A college built a model predicting enrollment will keep dropping unless they act. Their yield rate is 9.9% versus peers at 15-16%. To recover by 2028, they need to hit 14-15% yield and enroll 1,000 freshmen yearly for five straight years.
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That's the problem. So let me show you. So I have a page on the dashboard that helps people make these projections going forward because the math is a little tricky, right? You lose a class that came in 4 years ago, you gain another class. You also have attrition. You also have transfers in. You also have, you know, people graduating at different times. There's a lot of things to put together. And so I created a model that accounts for all of that. And what the model says is the red line, right? And you see it's backtested. All these red numbers are calculated based on the retention rate, their applications, their yield rate, graduation rates, and so on. And it's completely separate from what actually happened. So the model is pretty accurate here, especially in these more recent years. So it's backtested. We call it backtesting. So what's going to happen if they continue to do what they just did in fiscal year 2023 is they're going to shrink, right? They're going to shrink and it's not good, right? They're going to continue to shrink. They'll have a slight bump here. Why do you suppose that happens, Gary, in 2026? Because those freshmen go away and they've got a new class coming in, that tiny freshman class graduates finally, right? And they get a bump here just because the new freshman class is about 800, right? So this is the dynamics they're dealing with. And you can see the problem they have here. It's all about their yield rate. It's completely terrible. I don't know, 9.9% yield is very, very, very low. The average of their peer set is something like 15 or 16%. And that's still a bit low. All right. So the only way they get back to where they need to be is to get their yield rate up to about 14%. You see what I did there? 15% yield rate. That's a normal yield rate for them, by the way, and totally doable if they do, if they are effective. Right. But notice, even if they do that, they have to do that for 5 consecutive years, right? Every year, bring in about 1,000 freshmen, right, with a nice yield rate. And if they are successful and do that for 5 consecutive years, only by 2027 or 2028 does their enrollment get back to, you know, where it used to be.
