In this YouTube video, Gary Stocker of College Viability presents a data‑driven puzzle for executives and other higher‑education stakeholders. He displays a series of nine anonymized private‑college profiles drawn from the 2024 Private College Viability App, each showing IPEDS‑sourced metrics such as full‑time‑equivalent (FTE) enrollment, graduation rates, admissions yield, retention, institutional grants/discounts, endowment size, and tuition & fees, together with 8‑year changes and percent changes (2015‑2022). Only one of the nine colleges has publicly announced its closure in 2024. Stocker asks viewers to pause, examine the slides, and infer which college is the one that closed, then post their guess and reasoning in a LinkedIn reply. He explains that the same set of nine colleges is used across all report slides, that the reports are available in multiple versions (executive, faculty/staff, student/family), and that the data can be used to flag other institutions that may be heading toward a crisis. He promises to reveal the actual college number and name on April 15 via LinkedIn. The video serves both as an interactive engagement tool and as a demonstration of how IPEDS metrics can signal financial and operational risk for private colleges.
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Hi, this is Gary Stocker from College Viability. There have been many private college closure announcements over the past few weeks. You're about to see 7 IPEDS data reports from From the 2024 Private College Viability App for executive analysis, there are 9 anonymized colleges listed, and only one of them recently announced their closure. Look at the data from the 9 colleges numbered 1 through 9, and then in this LinkedIn post by reply, list the college you think is closing and why, and I'll post the results of the actual college number and the actual college name in LinkedIn on April 15th. Which of these private colleges announced their closure in 2024? Now, the data you're about to see is from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. The report is from the 2024 Private College Viability App for Executive Analysis. Let's take a look at the data. So I'm going to show the anonymized financial enrollment and outcome data for 9 private colleges. Pause the video to review the college data to help you decide which of the 9 is the college that actually announced its closure earlier this year. Only 1 of the 9 colleges on the list closed so far. Can you tell which one by looking at the data? So here's the format, and you can see this one is FTE enrollment. You can see in the upper left-hand corner, corner, You can see these are the anonymized colleges. Only one of them is a college that actually announced its closure. And you can see the enrollment for the years 2015 through 2022. You can see the 8-year change, and you can see the percent change. This is for FTE enrollment. And as we click through the slides, you can see this is the graduation rate. I use the same set of 9 colleges for each of the reports, so the order is always the same for each slide. This one is admissions yield. And again, you can see the data from 2015 through 2022, the 8-year change, the percent change. And again, all this is available, uh, through some of the versions of the, of the College Viability Reports. There are both public and private versions. There's executive analysis versions for each, and there's also versions for faculty and staff with just a few reports, like 9. And there's a version for students and their families. There's just 5 reports available for So this executive analysis version, there are more than 30 IPEDS reports available, there are ratios included, and there are 8-year changes calculated as well. Let's move on to retention. Again, you can see the 9 colleges on the left. You can see the retention data for those 9 colleges, and only one of those closed. These are the institutional grants. You might more commonly call them discounts. They are more commonly called by, by faculty, staff, and students as merit aid. And most scholarships. And again, you can see the individual year data. You can see the 8-year change and the percent change for our 9 colleges. And the endowment value, again, same data. And then tuition and fees. So the interesting part of this is one of the 9 colleges has already announced its closure. But if you go back and look at the data, and maybe you saw it on the first pass-through, a lot of the data points are very similar for all 9 of the colleges. And how many of those private colleges on that anonymized list may yet close because their data is very similar to just the one that's already announced its closures? And what kind of questions can we ask those colleges? What kind of questions can we ask them about their enrollment? Their tuition and fee revenue, their graduation rates, and much, much more because the data is there. The data is there to let you know what colleges are headed toward a crisis, and you'll see that in the report below. So I'll release the college number, 1 through 9, and the name of that college that announced its closure on April 15th, and I'll do that via the LinkedIn post that you're seeing the actual video from. This is Gary Stocker with College Viability. Thanks for taking a few minutes to look and listen.
