Gary Stocker compares five private colleges using financial data from 2014-2019. Champlain College shows strong enrollment and revenue growth with a 65% graduation rate, while Becker, American International, Fontbonne, and Anna Maria all have declining enrollment and endowments under $25 million, far below the $50 million safety benchmark. Use the College Viability App to check a school's financial health before enrolling.
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This is Gary Stocker.
As more private colleges start to succumb to financial pressures, you'll want to be able to compare one against the other in terms of their financial health and viability. Today we're going to compare colleges across different areas of the country, and this is the first time that we've done this at the request of viewers of the College Viability channel on YouTube.
And stay tuned as we compare 5 private colleges and their financial health and viability compared to one another.
This is the first time that I've done a set of private college comparisons that have been requested by viewers. So we're going to take a look at a disparate set of colleges from kind of a wider geography than we usually do. And you can see on the screen that I have 5 colleges listed, uh, Becker College that we recently did a single video on their challenges, and then 4 colleges that have been requested from viewers: American International, Fontbonne, Anna Maria, and Champlain College. Let's take a look at the changes over the 6 years. And again, this is the 2021 version of the College Viability App, and the data comes from 2014 to 2019. Let's take a look at the 6 general categories that we use to track colleges. And I've got this set up for these 5 colleges, and let's take a look at the enrollment, the full-time equivalent enrollment, over the last 6 years. And let me sort from highest to lowest. And we'll see during that time period that Champlain has done a good job. Really, compared to all the other 4, their enrollment is up almost 1,000 students over the course of the 6 years. And really, Anna Maria and Becker College, if we're looking at that 6-year period of time, are relatively flat. No big positive increases or big negative jumps. And there would be some concern about both American International College, down a couple hundred, and quite a bit of concern about Fontbonne. And here's why.
It's 6 years. It's a 6-year number that we're looking at right here, and if you can't grow your enrollment, or at the very least keep it flat, over the course of 6 years, you really have to have some concerns.
Let's take it a step further.
I want to look at the next column, which is the 6-year tuition and fees. This, of course, is the amount of revenue that colleges collect that is just from tuition and fees. The fees vary a little bit from college to college, but it's a good side-by-side comparison. So again, we can see that Champlain, as we sort these from highest to lowest, Champlain has grown about $3.6 million and change over the 6 years in tuition and fees revenue, We'll see a different number when we look at total revenues in a minute.
American International, up a couple million, not bad. And again, reason for concern as we see decrease over 6 years of tuition and fees for Ana Maria, Becker that we looked at before, and Fontbonne.
I'm going to come to graduation rate, come back to graduation rate in a couple minutes. Let's look at expenses, but not just in the context of expenses by themselves, I want to look at it in the context of revenue change over the same 6-year period. And again, these are not absolutes. These are comparing one college to another. If these were the 5 private colleges you were looking at, you would compare the overall numbers that I'm sharing with you and make your own assessment. Is this the financial health, is this the financial viability that I'm looking for for a private college? For myself or my student.
So Champlain, let's sort this again to make sure we have it in the right order.
Champlain has had expenses go up about $13 million over the course of 6 years. In and of itself, not a big number. Revenue has effectively remained flat. It's down a couple hundred thousand dollars. So they've had an issue managing expenses in the face of total revenue, which is down about $200,000. It's not a reflection of what they collected on tuition and fees. It's a reflection of them probably being unable to collect revenue from other sources. The pattern we see is pretty similar across all 5 of these colleges. American International with expenses up about $6 million, revenues up only a little above $1 million over those 6 years. Becker College we've seen before. Again, they have expenses about twice as much increase as revenue over the 6 years. Anna Marie College, again, same pattern, too much in expenses, not enough in revenue, and you really have to have some concerns about Fontbonne, even though when you see their expenses went down over $4 million over the course of 6 years, they knew something was going on, but it didn't match the losses, the decreases in revenue, which were a little bit over $5 million. Let's quickly jump using the College Viability App to the enrollment numbers just to get a feel for the comparative size. And let me just go to the 2018-19 year, which is the most recent. And we can see again that Champlain with enrollment of 3,600-some-odd students, and a little bit larger than the others, not as much as American International.
And you can see comparing these 5 colleges, our algorithm, our tool that we use, shows in this category Champlain does the best. Fontbonne, not so much.
Let's look at graduation rates. And I skipped over that in the summary because this one is more indicative. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the graduation rate, and this is 6 years, and it's a 6-year graduation rate for each of these colleges.
And again, Champlain does all right.
I like to see that number higher than 70%. I'll explain why here in a second. But 65 is not a bad number, especially when you're comparing it to the others in this sample. Here's how I define 6-year graduation rates, and we'll use Champlain as a positive example. For every 100 students who started at Champlain with an undergraduate degree in the 2013-2014 academic year, 65 of those graduated from Champlain with that undergraduate degree in the fiscal years 2018-2019. So 65 out of every 100 who started graduated from Champlain. That doesn't mean that some did not graduate after 7 years or 8 years, or maybe they transferred somewhere else and graduated, but that's just a reflection of the graduation rate. If we look at the other 4, Not impressive numbers. We're hovering around 50%. It's the same story. Only 50, give or take, out of every 100 students graduated from these colleges over a 6-year period. You make your own judgment. You make your own assessment. This is a pattern. This is a trend. I can make the case that Champlain, compared to these others, shows they have some systems and processes in place to graduate students within 6 years that are more successful than we see for the other 4 colleges. Finally, let's take a look at the endowment. So I'm going to click on the endowment link over here on the right-hand side. And again, we show comparative color indicators. Green is the best, yellow is intermediate, red is not so good. Let's take a look at the endowment for these 5 colleges. And again, you can see the changes. Let me sort them for you. So we can see that both Champlain and Anna Maria had comparatively more growth in their endowment from 2014 to 2019. But that's not really the number that I want to look at. I want to look at the value of the endowment in the last reported year. And even though it's a couple of years old and not good, that still shows us a pattern. And we can see that each of these 5 colleges has an endowment of $25 million or less. Here's the problem. Here's the challenge. Generally, most higher education experts expect a minimum endowment in the $50 million range and higher to indicate a college has the resources to withstand tough times like we have been through recently. Each of these colleges, to varying degrees, don't show that financial strength. And when we look at Fontbonne and Anna Maria and Becker, and remember Becker has announced it may close, they just don't have the financial resources to provide you and/or your student with that financial comfort that these colleges would need to survive tough times. These are the colleges that when the finances, that when the finances get tough, will find it tough to survive in their current form.
I created the College Viability App to make it easy for you to compare the financial health of the private colleges you may be considering. Don't make a college decision without checking on that college's financial health. It's only fair. Colleges check on your financial health with the FAFSA. You should check on their financial health with the College Viability App.
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If you have private colleges you would like me to compare in subsequent videos, make sure to go ahead and put that college name or names in the comment section down below. I'll add that to my list, and I'll provide that to you in future college viability comparisons.
