Gary Stocker walks through the 2024 Public College Viability App, which compares over 1,500 public colleges on graduation rates, admissions yield, retention, and student debt. The tool lets you filter by state and sector, then see eight-year trends for each metric. He emphasizes comparing multiple data points rather than relying on any single number.
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Hi, my name is Gary Stocker. I'm going to show you how to quickly and easily compare key aspects of public colleges. If you are making time to watch this brief video tutorial, You probably want to make sure that the public colleges you are considering will meet your expectations. The 2024 Public College Viability App for Students and Families compares 6 important reports from more than 1,500 public colleges. Let me show you how it works. There are more than 1,500 public 2- and 4-year colleges in the United States. The 2024 Public College Viability App for students and families lets those users compare any combination, any custom set of those colleges to make sure those colleges meet the expectations from finances, enrollment, and graduation rate outcomes. Let's take a look at how the app works. First, I'm going to click on the sector and type. This is just higher education speak for the type of colleges. And you can see there are community colleges, public 2, and public 4 years listed. Let's just select public 4-year. And so that we have a moderate list, let's just pick the public colleges from Colorado. And there are 23 that you can see on the right-hand side. We've got just public 4-years. You could also select a subset of colleges by simply selecting any of these boxes. Let's go ahead, we've got the colleges in Colorado, the public 4-years. There's 23 of them. Let's just work our way through the list. We're going to first set the 4-year graduation rates. And this is the data piece, and you can see those colleges listed. and this is the 4-year graduation rate. And let's take a look at the 2022 4-year graduation rates. This is for undergrad students, and you can see some very high numbers. And here at College Viability, we use a minimum threshold of 50%, so really just 3 of these colleges actually meet our minimum threshold. You can have a different threshold if you want, and you can also see the 8-year change. I can, I can click on any of these, any of these headings to get them separated. And you can see some have gotten much better, and you can see the percent change. And in almost all of the reports, we have a chart that goes with it, so you can see which of the colleges have done better at a glance. You can see we've added that 50% minimum threshold guidance, and you can see many, many colleges don't make that. The navigation is from these 3 horizontal lines up here. Let's go back and let's go to the next one with it, which is admissions yield. And really, this is representative of the percentage of students that a college has accepted that actually show up, attend classes, and pay tuition. And really what we focus on here is the 8-year change. So I'm gonna look at the 8-year change, and we can see that Colorado State University at Pueblo has gone, has done nicely in terms of growing its admissions yield. I'm gonna click on this one more time, and we're gonna note that most, almost all of the public 4-year colleges in Colorado have had negative Admission G over the last 8 years. So our data comes from 2015 to 2022. This is the last reported set of data from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. We've taken the data from that IPEDS database and made it easier for you to use. So you can use that to compare it. Again, there's a chart you can look at the data from there as well, and you can see which ones are decreasing, which ones are increasing. Let's go again to the next report. And I'm going to jump around here. I'm going to jump to enrollment. I'll go to the student loan here in a minute. And I want to look at the 8-year change. So I'm going to click on that heading, and we're going to see of the public colleges in Colorado that not quite 10 have had increased enrollment over the last 8 years. Now the last couple, not very many, Colorado Boulder has had nice increases, Colorado State has had nice increases, the others use your own judgment. And you can see the percent change as well. Let's flip that and click on that 8-year change again and look at all the colleges in Colorado who had negative, a decrease in enrollment over the last 8 reported years. That's not a good thing. So if you're looking at a college, I'll just pick on one here, Adams State University, I don't know where that is, the enrollment has gone down from almost 2,000 to just a little over 1,300, down 34% over the last 8 reported years. That's a concern for a variety of reasons, and that's a discussion for another day. But the 2024 Public College Viability App for students and families gives you the chance to see which colleges are growing and which colleges are not. Let's go back to the main menu, and I want to look at percent admitted. And typically in colleges, it's a high number, and we see that high number here. I'll click on 2022, and we can see that almost all students who apply to Colorado's 4-year public colleges are accepted. The United States Air Force Academy is an exception, and we know why. Let's take a look then at retention, and those are the students that stay from one year to the next. Let's sort them from 2022, and we can see again, there's some good numbers for about half of the colleges, maybe a little bit more than half. But use your own judgment. You know, is a 63% retention rate good at the Metropolitan State University of Denver? If you're looking at that one, and Boulder or Colorado School of Mines, is that a big difference that you want to consider? You can also look at the 8-year change to see what direction that retention rate is headed. And then lastly, as I promised, I want to go to the average federal student loans. And we can see, we'll just look at the 2022 data. And again, you can look at that, you can sort any of these years that you want. And we can see that Colorado Boulder has gone from $33,000 to $43,000 over the last 8 years. That's your judgment whether that's a good number or a bad number. In terms of the loans, the average federal student loan for those students has gone up about $10,000. And you can compare that for the other colleges as well. Some of these colleges, I don't know how Arapahoe Community College and these other community colleges got in the dataset here. They shouldn't be. But those are, these are the colleges on the top that have had the average federal student loan changes in the last 8 reported years. So what are students and their families supposed to do with this College Viability App? It's the comparisons that matter. There is no single data point that can suggest that a college is doing well or not. It just doesn't exist. As you look at the public colleges, and there's a private college version of the app available also, and I'll link it for you in the YouTube description, but as you look at public colleges, compare the 6 reports that I just showed you for the colleges that you are considering. If you have questions about some of the results, ask the college's admissions rep for answers. The higher education market is changing. Public colleges are regularly cutting faculty and staff and programs. Make sure that the public or private college you are considering, make sure it compares favorably to other colleges, public or private. And one final tip: Ask public or private colleges you are considering to share the number of recent graduates from any major or program that you are considering. I can tell you from experience, low-enrollment majors and programs are at the greatest risk of closure. The College Viability series of apps serve as kind of a reverse FAFSA. You share your financial information with FAFSA. You share your financial information for colleges with FAFSA, the College Viability app shares the college's financial information and more with you. For College Viability, I'm Gary Stocker. Thanks for watching. Mm-hmm.
