been a little over $19 million for Ithaca in the reporting period that we're looking at. But let's jump next door in the next column over. Let's look at 6-year change in core revenues. We saw an issue with tuition and fees. In that same 6-year period, core revenues, the standard definition used in the database used to capture the data for here, is down not quite $12 million. So if we do the math, $19 and almost $12, over $30 million in negative change. Legitimate reasons to be concerned, legitimate reasons to look at the expenses and all the types of expenses associated in running this college. I'm going to jump over now to graduation rates, and these have already been sorted. I'm going to point out a couple of things here. First of all, this is a stunningly successful group of private colleges with graduation rates from the low 60s, which is nominal, marginal at best, to Elmira College, almost 70%. That's not awful because trust me, when you look at enough of these, there are many, many, too many private colleges where the graduation rates are hovering around 50%. But look at the strong numbers from the low 70s to upper 70s for most of these colleges, including Ithaca at 74% graduation rate in 2019. And their change, you know, Ithaca's had a small change over those 6 years something to watch, not necessarily something to be grossly concerned about today. And most of these colleges have been stable, with a few of them showing some good growth in their 6-year graduation rates. So let's take a quick look at the overall enrollment for these 9 colleges, and I've sorted them on the column that says 12-month enrollment full-time equivalent is what FTE stands for, for the 2018-2019 time period, the most recent data just released in late February of 2021. That shows that Adelphi and Ithaca are effectively the same size colleges. There's about 1,000 difference between the two. And the others are somewhat smaller, all the way down to Elmira College, which is substantially smaller. But these are all reasonably peer-sized institutions. Let's take a look in the far right-hand side. And what I've developed here is a tool that lets, that provides kind of a green, yellow, red comparison. And it's based on the colleges selected. So let me just sort this by percent change, and we can see that of these 9 colleges, the ones that by comparison— and that's an important qualification because Bard and Canisius and Elmira colleges have all had awful enrollment growth over the last 6 years— that even colleges like Ithaca with a small decline in enrollment, not quite 200 students over the 6 years, show up as green. If we were to take out these bottom 3 colleges, these colors would all change for those in the bottom part of the screen. That's just the way the app was developed. So what does this mean for Ithaca College? It means they are typical. They are fighting the same intense market for traditional college students that every other public and private college is fighting. It is the unfunded tuition discounts, often called merit aid or merit scholarships, that is decreasing Ithaca's and most, if not all, other colleges' revenue. At the same time, Ithaca College's expenses over the last 6 years have gone up appreciably, over $13 million. That's a long-term formula for failure. It's difficult to grow out of this bad balance of expenses and revenues because new programs, new degrees, only come with guaranteed additional costs, not additional revenues. The higher education market, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, has too many college seats, too many classroom seats, whether it's in person or online, and not enough students to fill them. Ithaca College is just one of many going through this phase. Almost without exception in my experience, When cutbacks of any type are shared, protests develop from faculty, from students, sometimes from staff, sometimes from communities. It's simply part of the process that higher education is going through now. I will close with this: Ithaca College is in a stronger financial position than most of their competitors. Balancing the negative pattern of increasing expenses and decreasing revenues is an absolute necessity to maintain that position. And finally, let's look at the endowments for these 9 private colleges in the state of New York. And we can see when we look in the column of the value of the endowment at the end of the fiscal year, which is the standard term that I use, that Ithaca is strong at well over $300 million in endowed assets they are far superior to their competitors in terms of endowments. This is an area where I see regularly that faculty, staff, and others say, hey, you've got an endowment, it's a good endowment or not, why can't you use that to support faculty and salaries and all the expenses that go with running a college? The challenging part of the endowment is that there is a responsibility, it's called a fiduciary responsibility, of the leaders of these colleges to make sure that that organization is viable into perpetuity. And when they look at the value of those assets, their responsibility is to make sure to protect those in the short term to ensure long-term viability of these organizations. Are there assets available? Are there dollars available at Ithaca to spend on salaries? Undoubtedly. It's beyond my level of expertise, but clearly there are some resources available. But here's the balance that college leadership faces. Even in a well-endowed organization like Ithaca, there is an eternal obligation to protect those assets. Short-term to maintain that long-term financial health and viability. Again, if you like what we're sharing about these private colleges, make sure to click on the like button down below. Subscribe if you'd like to see more of these. And if you have any additional private colleges you would like me to compare for you, just put their names down in the comment section. I'll add that to my list, and I'll get those posted in the coming days and weeks. Mm-hmm.