Gary Stocker ranks Indiana's private colleges by enrollment growth, graduation rates, and admissions yield. Marian, University of Indianapolis, and Trine are gaining students and revenue, while Valparaiso, Anderson, and Martin University are declining. Low graduation rates and admissions yields signal financial trouble ahead.
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Hello, this is Gary Stocker with College Viability with another episode of This Week in College Viability. And today we're continuing our series to look at the top and bottom 5, in both cases, of private colleges in Indiana. And today we're looking at their full-time equivalent enrollment, their tuition and fee revenue, which we'll talk about, their 4-year graduation rate, and something I call the popularity indicator. Technically, it's known as the admissions yield. You can see on the screen that I have brought up the first field, which is enrollment. And we're looking at the top 5 Indiana private, actually top 6, in terms of enrollment change. And you can see the change over here in the far right-hand column. And you can see comparative indicators on the very far right. And you can see the list of colleges: Marian, U of Indianapolis, Trine, Butler, St. Mary's, Goshen, all have done better than the other private colleges in Indiana in terms of growing their enrollment in terms of percentage over the last 6 reported years. And this is from— this is data from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. So there's enrollment. Let's look at tuition and fees. And this is kind of an interesting category because this one looks at the tuition and fee revenue collected. It's kind of a double-edged sword from a consumer's perspective because this is the revenue that colleges collect from you and I in paying tuition. They need that revenue to keep the lights on, to pay the faculty, and the million things associated with running a college. And we can see the colleges that have done pretty well, and we can see a couple of repeats from the previous screen, which you would expect. As enrollment goes up, you would expect tuition and fee revenue to go up. When we look at the bottom 5 here in a couple of minutes, you're going to see there are some areas that— there are some colleges in Indiana with some concerns about both enrollment and their tuition revenue. But you can look at the numbers on your own. Pause the video if you need to. The 4-year graduation rate is what I want to look at next. And again, these are the top 5, top 6 in Indiana in terms of graduation rates. If you look at the 2020 value, you can see those numbers are all strong. And the threshold I use for 4-year graduation rate is 50%, and you can see that all these far exceed that number and are, are clearly have established the systems and processes needed to graduate their students. Let's look at that popularity indicator, or admissions yield. Again, this is the definition of admissions yield, or popularity, is the percent of accepted students into a college that actually show up and pay tuition. So we can see the top 5, top 6 in Indiana. That popularity is 40%. Holy Cross is doing a really good job. It's grown quite a bit, and that's why it's the highest one, highest one rated here over the last 6 reported years. And the others aren't doing bad. When you start getting into the teens, it becomes pretty standard. But this is a comparison that we use in the College Viability app, and we can compare each of these 5 colleges with the admissions yield popularity of the bottom 5 that we'll look at here in a couple minutes. Now let's look at the bottom 5 Indiana private colleges in terms of FTE enrollment over the past 6 reported years, tuition and fees revenue collected, 4-year graduation rates, and the popularity indicator, the admissions yield. And you can see I have added— I brought up the 5, the bottom 5 for Indiana, and you can see that over the course of this time period, there have been some substantial losses at Valparaiso, Anderson, Calumet College, Trine University, a different campus it looks like, and Martin University. We look at the percent change because of course colleges have different enrollment sizes, they're different-sized colleges in general. This is where you wanna look at. If enrollment has gone down this substantially over a 5 or 6-year period, 6-year period in our case, I would encourage you to ask the college why. Why is enrollment going down so much? You'll get lots of answers. Some will be valid, some will be— most will be not valid. They're just not drawing students. But this is the way that we compare colleges. This can show whether a college is financially healthy and even viable just by looking at enrollment trends. If nothing else, a single year enrollment number doesn't mean anything. That's the value, that's the utility of the College Viability App. You can compare 6 years of data. You look for trends. It's the comparison that matters, not the absolute value. Let's move on to tuition and fees. We can see that these 5 colleges, and you can see the list on the left-hand side, have decreases in tuition revenue. In the case of Valparaiso, because we saw the enrollment was down, big losses. It's somewhat obvious as to why this is important. If you don't have revenue, you can't keep the lights on. You can't make payroll. Again, when we're looking at colleges, in this case Indiana private colleges, it's the comparison that matters. Remember we had 5 top colleges? We're looking at the 5 bottom now. There are 20-some-odd private colleges in Indiana. There are many colleges in the middle. But if you're looking at financial health, stability, being comfortable in knowing that a college will be around for your 4 years or more of study, these comparisons matter. If you're thinking about Valparaiso, ask them difficult questions because you have other options. They've lost $22 million and change over the last 6 reported years. That's serious. Their enrollment is down over 1,000 students over the last 6 years. That's serious. Moving on to 4-year graduation rates. Again, remember from the top 5, this 2020 number was an 80, down to 70-something, as I recall. Look what we're looking at here. 47% 4-year graduation rate. This is nothing more than a coin toss college. When a student goes there, they have no more chance of graduating than flipping a coin. Half will, half-owned. And really, when you look at these 5 colleges— and I'll let you see the names on your own— they're not even coin toss. They're below a coin toss college level. You want that 4-year graduation rate to be 50% or higher as a minimum threshold. And even the 6-year graduation rate, we have that in the College Viability app, you want that to be 70% or higher. And as, as with all the data that I've looked at on college viability, there are way, way, way too many colleges, both private and public, with 4- and 6-year graduation rates substantially below that 50% and 70% threshold. And finally, let's look at the admissions yield. We get popularity indication. We can see the numbers. You know, 24 was not bad when we remember the top 5, but look at the change. Over the last 6 years, each of these colleges has had a substantial decrease in their popularity. You can see the comparative numbers here on the right-hand side in the percent change. It begs the question that you can easily ask these colleges if you're considering them—Indiana Wesleyan at Marion, Anderson University, and the others—why are students not coming? When you accept 100 students, only 12 are showing up. When you accept 100 students at St. Francis Fort Wayne, You accept 100, only 24 showing up. DePauw, you accept 100, why are just 10 showing up in 2020? For every 100, 10 show up. I'll reiterate, it's the comparisons that matter. There may be a lot going on at DePauw University. There may be good things going on at DePauw University, but these provide students, their families, and other stakeholders with comparisons you can use to say, hey, what's going on. I record this in the middle of December of 2022. In the last 2 weeks, there have been 2 private colleges that closed, one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast. There will be more. The research we have done on the financial health and viability of private colleges in particular readily suggests there will continue to be closures. Don't put yourself in the position of making a college decision where the college is not financially healthy, or maybe not even viable. The consequences of that financially, emotionally, and otherwise are substantial. Use resources, use tools like this to be able to compare not just the majors and the faculty and the degrees and the campus and the athletics and the extracurriculars. The first item on your checklist really should be, is this college financially healthy enough and even viable to take good care of my student, to take good care of me while I go through my college education. I'll have a link in the description down below with ways to stay in touch with me and to get more of these analyses in the coming weeks and months. Mm-hmm.
