In this 2021 YouTube presentation, Gary Stocker demonstrates his College Viability App by comparing seven private Wisconsin colleges—Alverno, Carroll, Carthage, Edgewood, Mount Mary, Ripon, and Viterbo—using six‑year (2014‑2019) data from the National Center for Education Statistics. He examines four key dimensions: enrollment trends, tuition/fees (core revenue) versus expenses, six‑year graduation rates, and endowment size. For each college he calculates the net change in enrollment, revenue, and expenses, notes the graduation‑rate percentage, and compares the endowment against a $50 million benchmark. Based on these metrics he assigns a red, yellow, or green “battery” indicator (red = concerns, yellow = cautions, green = relatively healthy) to each institution and explains the rationale. The overall findings show a regional pattern of declining enrollment, mostly decreasing tuition revenue, and expense‑revenue imbalances, with only Carroll University receiving a green rating. The talk concludes with guidance for prospective students and families on incorporating financial‑health data into college‑selection decisions and a preview of upcoming analyses for other Midwestern states.
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Hello. Today's College Financial Health and Viability episode is on 7 private colleges in Wisconsin. Those colleges are: Alverno College, Carroll University, Carthage College, Edgewood University, Mount Mary University, Ripon College, and Viterbo University. 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'm going to share with you today for these 7 Wisconsin private colleges. During this video, I'll show you how to quickly and easily compare the financial health of some of Wisconsin's private colleges you may be considering. I can help you become more informed, more comfortable, and more confident in your final college decision. By the way, the data that I use is from the National Center for Education Statistics. Here are the 7 colleges in our set for today. Again, these are all private colleges from Wisconsin, and I just want to make some general observations. And the first one starts here with the 6-year enrollment, and I define my terms. The 6 years we're talking about are the years 2014 through 2019. It's the most recent data available from both the colleges themselves and the National Center for Education Statistics. But we can see each of the 7 colleges had a decrease in enrollment over those 6 reported years. If you add the numbers up, it's a little over a decrease of 2,300 students across these 7 private colleges. Now clearly, as you look at the information, some of the decreases were more than others, but that's a disturbing trend across a region that so many— in what's effectively a random set of 7 private colleges— has such a large number of private colleges with decreasing enrollment. The second is, of these 7, only one, Carroll University, showed an increase in 6-year tuition and fees charges. This is the revenue that colleges, both public and private, collect from tuition and associated fees from their students. Reminding you that this is over a 6-year period, it's concerning when any business, a college or anything else, has a decrease in its main source of revenue over such a long period of time. And again, in this set, only Carroll University has an increase. In their tuition and fees revenue over the 7 years. Now I will note that Viterbo University has a small increase, but nothing of substance. You do the math of $400,000 over 6 years, it's a relatively small number. The next observation is comparing the 6-year changes in expenses with the 6-year changes in core revenues. And of these 7 colleges, 6 of the 7 had an imbalance. They had expenses increase more than revenues, or expenses did not decrease as much as revenues decreased. The only exception to that is Carroll University, which showed revenues increasing a little over $11 million and expenses were just a little under $11 million. Not a big difference, but a difference nonetheless, and it stands out from their competitors. And again, the concept behind these comparisons is just that. There is no absolute bad college or good college in this set. We're simply providing a tool that you can compare a variety of important assets, if you will, um, components, if you will, of these colleges as you make the decision about which one would be best for you, your child, or other members of your family. And I have changed screens to go to the graduation rate screen. And this is a 6-year graduation rate. So if somebody started at a college, we'll say Alverno College in 2014, what percentage of those students graduated 6 years later in 2019? And the reason I point this out is that all 7 of these Wisconsin private colleges fall below the threshold that I use and many others use of 70%. Now, some are much worse than others. Alverno, just I picked randomly, at 48%. Here's how you'd read that. Of every 100 students who started at Alverno, In 2014, only 48 have graduated from Alverno. In 2019, now some may have continued on and transferred elsewhere and got their degrees. Some may be continuing to pursue their degree and will graduate down the road from Alverno, but that's the number after 6 years. The comparison image, the comparison icon, if you will, that we use for comparing these private colleges are batteries. We use a red, yellow, and green color scheme. Red, a red battery indicator shows we have some concerns about a college. Again, this is in comparison to peer colleges in their region typically. The yellow is one that we have some cautions about, and we'll share those cautions with you. And the green battery indicators are for those colleges that, again, in comparison with their peer institutions in the private college sector, and mostly in geographies, are in better shape by comparison than their peer colleges or competitors. We'll do these colleges alphabetically, and we'll start with Alverno College. And right off the top, as we look at the 6-year changes, we click on this icon over here, we can see their enrollment is down over 500 students over 6 years. Their tuition and fees has decreased a little over $7 million over those 6 years. We'll talk about graduation rate in a second, but of the most important concern, and the main reason we're going to give Alverno College a red battery indicator, is when you look at the expenses and revenues imbalance. Expenses went down about $5 million, but revenues went down about $15 million, $16 million and change. So that's about an $11 million gap to the negative over the course of the 6 reported years. Let's look at the enrollment, and the enrollment at Alverno College has gone down from 1,860 to about 1,340, down over 500 students. The endowment at Alverno is at $31 million, probably a little over $32 or $33 million right now. Our threshold, and the threshold many others use, is $50 million or higher is a decent endowment to have. Way below that. And finally, we'll look at the graduation rates, and a really sad, a really bad 48% of Alverno students graduate after 6 years. Because of that, we will give Alverno a red battery indicator. Carroll University is going to get a green battery indicator, and here's why. While the enrollment has gone down over the course of the 6 years, down 144 students, that's about, about 4% or so. It's balanced by the fact that they've been able to increase their tuition and fees collected from students, a little over $3.5 million. And this is the one college that I mentioned earlier that has been able to keep its expenses managed in relation to its revenue. And then when we look at graduation rates for Carroll University, we can see that it's really the highest, one of the highest in this group, even though it's below our 70% threshold. By comparison, it's stronger than some of the other colleges. And then when we look at their endowment, we can see their endowment is $71 million. Not a particularly strong endowment, but it does exceed that $50 million threshold that we look at for private colleges. So again, we'll give Carroll University a green battery indicator in comparison to this set of 6 other private colleges in Wisconsin. Carthage College is going to get a yellow battery indicator. Over the course of these 6 years, Their enrollment is down just a little bit. It's a school of over 3,000, 3,200 students. Their tuition and fees revenue is down over the 6 years, not a good indicator. But of most important concern is the gap between expenses and revenue. Expenses up over $17 million, revenue down about $10 million. So that's a $27, $28 million gap over the course of 6 years. It's a pattern. It's not an absolute, but it's certainly not a good pattern. Certainly not a good trend for Carthage College. There are two reasons why I did not choose a red battery indicator for Carthage College, and the first is graduation rate. And we can see it's a mid-60 number, doesn't meet our threshold of 70%, but not as bad as many I've seen. And when we look at the endowment, the endowment for Carthage College in 2018-19 was a little over $111 million, strong enough to suggest they have the financial wherewithal to survive ups and downs. Like pandemics and be able to provide a college degree, a college education for many years in the future. For Edgewood College, I'm going to give a reluctant yellow battery indicator, and the only reason I'm not going to give them a red battery is their endowment is above $50 million, and I'll show you that number here in a second. But when you look across the board for Edgewood College and we look at the 6-year changes Enrollment is down almost 700, almost $5 million in decreases in tuition and fees. There's about a $12 to $13 million gap in expense-to-revenue imbalance. When we look at the graduation rates for Edgewood College, again, a mid-60s kind of number. Not good, not necessarily bad, but it's when we look at the endowment and we see Edgewood College at $55 million. Again, to be fair and to be consistent, It's above our threshold and that's the main reason, really the only reason we're going to give Edgewood College a yellow battery indicator as opposed to a red one. For Mount Mary University, it's really kind of flat across the board for everything. Enrollment is relatively flat, down a little bit. The 6-year tuition, $11,000 over 6 years, that's couch money. We'll look at graduation rates. Expenses were up $500,000. Revenues up not quite $400,000. Not bad, especially in comparison to others that we've looked at here. And we'll look at the endowment on its own. So I'm going to give Mount Mary University a yellow battery indicator. They just haven't distinguished themselves. Their enrollment is barely over 1,100. That's not a strong number compared to many of their peers. When we look at the graduation rates for Mount Mary, at 65%. Again, undistinguished. Not awful, not good, but undistinguished. It's just one where, you know, I will use this as, as an example to point out these colleges that I rate as yellow battery indicators. And I've seen this many times in 2020 and 2021. These are the kind of colleges that have to make the financial decisions to close programs, close degrees maybe cut staff to be able to balance their books, to be able to stay profitable for the long term. So it's these yellow colleges in particular you want to ask them the question, "Do you have plans, are you considering canceling any programs, degrees, or majors?" Mount Mary University would be one college, one university that I would ask those questions to. Ripon College, or Ripon College, is the 6th of our 7 of the private Wisconsin colleges we're reviewing today. I'm going to give them a yellow battery indicator. Their enrollment has slipped about 20 students a year over the last 6 years on average. Their tuition and fees is essentially flat, down about $500,000. There's not a good balance between expenses and revenues. The expenses have gone up a little over $6 million. The revenues have gone down a little over $6 million, so about a $12 million gap. We also look at the enrollment for Ripe Pond College. And it's below 1,000, just not a lot of buffer for them. It's one of the reasons I considered giving them a red battery indicator, but the reason I didn't goes back to their endowment. And their endowment at $94 million and change, probably a little bit higher than that a couple years after the reporting period, is strong enough to suggest they have some resources they could use to get them through tougher financial periods. So a yellow battery indicator for Ripeon College. Finally, for Viterbo University, or Viterbo University, let's just take a look at their data, and then I'll share the battery indicator assignment I would give to this. Enrollment is down, not quite 1,000. This is on an enrollment of— it was over 3,000, now it's approaching 2,000. Not a good pattern. When we look at the tuition fees, it's up about $500,000, but that's really over 6 years, up $50,000 a year. Probably not even the salary of a full-time professor over the course of a year. Or take a look at their graduation rate, which is barely above 50%. But they have shown some capacity to manage the expense-to-revenue ratio. It's off only about $2 million, better than most of the other colleges except for Carroll University. When we look at their graduation rates, you know, at 54%, I have concerns that any college that low, be it Viterbo or Alverno in our examples here, They just, by comparison, don't have the systems and processes in place to graduate students in a 6-year time period as compared to their competitors who have higher numbers. That's just the way I look at comparing graduation rates. And then finally, we'll look at the endowment for Viterbo. And finally, we'll look at the endowment for Viterbo at $55 million, barely over our $50 million threshold. I'm hesitant to give red battery indicators. And because they're over the threshold, because they have shown some capacity to manage their revenue and expenses compared to others, I'm going to stick with a yellow battery indicator for Viterbo. Not a strong endorsement, but still I'm not quite ready to give them a red battery indicator as yet. So you've seen that some colleges compare well to others. And some private colleges that don't compare so well to their regional and peer colleges. I'm not doing predictions here. I'm not predicting failures. The colleges, the 7 private colleges listed here, they may be good, they may be bad. I'm just providing a comparison of finances, enrollment, and outcomes, graduation rates. These simple comparisons should allow you to add this factor in addition to degrees offered, and extracurriculars, and sports, and faculty, and the campus, to the criteria you use when trying to choose a private college for yourself or your family member. Today there are predictions from many sources that there will be closures, mergers, and other forms of consolidations of both private and public colleges in the coming months and years. That really means you need to have the capacity to readily easily compare the finances, enrollment, and outcomes of private colleges you're considering. That's what the College Viability app does. I'll provide a link to the app in the description down below, and if you have colleges you would like to see me add to my comparison list, feel free to list those in the comments below. I'm currently focusing on the Midwest in June of 2021, so we will finish up Wisconsin then move into Minnesota, Michigan, and Ohio in the coming weeks and months. And as always, if you like the information I'm sharing with you, click on the like button down below. If you'd like to be advised of when these updates are posted to YouTube, make sure to click on the bell down below to subscribe to my College Viability channel, and that'll make sure you get access to these videos as soon as they come out.
