Lincoln College (IL) is closing. Here are the reasons why.

With this week's announcement that Illinois College is closing, we get yet another chance to compare the financial health and viability of other private colleges. In this video, I will compare the finances, enrollments, and outcomes of Lincoln College with other private colleges. Students and parents can use comparisons like those from the College Viability App to make more informed decisions about private colleges they are considering. Hi, my name is Gary Stocker. I developed the College Viability App in 2019. The app takes data from the National Center for Education Statistics and lets students, parents, and many others compare private colleges' financial health and viability throughout the United States. What I have done here is listed the 8 private colleges in Wisconsin, Vermont, Illinois, and Missouri, and we're going to use the 8 colleges and compare all of them, including Lincoln College, across 6 or 7 different fields. The College Viability App, the 2022 version, monitors changes from the years 2015 to 2020. It's the last 6 years of data available, and it's from the National Center for Education Statistics. There are other comparisons that we'll do on another day, but for today we're just going to look at the summary screen, the 6 years' worth of changes. And so we can see Lincoln College— Lincoln College had a decrease of 86 employees over the 6 years reported. I can click on the FTE enrollment and do a sort, and you can see that of those 6 In all honesty, Lincoln College had the smallest decrease of all of them. So Champlain in Vermont, William Woods in Missouri, and on and on. Each of the 8 lost enrollment, not in one year, but over the course of 6 years from 2015 through 2020. Let's take a look at tuition and fees. And this is the tuition and fee revenue that these colleges collected. Let's take a look at tuition and fees. We can see that 6 of the 8 actually had a decrease in the amount of tuition and fees they collected from their students in the 2015 to 2020 reporting period. Not a good pattern, not a good trend. Lincoln College was, was on the low end of those losses, of those decreases, but nonetheless they showed a decrease. Let's look at graduation rates, and I'm just going to sort this back alphabetically again, and we can see that Lincoln College had a decrease in both the 4-year graduation rate and the 6-year graduation rate. There's some actual numbers that we track in the application up here. We'll show that on another video. Compared to the other colleges, the 4-year graduation rate for Lincoln was a little bit worse than the others. Some showed some growth— Eureka College and Fontbonne University. Most hovered close to that zero or slight decrease. When we track percent admitted, We're looking at the number of, the percentage of students that colleges accept over the course of their admission season. I'll sort these again and you can see that over the course of the reporting period, Lincoln College increased by 18% the number of students it admitted, it accepted. But I want to go to the next column and I want to look at the admissions yield. This is kind of a tracking tool that very few people use. Admissions yield is kind of a popularity indicator. Admissions yield is the percentage of students who actually show up at a college that has accepted them. And what we're looking at here is Lincoln University, excuse me, Lincoln College increased the percentage of students that they admitted, but look how much their loyalty factor, my words, not the, not the database's, their admissions yield went down. It became, Lincoln College became a much less popular college for the students it accepted over the 6-year period. And you can see there really is a trend among all 8 of these colleges. Their popularity, if you will, or admissions yield went down, with minor exception. And then when we look at total expenses in the next column, we're really looking at did these colleges, each of which has their own financial challenges, operational challenges, admissions challenges, outcome challenges. Did their expenses go up or down? And again, let me sort this, and we can see that of the 8, 4, even though they were in financial trouble compared to peer colleges, had increased expenses. Lincoln College was the third worst in terms of growing its expenses compared to the other 8. Some, the bottom 4 here, probably realized they were heading for a tough time and in advance tried to keep their expenses in check. They deserve credit for that, and you can see the colleges listed over here, but nonetheless they still face financial challenges. You can compare their challenges with what we see for Lincoln College. So finally, I want to share two comparison screens, and the first one really just itemizes the challenges that Lincoln College in Lincoln, Illinois faced. Their enrollment was down 82 students over the course of 6 years. Their tuition and fee revenue decreased over $360,000. They had decreasing undergraduate graduation rates, and, and really, you see the note here, they were abysmally low in almost all cases, at 10% or less. Just not good at all. They admitted 18% more of the students who applied, indicating they were probably seeking some additional tuition revenue. But the admissions yield was down 31 points. It just— Lincoln College just was not popular during the last 6 years with the students it admitted. Expenses increased. The retention rate increased 15%, which is interesting. One can speculate that those students who did accept admissions to Lincoln College were somewhat more loyal. That's what the data would suggest. Their endowment, the, their ability to raise gifts, donations, and other funds was at $21 million, the total endowment. That's below the minimum threshold that I use of about $50 million. The endowment per student was in the middle of the group of 8 that we looked at. Uh, the endowment per student is a better reflection of an organization's ability to raise funds based on its enrollment, as opposed to the total number that we looked at of $21 million for Lincoln College. And then let's look then at the overall comparison of the 8 private colleges. We saw the demographics reflected, 4 Midwestern and Northeastern states were represented. All 8 lost enrollment, 6 of the 8 had decreasing revenue from tuition and fees, and only 1 had a 4-year graduation rate. 5 of the 8 private colleges in our sample had endowments below my minimum threshold of $50 million. 5 of the 8 had lowered the percentage of students they admitted. I'm assuming they are trying to become more selective in their students that they admit, even in the face of financial challenges, but that's just educated speculation on my part. 6 of the 8, interestingly, had a lower admissions yield. And remember how I described this as kind of a popularity indicator. So 6 of the 8 had a lower percentage of students whom they offered admissions to who said no, and those students chose another college. And then finally, in the face of various financial challenges, 4 of the 8 colleges in our sample still had increased total expenses from 2015 to 2020. So what conclusions can we draw from the closure of Lincoln College? I'm not sure you can draw a universal one. There is no single indicator of impending closure. It's very easy to look after the fact and say, "Oh, that makes sense." That's kind of what we're doing with this exercise. But it's also disconcerting to note that many private colleges, and remember I just sampled 8, present data points similar to those of Lincoln College. It begs the fair question, how many others are following along the path of Lincoln College? And we won't know it until they say, hey, we can't make it any longer. And then finally, here's, here's the big takeaway. It's really the comparisons. If you're looking at private colleges for your college decision-making process, it's important to compare the financials, the admissions, and the outcome results of the colleges you are considering. It provides yet another indicator, along with the majors and the faculty and the campus and the tuition cost and the extracurriculars. It provides another factor for you to consider when making your final college decision.