Gary Stocker defines a coin-toss college as any institution graduating fewer than 50% of students in four years. In 2020, 780 of roughly 1,300 private colleges fell into this category. When choosing colleges, evaluate eight-year enrollment trends, graduation rates of at least 50%, and admissions yield.
Chapters
Hi, this is Gary Stocker with what we call a short segment version of This Week in College Viability, and the question we're answering today is: what is a coin toss college? Now, if you follow my posts and blogs and other social media work that I do, I've used that term for quite a while, and it simply reflects those colleges, both public and private, who don't, who do not graduate at least 50% of their students in 4 years. And we track that using our College Viability App and the data from the National Center for Education Statistics. And our logic is this, or my logic is this: if a college can't graduate at least half of its students in 4 years or less, it's the same as flipping a coin and see if it lands heads or tails. If a college can't graduate that 50%, I call it a coin toss college because you might as well toss a coin to see if your student or yourself can graduate in that 4-year time period. Let me give you some stats that should concern you, and this is from 2020, um, and I could do it for later years, but it's, it's better from 2020. In 2020, there were 780 out of about 1,300 private colleges that graduated less than 50% of their students in 4 years. In 2020, 780 private colleges graduated less than 50% of their students in 4 years or less. And you want to really be scared of that same group, 384 did not even graduate 25% of their students in 4 years. So as you start to develop the list of colleges you're going to select for 2024 and beyond, there's 3 areas I would encourage you to look at. The first is enrollment trends. Look at the last 5 to 10 years of something we call FTE enrollment. It's a nice standardized comparison of enrollment. Don't look at 1 year or 2 years— that does not a trend make. We use an 8-year pattern, 8-year trend in the College Viability app. Look at graduation rates, look at the 4-year, and we also post the 6-year graduation rates. Our minimum threshold is 50% for 4-year and 70% for 6-year. If you can't graduate more than 7 out of 10 students in 6 years, you gotta wonder why you're even in college. And then lastly, something called admissions yield. I call it the popularity indicator, but the admissions yield reflects the percentage of students that a college accepts that actually show up, go to class, and pay tuition. So again, a coin toss college is not a term of endearment. It's something to be concerned about, because if they can't graduate at least half their students, they're not going to make my list for college consideration. This is Gary Stocker with a short segment version of This Week in College Viability.
