Tutorial: Will a college cut your major? Use the (free) College Navigator website to assess.

Hi, it's Gary Stocker from College Viability. I'm back with another free tutorial for college-going students and their families. You may have seen my College Viability app. It lets users compare the financial health enrollment trends, graduation rates, and much more for colleges across the country. The app covers about 2,500 both public and private colleges and lets you see the trends, both good and bad, for the last 8 reported years. Today, though, I want to show you how to use a free government site to see how many students are graduating from any college in the major or majors that your student or a student may be considering. Why is this important? While we will almost certainly see more college closures in the coming months, there are thousands of colleges that won't close. However, many of those same colleges have been and will continue to cut back on low-enrollment, low-enrollment programs and majors. They are doing this in large part because the high cost of supporting so many majors that don't bring in sufficient revenue to the college. Let me show you how to use the College Navigator website to determine how many students are completing programs or majors you may be considering. So I've gone to the College Navigator website. You can see the URL, the address up here. You can type that in if you want to or just search for College Navigator. One of the top returns is gonna take you right to that website. And I've got two versions of the tab open. One is for Bradley University in Illinois, a medium-sized private college, and the other is for DePaul University, also in Illinois, a little bit larger size college. And I'm gonna look at three or four majors. So let's go ahead and go to Bradley, this one on the side. Let me collapse this to show how it works. So I'm gonna expand Programs and Majors for Bradley. Let's jump over to DePauw, and again, just to show you how that works, there's Program and Majors. I'm going to collapse it, and of course expand it right back out. Looking at Bradley, let's start by looking at Business Managers. So we're going to go to Business. We're going to look at Managerial Accounting right here, and there are 5 graduates, um, in Business Managerial Economics at Bradley University. Let's do the same thing at DePauw, and we can see they're 18. Now, does that mean anything in and of itself? No. 5 at Bradley, 18 at DePauw, but it shows you how to compare the differences. If it were 5 at Bradley and 180 at DePauw, that would be significant. I would be concerned that a college like Bradley could not continue to support a managerial economics program, but you're going to make that decision. I'm just showing you how to write the data. Let's take a look at Communications. Let's go back to Bradley. And I wanna look at Journalism. This is always my go-to example, is Journalism. There are 4 undergraduates in 2022-2023 at Bradley University. Let's do the same thing for Communications. Journalism, there were not only 25, highlight the whole thing here. There were not only 25 undergraduates, there were 14 graduate students. So again, if you're thinking Journalism is a major, let me highlight that for us. 4 at Bradley, a lot larger number at both the undergraduate and graduate level at Bradley University. That's how the comparison is done. Let's do a couple more. Let's go back to Bradley and let's go to Computer Information Systems. And let's look at the totals only on this one, right? Kind of give you a feel for the overall program. See, this is the Computer and Information Sciences at Bradley University. There were 77 undergrad and 80 graduate majors. You can see what the individual disciplines were. Let's jump over to DePauw University, and we have Computer and Information Sciences, and we can see a lot more programs offered with different kinds of graduation numbers, 292 on the undergraduate side, 300+ on the graduate side. So again, draw your own conclusions, but this is the way you use the data. And then finally, let's go back to Bradley and let's look at Social Services. Scroll all the way down, Social Sciences. And you can see just the total numbers. You can compare these on your own. Political science, sociology, economics, international relations, 22 total undergrads at Bradley. Let's do the same thing for DePauw, all the way down to social sciences. A lot more offerings at DePauw with some really strong programs, criminology for example. And you can compare them. But overall, we see a program in social sciences much stronger. With 215 undergraduates, 35 graduates at DePaul. That's gonna give you a feel for the program, at the program level, social sciences level. You can do individual comparisons for each of the majors, geography, economics, and all the others that you see. Like I said in the introduction, there will continue to be colleges closed. They will almost all be private. Many of those will be private nonprofit. And private nonprofit rural and small private colleges. But that's not even the focal point of this tutorial. Many, many, many more colleges won't close, but they will continue to cut back on programs and majors, especially the low-enrollment programs and low-enrollment majors. This tutorial is designed to provide you with a resource that you can use to look at majors either you're considering for yourself or you're considering for your children or others to compare and get a handle. Don't— you want to be careful about sending someone to a college with 5 journalism majors that graduated as compared to one that has 25 or 55 or 105. It's not the deciding factor, but it certainly is a risk factor if choosing a college with a low enrollment, low graduation number for any of the programs or majors that they offer. My name is Gary Stocker with College Viability. Thanks for making a few minutes to listen. I'll be back soon with more tutorials.