Top 5 and Bottom 5 Minnesota private colleges by enrollment, graduation rates, and popularity

Hi, this is Gary Stocker. We're going to look at some Minnesota private colleges today. We're going to look at the top 5 and then the bottom 5 in 3 areas. FTE enrollment, full-time equivalent student enrollment. We're going to look at 4-year graduation rates, and we're going to look at admissions yield or popularity. You can see on the screen that I have the list of 20 private colleges in Minnesota, and I've pre-sorted them by enrollment change, FTE enrollment change, over the last 6 reported years, 2015 to 2020. That's the last set of data years reported through the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. And you can see most of these colleges have suffered enrollment losses, and we see that across the board. You can also look quickly and see some of them have even had substantial decreases associated with the fees they collect for tuition and other fees. For this comparison of Minnesota private colleges, I'm using the 2022 Parent College Viability App from College of Viability. You can see all the fields that we can compare, but I just want to focus on 3. I'm going to click on a tab for FTE enrollment, and we're going to see the top 5 colleges in terms of enrollment growth from the period 2022 through 20— I'm sorry, from 2015 to 2020. And we can see the 5: Bethany Global, Herzog, Concordia, Augsburg, and Saint Paul. And we can see they have all had at least a little bit of growth, and I've also added the percent change to give that more of a, of a standard approach. Let's look at the second comparison. Let's look at 4-year graduation rates, and we're going to see again a different set. We can see really some strong graduation rates across the board for Carleton, Macalester, St. Olaf, St. Benedict, and Gustavus Adolphus College. Really strong enrollment rates I don't see that set very often. And then lastly, I want to look, again, top 5 in Minnesota. I want to look at admissions yields, and this reflects the popularity. Admissions yields, by definition, is the percentage of students who are accepted by a college and end up showing up. And again, the numbers aren't bad here. You can see some disparity. Herzing does a good job of bringing in students who they accept, and the range is, you know, it's about twice as good as what we see from the College of St. Scholastica. These numbers aren't bad, but let me go ahead and switch this. And so let's look at the bottom 5. These are the bottom 5 in terms of Minnesota private colleges and admissions yield. And really, when we look at the 2020 numbers, not awful. But what we start to look at is the 6-year change. What has happened from 2015 through 2020? And we can see that each of these 5 have had noticeable, if not significant, changes in their popularity. Let's take a look at 4-year graduation rates. Again, we're now looking at the bottom 5 of the 20 private colleges in Minnesota, and this is based on the percent change. And we can see the 4-year graduation rates are much, much, much different than we saw for the high success, the top 5. These are at best coin toss colleges, where it's, it's a coin toss whether a student graduates or not. These are not good 4-year graduation rates. Some have gone up a little bit, but even with changes that we see here, this is not a good number at 47%. This is an awful number at 24%. These are the kinds of fields you can use to compare colleges you are considering. Be careful considering colleges with low 4- and 6-year graduation rates. And lastly, let's look at enrollment. And again, these are the bottom 5 enrollments in the state of Minnesota for private colleges. And we can see, I'll sort this so we go from biggest drop to smallest. So we can see that Hamlin all the way down through Concordia Moorhead have had significant decreases in the number of students enrolled. You can see the percent change here, and that's what this bottom 5 is based on. You always have to have concerns. You always want to wonder what's going on if over the course of 6 years, 2015 to 2020, enrollment has dropped at a college. In any business, the, the number of customers can go up and down over the course of a year or 2 or 3, but when you see a 6-year pattern, there's reasons, lots of reasons to be concerned. So why do we have a college viability app? When we're looking at colleges in this day and era, when there are pressures across the board from tuition discounting to a decreasing number of students considering college after high school to a whole plethora of reasons, it's the comparison of financial enrollment and outcome, graduation rates, that really matters. It's not an absolute number. If we see up and down, you might expect that. But if you see strong enrollment growth over the course of 6 years, that's a good indicator. If you see graduation rates, 4-year graduation rates, in excess of 70, 80%, that's the kind of college you want to think about. If you see admissions yields that are going up, an indication that that college is starting to do something right. On the other hand, if you see admissions yields going down, you got to wonder what's going on at that college. So the purpose of the College Viability App is to let you compare across a wide range of fields, and we're here to help you with those. I have more information posted down below on how to get in touch and how to get access to your own copy of the College Viability App.