Top Bottom OHIO Oct 2023 Reg and Rel

This is another College Viability edition of Top Bottom Reports where we look at the financial enrollment and graduation data for private and public colleges throughout the United States. Today's Top Bottom College Viability Report is brought to you by the State of Ohio, and today we're going to look at both regional and religious colleges, and we're going to look at that in a moment. Admissions yield, also known as popularity indicator, their 4-year graduation rates, and their endowments. And let's start as we always do with the top, and we're going to look at FTE enrollment, which is the full-time equivalent enrollment. That's the best, most consistent indicator of enrollment trends. And as always, the data for our app is from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. We use 8 years of data and the most recently reported 8 years of data are from 2014 to 2021. And we're looking at the top regional and religious colleges, private colleges in Ohio, and we can, we always kind of jump over to the 8-year change. That looks at the pattern. And we always make the case that it's the pattern that matters, the trend that matters, not really the absolute value. For example, we can see that we'll use this top college, Cedarville University, has grown its FTE enrollment from 3,300 to 4,100, about 800 students, or 24%, over the course of the last 8 reported years. When we look at another college like the University of Dayton, it's a much larger school, so we can look at the percent change as a comparison. And so the growth at the University of Dayton, although very similar in absolute number to Cedarville, is, is much less in terms of a percent change. And as always, we use conditional formatting Green is good for, looks like, Antioch College, and the yellows are okay, and you'll not see any red for the top performers. But as we go to the next slide and look at the bottom performers, bottom 10 give or take, of regional and religious colleges, private colleges in Ohio, you can see the colleges, and we'll jump over here to the change, and we can see the 8-year change, and we can see each of these, looks like 10 or 12, are down, down from 500 students to over 1,300 students. You can see the percent decrease here. And of course, they're almost always gonna be red indicators, which means not doing so well. When we look at news reports, we regularly see how colleges say our enrollment is up. And you always wanna be careful when listening to that because it's always different what they're comparing their enrollment to. For example, the most common one we see in 2023 is a college will report with great fanfare that their enrollment is up from last year or from the last couple of years. Well, goodness gracious, gosh almighty, I would hope so. The last 2 years have been as part of a pandemic, and college enrollment across the board took a hit. So if your enrollment isn't up over the last 2 years, that's a concern. But we look at 8-year patterns, 8-year trends. We can make the case, we can make the logical argument, and we do here at College Viability that if your trend is down over 8 years, don't tell me that a 1-year jump means you're over the hump. It just doesn't make sense. Let's move on. Let's take a look at graduation rates. And if you've listened to these top-bottom, top and bottom podcasts, top and bottom reports before, you know that I regularly talk about enrollment— excuse me, about graduation rates as being kind of the hidden bad news associated with colleges. And we at College Viability use both a 4-year graduation rate, which you're looking at here. We also have a 6-year one that's not part of this, not part of this report. But we look at the most recent graduation rate, the most recent graduation year, in this case 2021. And we can see the top performers, the top regional and religious performers in Ohio are doing well. Everything is above 60%. The minimum threshold we use at College Liability is a 4-year graduation rate of 50% or higher, and of course, all of these meet it. You can see some jumped more than others. You can see the trend on your own, but that's what we look for. When we go to the other side of the tracks and we look at the 4-year graduation rates, the bottom versions, we again start looking at the most recent year, we can look backwards as appropriate. And Lourdes College graduated 35% of its students. So the way to look at this is for every 100 students who started at Lourdes in 2017, only 35 graduated from Lourdes 4 years later. Now there are other indicators, and others will share with you, there are other indicators they think are more important, and maybe that's the case, than just the graduation rates for a variety of reasons that are inside baseball kind of items. But I'm always going to make the case, as I started out with this episode, it's the comparison that matters, it's the trend that matters. Yes, the absolute value at Lloyd's at 35% is nothing like what we would expect to see at Kenyon at 83%, but it's, it's, it's, it's not just the value, it's the trend. And so we see these 4, these 8 or 10 colleges regional and religious colleges in Ohio, and you can see these are not good numbers for lots of reasons. Now, some have shown some growth, I get that, but when you start at 13% and you get to 35%, while progress is certainly made, the comparison matters. There are colleges doing much, much better. Let's move on to something called the admissions yield. Again, that's kind of an inside baseball, inside higher ed term. I call it the popularity indicator, that's a Gary Stocker term. It references the percentage of students that a college accepts who actually show up and start paying tuition. Popularity. It's kind of market speak. So we can see there are some strong colleges. Now, I don't know that I buy 100%, but this appears to be Pontifical College Josephinum, a very specialized college, so it's possible that every offer was accepted. But when we start looking at the other data, we're looking at the 8-year change, and I've sorted those so the biggest changes are on top, and Wilberforce has gone from 7% to 15%. I can make a logical argument that they're doing something well because the market is speaking and more students are accepting the offer, although it's not a great number, than were back in 2014. You can look at all these on your own, and there are more than these colleges that I'm showing you. I'm just doing the top set and the bottom set. Let's go to the bottom set and let's look at the popularity indicator or admissions yield low, the bottom end. And a couple things on this one. First, Ohio Christian, they reported in 2014, haven't reported in years prior, so this number is probably not accurate, but that's not the point that I want to make. The point that I want to make is when a college can't even report the data, they don't have the skills, capacity, the resources to pay somebody to find someone to report this data, that's as much of a concern as the actual data that could be submitted. So we can see that Antioch and Kettering and Malone and others, we can see that their admissions yield has gone down. That's the trend we're looking for. Now we can look at Mercy College of Ohio, I believe that's probably a religious college, from 55% to 40%. That's a high admissions yield number, but look at the trend. It's down 15 points. It simply means when you think about it logically that students are getting offers from other places and for whatever reason, they're making the decision, I'm going to go somewhere else. And then finally, let's take a look at the endowment. And as we see in almost all states, some regional and religious colleges with exceptionally strong endowments, it's quite possible that Oberlin is above $1 billion right now. We can look at the trend. The two things that, the one thing I wanna point out here is Ohio Northern University, I presume that's a private college, has their endowment has gone down $8 million over the last 8 years. Now, a couple things: they're either spending that money to keep the lights on— I find that hard to believe— or they've just made bad investments and their endowment has taken a hit from that. And then the really concerning area to look at for endowments is those colleges whose endowments are below $50 million. That's the minimum threshold we use at College Liability. And we can see all of these colleges are well below that minimum in 2021. We can look at the 6-year change, and I'll let you do that on your own, but these colleges, Wilberforce and Lourdes, on the low end, it's almost certain that these colleges are using funds from their endowment, probably principal from their endowment, to do something like just to keep the lights on or to make payroll. Now we start seeing trends, we start seeing new stories, for example, Avila University in the Kansas City, Missouri area last week announced that they had gone to the state's attorney general in Missouri and asked for release, relief in the tune of $6.4 million from their endowment in effect to keep the lights on. Those are my words, not theirs. What was particularly striking about this case at Avila was that was somewhere in the vicinity of 30% of their endowment just to keep the lights on, just to make payroll. So we'll conclude with that, with this edition of the Top Bottom Report from College Viability, brought to you by the state of Ohio. I'll include some links in the show notes about where to get access to the College Viability app, and we'll look forward to speaking with you next time on the next Top to Bottom College Viability Report. Mm-hmm.