Gary Stocker compares Notre Dame College and St. Bonaventure University using six financial and academic metrics from 2014-2019. Notre Dame saw sharp enrollment drops and only 37% six-year graduation rates, while St. Bonaventure graduated 60% of students and spent nearly $3,800 per student on academic support versus Notre Dame's $1,200.
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Are you looking for information about a college's financial health? Or are you concerned private colleges you are considering might be in financial trouble? Might close, or maybe just struggle to provide a quality higher education.
Hi, my name is Gary Stocker.
For the past 5 years, I have been researching the financial health and viability of private colleges in the United States. In 2020, I created and released the College Viability App that I am going to use today to compare two private colleges. During this video, I'm going to compare Notre Dame College—it's important to say college, not university—and St. Bonaventure. Notre Dame College is seriously challenged across all of the financial health and viability indicators that I use, and I'll share those with you. St. Bonaventure presents a much stronger graduation rate outcome, better retention rates, and better academic support for their students. I'll show you the data. You'll see that I have some financial concerns about St.
Bonaventure, but overall St.
B's is in much better financial health and viability than Notre Dame College. So we're looking at the College Viability App, the 2021 version.
Uh, the data is from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. The information is provided by the colleges themselves. And this summary page that I look at compares 6 years' worth of changes to some key indicators that I use to compare the financial health and even viability of private colleges. And we can see at first glance that Notre Dame College, from the reporting period 2014 to 2019, the last 6 years available, shows serious enrollment declines of almost, of over 400 students, while St. Bonaventure's has had a modest increase over 6 years, maybe a dozen students per year. But look at both cases for the tuition and fee revenue that these colleges collect. Both have lost, both have had decreased tuition and revenue fees over a 6-year period. That's a significant pattern. The decrease is much more substantial at Notre Dame College than it is for St. Bonaventure. But imagine this, that you're running a business, and over 6 years the main source of revenue that you rely on has gone down, that's not a situation that you want to be in. Let's take a look at graduation rates. And I use this as the most important outcome when I compare colleges. There are some subjective and objective considerations, but nonetheless, it provides us with a quick comparison of a college's ability to graduate its students. And you can see here that in the case of Notre Dame College and St. Bonaventure, It's not even close. St. Bonaventure's graduation rate over 6 years, and I use a 6-year number, not a 4, is twice as good as what we see from Notre Dame College. Now, let's put this in perspective. The graduation rate, the 6-year graduation rate, is defined like this. For every 100 students that, for example, started at Notre Dame College in 2014, for every 100 of them, only 37 graduated from Notre Dame College in 6 years. Now many could have transferred, maybe some are still in the process of getting a degree, but for comparison, St. Bonaventure clearly has the systems and processes in place to graduate students in 6 years that Notre Dame College does not.
There are 3 other comparisons, 3 other areas that I want to look at for these 2 colleges. And if you look at the bottom of the screen on the College Viability App, let's take a look at academic support. And this is the amount of resources, financial resources, that a college provides per student. So let's just kind of get a good comparison per student. So if one college is a lot bigger than the other, it doesn't matter at all because it's a per-student comparison. And we can see that if we just look at the numbers for 2019, that St. Bonaventure provides about $3,800 per student. Notre Dame, about a third of that. So use that comparison as a way to evaluate the kind of support, the kind of education, by comparison, that these two colleges can provide you or your family member. Let's take a look at retention rate. And again, this is an indication of an organization's ability to keep students. And we can see St. Bonaventure, out of every 100 students that start, the first year, 84 come back for the second year. A much smaller number for Notre Dame College. Do the comparison, make your own judgment. And then finally, I want to take a look at how much these colleges spend not on academics, but on administrative support or institutional support. And we can see, interestingly, for all of the challenges we saw from Notre Dame College, that it spends almost as much for administrative costs as does St. Bonaventure. Again, make your comparisons, draw your own conclusions. If you'd like to see other private college comparisons, drop me a note in the comment section down below. And I want to emphasize here, I'm not doing predictions. I'm not saying one college is better than another, one college is going to survive and one is not. I'm simply offering a way to compare the financial health and potential viability or not of private colleges. I don't do guesses. I'm just doing comparisons. You deserve a quality college education. I want to help give you information to help you make that decision. There is reasonable and widespread speculation that in the coming months and years, some of these financially challenged private colleges, typically the smaller to medium-sized ones, may not survive. It's important to make that distinction before you choose one that's in financial trouble, as opposed to after. And finally, I created the College Viability App to make it easy, easier, for you to compare the financial health of these private colleges. Don't make that college decision without checking on the college's financial health. It's only fair. Colleges check on your financial health and capacity to pay. Through the FAFSA, you should check on their financial health through the College Viability App.
