Gary Stocker demonstrates the 2024 Private College Viability App, which now includes 32 IPEDS-based reports and interactive charts covering eight years of data for nearly 1,300 private colleges. Users can compare up to 20 institutions, benchmark against group averages, and access a new Ratios page for financial and outcome analysis. The app comes in three tiers: Executive Analysis with drill-down features, Faculty & Staff with 10 reports, and Student & Family with 5 reports.
Chapters
The 2024 College Viability App is here and ready for release. Hi, my name is Gary Stocker. This tutorial will show you the 2024 private college version of the College Viability App, the Executive Analysis version. Shortly, there will be versions for college faculty and staff and one, of course, for students and families. New feature highlights and functionality in the 2024 College Viability App include improved navigation, 32 IPEDS-based reports up from 30 in the 2023 version, and those will be in the executive analysis version, data tables, which we've had every year, but this year new are charts. You can actually visualize the 8 years' worth of data. For more— almost 1,300 private colleges in the country. In addition, we've added group comparisons. You can compare averages across college groups that you select. We've added a ratios page. It's kind of a big picture analysis for that executive analysis version of the app, and then some new drill-down reports on individual colleges. Ultimately, the College Viability App faculty and staff version will have 10 iPads reports The student and family version will have 5 reports. Let's take a look. So here it is, the 2024 Private College Viability App for executive analysis. Let's step you through some of the basic functionality and a lot different look and feel than the 2022 and 2023 version. We try to make it easier for users to get around, not just from the home screen, but from throughout the College Viability app. You can select states, as was always the case. I've pre-selected some states here. You can select and deselect just by clicking on or off. That's an improvement over what we've had in years gone by. The same kind of types we've had before. We're gonna select some regional types for the colleges that we have right now. And then I've pre-selected some colleges in those 3 states of Iowa and Illinois and Missouri. And we've added an extra list. You can see the colleges that are selected. So if I wanted to go over here and deselect Augustana College, it will come off the list, and I can select right back on to see what colleges I've selected for my comparison. You can select as many colleges as you want. About 20 is a good number to look at. So we've got the colleges selected. There's 14 private colleges in those 3 states. They're all regional in type. Let's take a look at the fall enrollment. Now remember, we, we always use the FTE enrollment for the College Viability App. The full-time equivalent gives us, we think, a standard comparison from year to year. And so this is the set of colleges that I've selected for our demo. The 8 years now included in the College Viability App improves from 2015 to 2022, the last reported data available that was just posted in January of this year. And as we've seen in years gone by, the 8-year change and the percent change for each of these colleges. New feature, new function is we've added charts. So you can see on the right-hand side we have the data piece which you're looking at now, and of course it can be sorted any variety of ways by clicking on the headers. We'll come back to that in a minute, but we've added the chart functionality as well. So now we can look at the charts and we can take a quick look and see, all right, which colleges on enrollment are growing their business. And Allen College was growing a little bit. Blackburn is on a downward slope. The good folks at Drew University had a big drop in 2018, looks like, and you can see I've rolled over the top and it actually shows the year and the data for that point. Eureka College dropped quite a bit over a few years, jumped up a little bit last year, and then, you know, you don't want to be in Hannibal-LaGrange University's position. They have been consistently sliding down. Westminster College, for the most part, this is the one in Missouri, and William Woods, you know, has had about a 5-year drop that has been pretty precipitous. Just a quick look and feel. You can see we've got the numbers and the horizontal markers for you to use as well. Going back to the data piece, we have added an overall average for the 8-year change. We want the users to be able to compare the colleges they have selected here, the set of 14, with an average of this parameter. So we're looking at the fall enrollment and we're looking at the, at the 8-year change, and the average 8-year change shown right here, was -273. So we can go back up here and say, all right, the folks above Greenville University had a bigger 8-year drop than the others. Now again, we understand some colleges will have bigger drops because they're bigger colleges. This is just one of many steps we're doing to improve the app to let you be able to compare groups that you select from one parameter to the other. Let's take a look at navigation then. And I'm going to go back. We've added different navigation functions. So these menu items on the top, you've seen that before. It's going to bring up all of the options that we have. And there are 32 reports on there. Some of the, some of these reports have more than one parameter in each one. But let's go to 4-year graduation rate. And again, we've seen this before. There's the overall average for the 8-year change is up 3.3%. So we can sort and see which colleges have done better than that. About half, half. And we can see the overall average graduation rate. Now, this is important. The overall graduate— the overall 4-year undergraduate graduation rate for this set of 14 colleges is 47%. That's ugly in and of itself. Now let's look at this. We'll look at the 2022 number. That's what we're measuring. And we can see about half or above that. But look at the colleges that are substantially below Half. At Blackburn and at Hannibal-LaGrange and at Eureka College and at Quincy and Culver-Stockton, not even coming close to graduating half of their colleges. Not even close to what we call a coin toss college. Alright, so let's look on then at selecting. We can actually select one college, let's look at Drury, just to focus on that. We also have something called drill-through, which was available in last year's version. We've changed the way we report that. So Drury College, I'm gonna right-click on top of Drury. I'm gonna scroll down to the drill-through, and you can see I have two options for you. We're gonna look at that single college snapshot for Drury University. And you're gonna see lots of numbers, lots of colors. And we've kind of segregated this by color to give you a feel for individual results And we've highlighted those for you in the parameters. It's 8 years of data. Some are single year, some are multi-year. But we can see, for example, that Drury had $23,000, almost $24,000 in total revenue per FTE in 2022. Their expenses were $38,000. Do the math. And their total revenue was only 62% of their total expenses. You draw your own conclusions. We take a look at the 8-year enrollment, the 8-year change. The admissions rate in 2022, the admissions yield over the course of 8 years. Downward trends are never good. The percent admitted, uh, increasingly that went down at Drury. But you can see all these parameters. We do track the one, the graduation rates for both the 4- and 6-year. And again, Drury is below our threshold of 50% at 4 years and 70% at 6 years. And then we look at some parameters we've had in years gone by. We're placing them differently. So in 2022, Drury University had almost $25 million in institutional grants, in unfunded institutional grants. Merit aid, many scholarships are unfunded because they're just discounts. The change over 8 years was up almost $11.5 million. So almost a million plus per year just to get students to enroll with tuition discounts. Their institutional grants that are funded, the nursing scholarships, the engineering scholarships. I've seen a lot lower, but $2 million is not a big number. And the average net price over 8 years is down about $500. Tuition and fees, the total revenue from the college, is down $20 million over 8 years. Tuition and fees as a percent of core revenue at 67%. And you can see the endowment value. Let's go back And I'll just briefly show you the other drill-through. We'll go back to Drury, right-click, drill-through. And then I want users, especially on this executive analysis version, to be able to compare 4 parameters of how institutions spend their money. And you can see that in 2015, that Drury University spent $795 for academic support and was up to $2,100 in 2022. And you can see those comparisons across the board. And you can see that expenses at Drury have gone up quite a bit. So that's the essence of what we're showing. And then one final item that's brand new this year, and that is ratios. We have had many users ask for better comparisons, more substantial comparisons. And what we've done is added a page with 8 ratios. And you can look at the ratios on your own. I'll talk about admit rates and draw rates another day. But you can see all of these ratios, in these cases they're graduation rates, arguably ratios, compare for each of the colleges. For example, we can look at what we just saw on the drill-through, total revenue for these 14 colleges. We can click through that and look at the high ones. So Blackburn had $46,000 total revenue. That's not just tuition and fee revenue, that's total revenue. And we can flip that again and see that Culver-Stockton had $17,000 in total revenue per FTE and $23,000 in expenses. Again, draw your own conclusions. The College Viability App and what we do here at College Viability is develop tools and provide media content on how to analyze colleges. So there it is, the 2024 Private College Viability App. This one is the executive analysis version. It's got 32 reports with drill-down and ratios. The faculty and staff version has 10 reports. There's no drill down, there is no ratios on that one. And the version for students and families will have 5 reports, and again, that one will not have drill downs or ratios available. So there it is, the tutorial for the 2024 Private College Viability App. My name is Gary Stocker. I'll make sure you get ways to access this app, to purchase it for yourself, for your organization, or for others.
