Top & Bottom College Viability report for Wisconsin (Oct 2023)

Hey, it's time for another 2023 Top and Bottom College Comparison Report. This private college report is brought to you by the state of Wisconsin. And if you follow our podcasts and blogs and other posts, Wisconsin, Wisconsin, Wisconsin. But there are some strong performers, and in this episode of Top to Bottom Comparisons, we'll look at the top performers and those that we call the bottom performers. And as always, we look at FTE enrollment, we look at 4-year graduation rates. Keep in mind we have access to 6, we just choose not to provide those. It's the same pattern you see with 4. We look at admissions yield, and that's also Gary's term for popularity indicator, and we'll look at a college's end-of-year endowment 4 basic comparisons. The College Viability App has many, many more, but these give a quick, easy-to-digest comparison, and it provides users, whether you're students, parents, faculty, staff, college leaders, community stakeholders, just a simple way to compare colleges in these areas, and there's value in that just for the comparisons. And as always, let's jump to the comparisons. On enrollment in the top colleges, in the top private colleges in Wisconsin. And this comes from the 2023 faculty and staff version of the app. It has, I think, 6 or 8 different IPEDS reports on there. The full version has 30. So we can see some colleges that have done well. I'll let you look at the list on your own, but from 2014 through 2021, the data source is the National Center for Education Statistics. And it's IPEDS database, and we see some growth. Now interestingly, of the 10 colleges shown there, only 6 in the state of Wisconsin showed positive growth. And really, if you think about it, outside of Herzing, the 2 Herzings, and Bellin, none showed any substantial growth. And I would make the case that's part of the issue in Wisconsin is nobody's growing, in the private sector at least, and we know there's lots of issues on the public side. Nobody's growing a lot. But when we go to the bottom list, and of course nobody's going to fall out of their chair, with Cardinal Stritch, they closed earlier this year. You can look at that number and know why. You can see we also have on the far right side under percent change, we have some conditional formatting. The red is of course not good. There's a yellow color indicator for okay, and a green one for those doing well. And the pattern is obvious. These colleges that are struggling, if they can't grow their enrollment, that's associated with the tuition and fees they can collect, they're not gonna do well. Now you see I've got a star by Beloit College, and here's why. You can look at this list on your own, and there's 23 private colleges, private regional colleges in Wisconsin. I've got 10, the 10 bottom in terms of FTE enrollment listed here. But let's look at the graduation rates and look at Beloit College. Now you can look at this and say, well, Beloit must be a good college. All right, I can't argue with the concept if you're looking at the 4-year graduation rates. The 6-year probably shows a number above 70%. I'd have to take a look to be sure. But here's what concerns me. A well-performing college on the 4-year undergraduate graduation rates Still, if we go back to the bottom FTE enrollment list, still lost 300 students, still lost 22% of their enrollment from 2014 to 2021. If even those colleges like Beloit, who certainly have the systems and processes in place to graduate students, still aren't attracting them, there's something else going on. And I've said this many times in the past few weeks, there's something going on and it's not good, although I use the word "ain't" on occasion. But you can see the colleges that do well, and look at those, because when we go to the next one, of course, it's the colleges on the bottom of the list. Now, the college viability minimum threshold for 4-year undergraduate graduation rates is 50%. And flashing back up to the top list, we can see that really all except Bellin and Viterbo meet that.

Again, a relatively small sample size, it's just 23 private colleges in Wisconsin.

But look at the 10 that aren't even at 50%. Now, I'll be nice and leave the folks at the School of Engineering in Edgewood and Concordia, though they have lots of enrollment problems, alone, Marion alone. But anytime you start approaching this 40% and lower, let me put this in plain English, For every 100 students that started at, for example, Lakeland University in 2018, 35 graduated out of 100. Now, some have gone on elsewhere, some are continuing their studies and will graduate in 6 years, but for comparison's sake, I look at Lakeland, flash back up to the top, Look at Beloit at 67, Marquette at 64, Carthage at 61. You know, if you're looking at just the capacity of a college to graduate students, this is an important consideration. Now, colleges will share with you, "Well, we accept everybody. That's why our graduation rates are so low." Well, if you follow my podcast, you'll see, you'll hear me say the word "geesh," and that's what I'm going to use here.

And that's fine.

Colleges can accept any properly prepared or unprepared students they want, but the comparison, the comparison still holds. If you only graduate Lakeland University 35 out of 100, I don't care what students you graduate, if you compare that to Beloit or others on the, on the high, on the top list, that's comparison.

And I think consumers, students, their families, and even faculty and staff for their own purposes can draw some conclusions from that.

And the popularity indicator, and that's not what IPEDS calls it, that's the college viability term. IPEDS calls it the admissions yield, and it's simply the percentage of students that a college accepts that actually show up at their college and pay tuition. Mine is, I call it popularity indicator because that's just what it was. And so we look at, let's look at Bellin College, which had issues before.

And their numbers are all over the place, so sometimes I question the capacity of them to actually submit the right numbers. But let's, let's give them the benefit of the doubt, the good folks at Bellin College, and let's assume that 76 students out of every 100 they offered, made acceptance offers to in 2021, accepted that offer. That's a really popular college. Let's go down to Beloit. That's not confusing. So look at Lawrence University, 18%. Now a couple of things to think about. So for every 100 students that Lawrence University accepted, 18 showed up. And then we look at Beloit with 13. Look at Carthage and Marquette. Now Marquette's in a different category. When we look at endowments here in a couple minutes, you'll note that Marquette is, in terms of endowment, the wealthiest college in Wisconsin. And they are what's called a selective college. They're not particularly rejective, but they prefer to keep that number in a, below the teen level because that's just the nature of the university, and they can get away with that. But if you're a college that's not selective, and really that's all the other colleges on this list, you want that number to be 100. You want everybody who you accept to enroll. So the lower that number gets, the less, the less students are selecting that college with their feet and with their paper and with their checkbooks, their parents' checkbooks, and showing up. Because if we look at the bottom list, for popularity or admissions yield. And it's not really the number. Again, we see some colleges all over the place. I question the validity of their submissions because this data to the National Center for Education Statistics is submitted by the colleges themselves. I'm just putting it into a readable format. It's the trend you want to look at. It's the 8-year change. And again, assuming the data submitted is correct, you know, you have to have concerns about these colleges where over the course of 8 years the admissions yield is going down. It clearly means that students, when given the offer, are choosing somewhere else. Draw whatever conclusions that you want, but that's a reasonable way to say, here's what the market is telling us, that for Concordia University of Wisconsin, for every 100 students they accept, only 21 show up, but the trend is down. From $33 to $21, that's not good. And then finally, let's take a look at endowments. And as we mentioned before, we'll look at the 2021 data. Marquette at $694 million. I would guess with the growth rate I'm seeing here, they'll be approaching $1 billion in endowment sometime in the next few years, maybe 5 years, something like that. But again, it's looking at the pattern. It's up 31%, so they've grown their endowment by these amounts. Beloit, you know, $130 is down to $87, so they have a 6-year change. That number doesn't look right. I'm going to have to take a look at that.

But you can look at the endowments.

And here's when I focus on the bottom endowments. And we see Northland College, their endowment has gone down from $20 million and change to $5, almost $6 million. And it's a negative number. Now, Doesn't happen all the time, but when that endowment number is negative, it means one of two things. They've really done a bad job of investing their endowments, which is possible, or more likely, the college has used those endowment funds and maybe even the principal to the extent that they can to what I call keep the lights on or to make payroll. Never a good thing.

And even if we look at the trend, you know, we'll look at Marymount, Mount Mary University.

$22 million endowment in 2021. Again, we have thresholds just for comparison's sake here at College Viability, and the minimum threshold for endowment we have is $50 million. And we make the case that if a college throughout its entire existence, in almost all cases it's decades, in some cases it's centuries, has not been able to raise $50 million for its endowment, then first of all, they have lack of access to funds in difficult times like we're in now. But then some of these colleges, and I've done podcasts and blog posts on this, well, when meeting that scenario where their finances are so bad that they're in trouble of not being able to survive, they'll say, hey, we're gonna do a $30 million fundraiser. We're gonna raise the endowment $30 million. And it's $20 million over decades, and they want to raise $10 or $20 or $30 million over a couple of years? That, my friends, is delusional.

Delusional, excuse me, is delusional.

And so what can you do with these comparisons? Clearly, in every state and every time I do one of these top/bottom comparisons, and the focus is mostly on privates, although I do do some publics, there are strong private college performers. It shows up here in Wisconsin. And in Ohio and Illinois and Pennsylvania, the most recent ones I can recall, there are strong college performers across enrollment, graduation rates, and finances. Look at those first would be my guidance. But for a college that is consistently on the bottom list for these 4 reports, be careful. They may or may not close. It's difficult to predict, although you can look at— by comparison, you can say which ones are more likely to not survive. However, when you're on that bottom list all the time, their financial capacity to provide a quality college education, especially when compared to those on the TOPS list is in question. If you have specific questions about the top/bottom reports or about a specific college that you want to talk about, I'm available for email correspondence. We can even set up a Zoom as appropriate. You can reach out to me at that email address, and we'll look forward to posting another top/bottom report. We'll find out what lucky state we do next week, and we'll get that out for you in another version of This Week in College Liability. Top Bottom Report. This is Gary Stocker.