Gary Stocker walks through the 2025 College Viability App, which covers nearly 2,800 colleges. The app lets you filter by size, state, and sector, then compare metrics like graduation rates and enrollment across four-year periods. Red numbers flag declines year-over-year.
Chapters
This is the brief tutorial on the 2025 College Viability App for students and families. You can see in the database we have almost 2,800 public 2- and 4-year colleges along with private 4-year non-for-profit colleges. We have selections that are based on two basic tabs: the data, which will show you the comparisons, and the charts will show you some graphic images of those comparisons. So let's start with the data, and we can select any combination of years. This parent— the student and family version contains up to 4 years. We'll leave and select all 4 years for this demo. You can also filter by size. If you want to look at all the colleges, say public colleges in 5 states with enrollment between 1,000 and 4,999, you can use that filter. We'll pass on that this time, and we'll choose a sector, and I'll come back to that in a second. The reports— there are 10 reports on the student and family version of the 2025 College Viability App. We'll look at a few of these to show you how the app works. And let's go back in and select a smaller set than all 2,700 of these private and public colleges. I'm going to go to Wisconsin. I'm going to select just the private colleges in Wisconsin. In reality, you can select any combination of those three options. And since we have 26 private colleges, non-for-profit private colleges in Wisconsin, let's kind of make it a smaller subset. I'll just select a handful here. And now the colleges that we selected, and there are 7 of them, you can see the list there, are available for comparison. Let's go ahead and start on top, and I'll just show a couple of these examples. 4-year graduation rates. The data in the student and family version is for 4 years, the last 4 reported years. 2020 through 2023, and 2023 is the last reported year in the IPEDS data system. This data is from the colleges themselves submitted to the National Center for Education Statistics. And in each of the reporting tables, we show the difference from year to, from the year 2020 to the year 2023. The other thing we can notice here is the red numbers indicate a lower value than the previous year. So we can see at Belen College, It was a 70% graduation rate in 2020, up, up in 2021, and then down in the 2 years that followed. On occasion, you'll see all 4, the last 3 of the 4 years in red. Let's take a look at another report. Let's take a look at full-time undergraduate enrollment. The same kind of data is reported, the full-time undergraduate enrollment in 2020 for each of the colleges, and that same number for 2023. And then we've calculated the differences for you. You can see most of these have gone down, one of them has gone up a small amount in the full reported years. Then we have a graphic indicator for you as well. The second part of the College Viability App for students and families is the chart view, and this is simply a graphic representation of the report that you're looking at. We can select any one of the individual colleges, and for example, uh, Vernal College, we can see that their enrollment is— an eyeball has gone down For the first 3 years of reporting period, looks like it's up a little bit. You can see as I hover over the bar, it actually shows the value for that time period. And finally, a couple options. You can clear the filters to start all over, and then you'll see the rapids report section in this that those rapid reports are not available in the student and family version. Those are available in the version for executive analysis. The 2025 College Viability App student and family version provides students, families, and others with an opportunity to compare 10 important reports, 10 important comparisons for private and public colleges throughout the United States. In this era, it is important that one of the first, if not the first, steps students and their families should use when looking for colleges, especially private colleges, especially smaller private colleges, and in particular smaller private colleges in non-urban areas, is to make sure they're financially healthy enough, especially when you compare them to others. This is Gary Stalker with College Viability.
