Gary Stocker walks through the College Viability Program Completion App, launching August 2024, which lets colleges and families compare degree completions across 16 program types at roughly 1,300 private colleges using 2020-2022 data. The app shows three-year trends and lets you drill into individual schools to see which programs are strong or weak.
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Hi, it's Gary Stocker with College Viability again. Thanks for taking a look at this week's College Viability Top Bottom Report. For the first time, I'm going to show the higher education world a new product from College Viability as part of my weekly Top Bottom Reports. It's the 2024 College Viability Program Completion App. I'm going to show you the private college version today, but both the public and private college versions will be released sometime this month in August. So why would I create a program completion app? And there are two basic audiences. And the first, of course, is for the higher education industry. College leaders, board members, faculty, community leaders, and other interested college stakeholders. And it'll provide, it will provide each group with a comparison of 16 IPEDS-defined programs and the number of completions in each of those 16 programs. The second audience will be students and their families. They will be able to use the app to see which colleges have stronger program completion numbers and which have weaker program completion numbers. This brief tutorial will help you use the app more efficiently and effectively. Let's get started. So this is the home page, if you will, the navigation page for the 2024 IPEDS program completions for private colleges, and the data is from 2020, 2021, and 2022. And you can see there's about 1,300 private colleges. And let's do some navigation work right here. I'm going to grab Iowa. And I'm going to grab Ohio, and we'll take a look at those two states. And you can see total there are 92 colleges selected. Let's take a look first at biology. I'll start on top. We won't go through all of the 16 programs. Let's start with biology, just kind of give you a feel for the navigation and what the data looks like. Again, so we can see the states of Ohio and Iowa. You can sort by clicking on the state header. You can sort by college to give them, to get them alphabetical if you want. but I'm going to focus on the data. So I'm going to go ahead and select the biology program completions, and I'll explain that in a moment, for 2022. So I'm going to click on the 2022 header, and we can see the colleges, the private colleges in Ohio and in Iowa with strong biology majors in 2022. You can also do the same sorting for 2020 and 2021. We can also see the 3-year change from 2020 to 2022, so I'll click on that 3-year header for bachelor's, and we can see the programs that have had growth, decent growth, and modest growth, but we can also click on this one more time and look at the programs that have had issues. So we can see the colleges that have had significant declines in program completions in biology. So let's stop for a second and let me show you what I mean by program completions as opposed to majors themselves. So this is the College Navigator. It's a federally produced site that tracks program completions. And what I have done in College Navigator is I've gone to Ohio, I've selected all private nonprofit 4-year colleges in Ohio, and I've just brought up the results for Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Let me scroll down and you can see how the programs and majors are divided up at the College Navigator site. So the program level that we'll be be reporting on in the app is right here at the Biological and Biomedical Sciences. That's a program. Biology, Cell and Cellular, Molecular Biology, Molecular Biology— those are all individual majors. We don't report on that in the app. We will with a future version, but not right now. Same thing, Business, Management, Marketing, and Others. You can see the individual majors, you can see the data for each individual of those, but we'll be reporting on the program total. So there's 118 students who completed this program and all the individual majors in the reporting year 2022-2023. Now I'll make a quick note that the, that the College Navigator site has already posted the 2022-2023 data. It will be out a little bit later this year. I will make sure to update the app when those 2023 data points come out as well. So now that we know what we're looking at, it is program completion not major, individual majors. Let's go ahead and look at a couple of the other programs that have completion data here. Let's take a look at Health Professions. And again, we see the same kind of data. We can see the 2022 bachelor's numbers, and we can see those colleges with strong numbers. And again, pause the video as appropriate to hold on to individual colleges. We can also, by clicking on that 2022 bachelor's header again, we can see those colleges that have, have weak to no programs. And again, something to consider. If you are at 5 or 6 here, do you really, are you really able to compete with talent and with quantity and quality with colleges that have multiples of what you have? Fair question. Make your own decisions on that. Same thing on the master's level. Let's take a look at the 2022 master's numbers. And again, strong colleges, you can see the numbers over here. We can click on that header again. And those colleges that don't have any programs at all, and those with smaller numbers, which ones are stronger? Logically, those that are larger are gonna have more resources to dedicate to those programs. Let's take a look then one more time. Let's look at psychology. And I'm gonna show you a special function inside the app for psychology. Again, 2022 numbers. But now what I wanna do is I'm gonna go and look at St. Ambrose University. You can see that they have some decent numbers for psychology. They don't have a graduate program at all, but I'm going to right-click. I'm going to show you the individual data for just St. Ambrose University. So I'm going to right-click on there. I'm going to put my pointer on top of Drill Through, and I've got two individual college reports. I'm going to show you the second one that will show us just the bachelor's and master's for St. Ambrose University for all of the programs listed. So we'll, we'll click on that. St. Ambrose University. This is the 2022 bachelor's and master's program completions. And at a glance you can see which of the programs is stronger. So business is stronger by comparison, health professions, parks and rec, psychology, and others on the undergraduate level. And at the graduate level it looks like decent numbers by comparison in business and maybe health professions, maybe public administration. So I'm gonna click on a, a back arrow to get back to where we were. And then one more thing to show you on the app, and that is the instructions and data support. And you can see what we have here. These are instructions on how to use the app and guidance on what the data source is and all those kind of things. The release of the public and private college versions of the College Viability Program Completion App will be posted on social media and at collegeviability.com, and I anticipate that will be done sometime by mid-August of 2024. There will almost certainly be hundreds of private and public colleges scrambling in the coming months and even coming years to avoid the financial irrelevance of this tough market or even to avoid closure. Apps like the College Viability app in general that shows financial data and the College Viability Program Completion app will prove to be a useful tool for all sorts of audiences to match market need to program availability in an efficient and effective model. For College Viability, my name is Gary Stocker. Thanks again for listening.
