TUTORIAL: 2024 PUBLIC College Viability App for Executive Analysis

This is Gary Sacher. The 2024 Private College Viability series of apps have been out for about a month. I released the public college versions the week of March 25th. This brief tutorial will show you the basic functionality of the Executive Analysis version of the Public 2024 Public College Viability App. The tutorial for the Faculty and Staff version and the Student and Family versions will follow shortly. I did want to let you know I chose to create Private College and Public College versions separately to accommodate the different reports for each and to accommodate the accounting standards, the different accounting standards used by both. This is the homepage for the 2024 Public College Viability App, and it's the one for executive analysis. It's for college leaders, board members, community stakeholders, that kind of group. You can see we have 1,579 colleges in the list. We can sort it by state, we can sort it by sector and type, and I've got those listed. We can look at any combination of those. So I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to grab all the public 4-years. I'm going to grab them in the state of Illinois because I know that's a nice manageable group. And we could select some subset of those in this list as well. We'll just, we'll just select all of them. I'm just going to show a couple of samples, and I always like to go to FTE enrollment first. So let's take a look at FTE undergraduate enrollment. And we can see those 12 Illinois public 4-year colleges listed. It's from the years 2015 to 2022, the last set of reported data from IPEDS. We measure the 8-year change and the percent change. You can, of course, click on these headers to sort those in any way that you want. And we can also add, we can also look at the charts that we've added this year. So we can actually see a graphic representation. And we can see, you know, pretty obviously that there's a downward trend of a lot of enrollment in these colleges, these public colleges in the state of Illinois. In each of the windows, each of the reports, there's also an information session that describes what being reported for that particular IPEDS report for your analysis. Let's go back to the main menu, and these are all the reports that are out there, and there are 30-some reports including ones we're going to look at for 8-year changes and for ratios. We'll look at those here in a second. Let's take a quick look at graduation rates. I always like to look at 4-year graduation rates. Again, you can see the numbers. Let's look at 2022 for Illinois, and we'll compare those, uh, low graduation rates Let's flip it again and we can see those colleges that are doing better. And here at College Viability, we use a minimum 4-year undergraduate graduation rate of 50%. So just 2 of the Illinois publics meet that threshold. You'll see that pattern throughout the country. Let's go back. We can look at the chart if you want to. And we've got that 50% marker that we, that we use as a standard. That's our threshold. You can pick whatever threshold you want. But when I go back to the data, and we did take for each set of colleges you select, either this full set of Illinois publics or a subset of those, we've calculated the 8-year average change. So you can look at the 8-year change, and the average is about 4.5%. So let's click on that to sort it. So we can see that somewhere in the vicinity of the University of Illinois Chicago or Illinois State, that's where the average is for this subset. And for 2022, the average 4-year graduation rate was 33%. That's gonna be dragged down by some of these colleges that didn't do so well, but it gives you a point of reference. Let's go back to the main menu. Let's take a look at state appropriations on the financial side. And again, you can see each of the colleges from 2015 to 2022. We've calculated that 8-year change on percent change so you can compare that. Let's look at the 8-year change, and you can see which colleges have got a lot more in increased appropriations and which of those have not had so much. You can do with that what you like. And let's take a look at some more admissions-related data. Let's take a look at admissions yield. And again, there's the data for each of the colleges. There's the 8-year change. I'm gonna flip that. And what we see, what I see with most of the data is the admissions yield change is down, negative, over the last 10 years. There's lots of reasons for that. We won't go into that in this particular video. And again, the chart is available for your use. And then finally, I want to look at the last two special pages that are just available in the Executive Analysis version. And the first one I want to go to is 8-Year Changes. And again, for that subset of colleges, Illinois publics, you can see the 8-year changes for each of these colleges. You can see it here, you can flip it, you can look at the total enrollment, you can look at the retention rate, you can look at the graduation, the graduate enrollment. And I flip that to see large ones. And none of these are going to surprise you, but it gives you a comparison resource. The 4-year graduation rate change, the admissions yield change, and the percent admitted change. We didn't look at that actual report. It gives you kind of a single-screen look at the 8-year changes for each of these colleges. And then finally, I want to show you the ratios page. This is new in 2024, and what we've done is we've added a little bit more depth to the comparisons. And you can see the admissions rate, which is common, the draw rate, which we've added the calculation for that. We can flip that to see who's doing better, who's not doing so well. And then this is kind of the profitability. This is the non-operating revenue over the operating revenue. And we can see, for example, the Chicago State, they have $3.21 in non-operating revenue for every dollar in operating revenue. Use that comparison for whatever you want, but we think that's an important comparison. Same thing for state appropriations as a percentage or ratio of total operating revenue. And then we always focus on graduation rates, and the average 6-year graduation rate is one we have for this report as well. And then to navigate home, we click on all the menus, got the little cute little home icon here that will take you back to the home page. And then you can clear all the filters and bring up whatever other subset of colleges across multiple states, multiple colleges, it doesn't matter. It's the same kind of selection mechanism you can use for any other app. If you have additional questions, you can send me an email at gary@collegeviability.com. That's College Viability as one word. I'll be happy to get back. This is the 2024 public College Viability App for executive analysis. I'm Gary Stocker.