What is going on with Kansas public 4 year colleges?

Welcome back, this is Gary Stocker. Welcome to another use of the College Viability App. Today we're going to be looking at the 7 public 4-year colleges in Kansas, and the reason they're on our list today is this past week, like many colleges, the news media outlets in Kansas released some updates on individual colleges in Kansas. And for the most part, as we typically see, the results were positive except for one college in Kansas, and that was Emporia State University. But let's hold that off and let's take a look at the data for themselves. So you can see the 7, uh, the colleges listed. Looks like there are 7 colleges in Kansas, public colleges that are 4 years. And let's take a look at the changes. And this is from the College Viability App, the 2023 version. And just a quick look for the 7 colleges, we can see the enrollment over the 7-year or the 8-year period from 2014 through 2021. We can see the FTE enrollment is down. The total enrollment is another number that's used. I always use FTE because it's a nice standardized way to look at the data. The retention rate trend, the graduate enrollment is up in most of the colleges, interestingly. We'll look at the individual details in a little bit. And we'll look at the 4- and 6-year graduation rates in a little bit more granular detail. While they're up without exception over the last 8 years, the actual values are not that good. And then we'll look at the actual values for, for percent admitted as well. So let's go back to the homepage. Let's look at the FTE enrollment for the 7 colleges, 7 public colleges in Kansas. And again, the trend over the last 8 years is substantial. It is negative without exception across the board. And you can see the percent change in the far right-hand column. And we've added some conditional formatting. Of course, red is not good, yellow is okay, and green of course would be good. There are no public 4-year colleges in Kansas with a green conditional formatting color because they've all had substantial losses. Now let's be careful about taking the fall 2023 announcements about enrollment and, and how many times colleges will announce the enrollment is up from last year or from 2 years ago. And of course, we all know what enrollment impacts were during the pandemic in 2021 and 2022. I would hope that every college had enrollment increased after the pandemic years. For those that didn't, that's not good, but that's another story. So the enrollment across the board for Kansas public colleges is down. Let's take a look then at their percent admitted. And this is where, you know, we can look at the values and they have gone up. That's what that 8-year change screen showed a minute ago. But look at the values for 2021. And you can look at the values for the other years as well. But this is really along the lines, and you don't see these kind of high percent admitted in public, I'm sorry, in private colleges. You don't see these high values. You rarely see a 90% for a private college unless they are desperate for students, so you do see it on occasion. But again, we're going to make the case that high percent admitted is in part a responsibility of the public colleges, in part is probably driving revenue, but let's take a look at its impact. So I'm going to go back to the menu. I'm going to bring up the 4-year graduation rates for the 7 4-year public colleges. In Kansas. And we'll just start with the 2021 numbers. You can look at the other years for your— on your own. And we can look at some numbers that are not good. And we here at College Viability, we use 50% as our minimum threshold for a 4-year graduation rate. And you can see only that the University of Kansas makes that minimum threshold. And the rest are substantially below that. That's after 4 years. Let's take it one step further, and let's look at the 4— at the graduation rate after 6 years. So again, someone who started in college in 2014, 2015, 6 years later, some of the colleges hit 50%. A couple don't. You have to wonder about the overall quality of the systems and processes to graduate students at Washburn and Wichita State University. Our minimum threshold for 6 years is 70%. So we can see none of the Kansas public colleges meet that, although Kansas State and the University of Kansas are close. But let's make the argument, let's take a worst-case scenario. And we're going to see some interesting financial data for Washburn here in a minute. But for every 100 students that showed up at Washburn 6 years ago, 44 graduated after 6 years? That's not even a coin toss college, not even graduating 50% after 6 years. The reason we point that out is we pay, we send our children, we send students to colleges to graduate. Not to take courses, not to go to football games, not to go to basketball games, not to go to mixers, but to graduate. And if Washburn University and many, many other colleges aren't even graduating 50% after 6 years, let alone 4 years, you have to ask yourself the question, what is going on at that college? Let's move on and let's take a look at— I want to go down to the comparison of 4 categories, and this is per student FTE. And again, FTE stands for full-time equivalent. It's a way to standardize the comparisons. And I'm going to start with institutional support. I'm going to jump around a little bit here. And this is the amount of support for non-academic purposes. And this is again per student. And you can see that over the course of this 8 years reported, that each of the colleges, with the exception of Pittsburgh State, increased the amount of dollars they spent on institutional expenses. Now we've heard this many times before, that colleges are spending money on administrators. This reinforces that. You can see the conditional formatting comparisons over here Pittsburgh State actually went down, credit should go to them for that. You know, look at the University of Kansas, look at Kansas State, they're spending a lot, a lot more money per student on institutional support expenses over the last 8 years. Let's take a look then on the other side is instruction. So we're going to look at the instruction expense per student. And again, we see without exception, instruction expenses have gone up for each of the 7 colleges. There are some disparities as a percentage, and we can see in particular Wichita State has had a 32% increase from $6,700 to $8,900 in the amount of money they spend per student for instruction expenses. Credit, credit is earned where credit is due. They have done a good job of finding ways to devote more resources to instructing their students as compared to places like Pittsburgh State and Fort Hays State. Let's look then at academic support before we look at student services. So the academic support, again, the helping students learn. Interestingly, that about half, 3 out of the 7 colleges have actually lowered the amount of academic support expense they provide per student. And again, you can look at the comparisons on your own, but Pittsburgh State shows up again, Fort Hays State shows up again, and Emporia State. And I'll remind viewers that Emporia State is one with substantial issues associated with enrollment. The others still have issues, but Emporia State has substantial issues. And so we looked at the first three, then let's look at student services. And again, student service expenses per FTE student, and quite a disparity in numbers here. Kansas State, the amount of money they spend per student on student services is down over $2,300. Per student, down 61%. It's fair to ask the leadership at Kansas State University, what's going on here? Are your students in no longer need that support? But the College Viability App is the tool that lets you compare. Is it a bad thing that these student service expenses went down? I don't know the answer to that. It could be a good thing. But it certainly provides stakeholders, and that could be students and their families, faculty, staff, community leaders, and others with a resource to say, hey, Weiser's down so much more compared to something like Wichita State, which saw their investment in student services go up. It could be the students they're admitting, the students they're enrolling, but it provides a data source to compare. I'm gonna jump back just for a second. I wanna look at graduate enrollment, 'cause there was an interesting trend here for these 7 colleges. And you can see that 6 of the 7 had increases, although Washburn was effectively flat. And only the University of Kansas was down 200 students. I don't consider that a big deal. They might have, have cut a major or something like that, cut a graduate program or two. But the graduate student enrollment has gone up. Now you don't see this across the board for private colleges, and I'm going to watch this more closely for publics. But it could suggest an opportunity for colleges, in this case public colleges, on the graduate student front. We'll have to watch that and see what happens. And finally, let's go ahead and take a look at— I'm going to go back to something called admissions yield. And I have coined a different phrase for this. The admissions yield is a technical term that admissions folks use, obviously, and it's in the IPEDS data. And remember, this data is from the National Center for Education Statistics, and it's IPEDS database. But the admissions yield is a popularity indicator. It tells us what percentage of students that a college accepted actually showed up, actually paid tuition, actually attended colleges. And we can see that the trend is what we're looking at here. And really, for 6— looks like there's 6 that reported that— 6 of the 7 colleges, or all 6 of the colleges reporting, um, I'll go back on that, 4 out of the 6 colleges showed a decreasing admissions yield, which means a fewer, a lower percentage of students they accepted are accepting that admissions offer and showing up. So for the, for the case of Wichita State University, they're down 10 points. They had used to have 37% in 2014, it's down 10 points to 27% in 2021. We'll continue to watch that in the next versions of the IPEDS data and in the 2024 version of the College Viability App. So what's the value in using a resource like the College Viability App? Whether it's for public colleges like we did here or private colleges, it provides a resource, a tool for a variety of audiences from parents and students to faculty and staff to college leaders to boards to community leaders to politicians to be able to look at a trend, look at a pattern of data for any of these types of colleges and look at what the trend is. I'm guessing that most, if not all, people watching this video are cognizant of the fact that higher education as an industry is in trouble. The challenge for each participant in that industry, and most particularly the students and their families, is to make sure they're choosing a college that goes beyond the majors, beyond the tuition, beyond the faculty, beyond the sports, beyond the facilities, and really looks at the financial health, and even in some cases of viability. There's not gonna be an issue of viability with public colleges, they're just not gonna close with hardly any exception to that. But for certainly, certainly the case for private colleges is closure already happens. About once a month over the last 5 or 6 years, and will continue to close because their finances are not good. So access the College Viability App, and I'll provide some links in the descriptions down below, to be able to make sure that the first step you look at when trying to put together that original college list is to answer the question, is this college financially healthy? What are their enrollment trends? What are their graduation rates? What are their admissions yields? Look at those kind of data points and make your own determination along the lines of, is this college the one that you want to have on your selection list or not? This is Gary Stocker. I'm with College Viability, and we'll talk next time.