Will My College Close? Pennsylvania Colleges Comparison of Private Colleges Financial Health

Hi, my name is Gary Stocker. For the past 5 years, I have been researching the financial health and viability of private colleges in the United States. In 2020, I created and released the College Viability App that I'm going to share with you today. During this video, I'll show you how to quickly and easily compare the financial health of some of Pennsylvania's private colleges that you may be considering. I can help you become more informed, more comfortable, and more confident in your final college decision. The data you'll see, by the way, is from the National Center for Education Statistics. Today's episode includes the following Pennsylvania private colleges: Cedar Crest College, Drexel University, Haverford College, Keystone College, Keystone College, Moravian College, and the University of Scranton. By the way, if you would like to see my financial comparison of other private colleges, please leave those names in the comments section down below. First, let's look at the enrollment over this 6-year period. And again, the reporting period is 2013 to 2018. Sadly, it's the most recent data provided by the federal government, but it still shows patterns and trends. And so as we look at the enrollment data, and let me sort by this category, let me sort by this category, we can see that 3 of the 7 colleges had positive enrollment growth for the 6-year period. Moravian, Cedar Crest, and Haverford all had positive growth. Moravian did a good job, Haverford just some modest growth over the 6 years. The other 4, Albright, the University of Scranton, Keystone College, and Drexel all had decreases in enrollment over that same period of time. Again, this points out a trend, and we'll see some more details here in a moment. Next, we're going to compare the change in expenses over the 6 years versus the changes in revenue over the 6 years. So you can see I have sorted this 5th column, core expenses, and we can see quickly that Drexel University has had an increase of $123 million in expenses And now we want to compare that to changes in revenue over that same 6-year period. And we can see the basic core revenues for Drexel only increased $111 million in that same time period. Moravian, $19 million in expense increases, only $15 million increase in revenue. University of Scranton, $12 million in expense increases and a decrease or loss of almost $5 million over that 6-year reporting period. Haverford, about $10 million in increased expenses, a decrease of over $2 million in revenue, and we can see the patterns for Cedar Crest. They, among the 7, did a good job because they had expense increases of $5 million and change, but revenue increases of over $8 million. We can look at Keystone, which shows expenses going up and revenues going down, and Albright, Albright College tried to keep expenses down, but their revenues went down a lot more. The challenge here is to compare each of these colleges. You can see which one has done a better job of managing expenses over revenues and make your own prediction, make your own educated guess as to which of these colleges, by comparison, is financially stronger than others. So let's look at each of the 7 colleges, and we'll start with Albright. And we're gonna go through each of the 6 columns, each of the 6 categories that you see here. And their enrollment, as we saw earlier, is down almost 300 over the 6-year period. You can compare that to the others. The admissions yield, which is effectively an indication of popularity, it shows how many students actually enrolled in a college that accepted them. So the higher the admission rate, the better. So if that number goes up, they're becoming arguably more popular. If that number goes down, as we see with Cedar Crest, less popular. The graduation rate, I want to look at not just the change, and it's gone down 6 points over 6 years for Albright, but I'm going to go over here on the right-hand side, and I'm going to click on the graduation rate button. Because I don't want to look at just the graduation rate, and again, you can compare each of the colleges on your own, I want to look at this last number over here on the column that says 6-year graduation rate for 2018. Let me set this up. A graduation rate is considered acceptable at about 70% or better, give or take. Anything around 50% or lower is considered marginal. Here's a way to look at that, and we'll look at Albright as our example. You can see that they graduated 54% of their undergraduate students in the 6-year period between 2013 and 2018. So for every 100 undergraduate students that started at Albright in 2013, only 54 graduated from that college 6 years later. Some may have taken longer, some may have transferred to other places and graduated, but for comparison's sake, you can look at the list and see that Albright in this group is not particularly strong. Let's go on and look at tuition. So tuition and fees for Albright, we can see where they started off with, with $30— So let's look at tuition and fees. This is a major source of revenue for almost all private colleges. And we can see that Albright started off with $34 million in 2013 and has dropped to $29 million in 2018. So a decrease of almost $5 million. Again, you can compare that to the other colleges on your own. The more tuition and fees revenue growth, The better for the college, not necessarily as good for the students, but that's how we look at the financial health and viability of these colleges is by comparing the revenue and, as we saw earlier, the expenses. And lastly, we want to look at endowment. And as we look at endowment for Albright College, we can see that their 2018 number was about $70 million. And again, ballpark numbers, any endowment $50 million and above is considered acceptable or better. Anything below $50 million is generally considered weak. We can see that Albright is a little bit above that—not a bad endowment, but not a great endowment, especially as you compare it to some of the stronger colleges on this list like Drexel and Haverford. Let's look at Cedar Crest, and we'll go through these a little bit more quickly now that we've set up what the college viability app looks like. We can see Cedar Crest has an enrollment increase of about 350 over 6 years. Their admissions yield is down a couple of points, not a big deal, just worthy of note. We can see their 6-year graduation rate has gone up 6 points. Let's quickly look what the actual number is. So for Cedar Crest, our graduation rate is just marginally better than we saw with Albright. Again, a comparison factor. The higher the graduation rate, the more you can make a logical assumption that colleges with strong graduation rates have the systems and processes to get students from their freshman year through their graduation point 4 to 6 years later. Let's go ahead and take a look at tuition and fees for Cedar Crest. And we can see that tuition and fees have gone up about $8 million and change over 6 years. And finally, let's look at endowment for Cedar Crest, and we can see at $30 million, it's below that $50 million threshold that we talked about before. You can compare it to the other colleges. Next is Drexel University, and it is by far the largest of the colleges we're looking at. We can actually click on the enrollment button and see that Drexel has about 20,000+ students, much larger than the other colleges that we're looking at. But when we go back to look at the 6-year changes, they have had significant decrease in enrollment, but even at 2,600 decrease, it's only about 10%. Or is 10% of a decrease. Something to consider. Less important for a larger college than for a smaller college. We can see their admission yield has stayed flat. We can see their 6-year graduation rate has gone up 2 points. Let's quickly look at what it actually is. And we know from earlier that at 70%, Drexel has a strong 6-year graduation rate. Let's look at tuition and fees. And tuition and fees for Drexel have gone up about $32 million over the 6 years. Shows some growth in revenue, always a good thing. And then lastly, let's look at endowment. And we can see that compared to the other universities, the other colleges, that Drexel at almost $800 million in endowment is very, very strong, and only Haverford is comparable to Drexel. Haverford College shows about 20 students per year average growth over the previous 6 years. Their admissions yield has stayed flat. Their graduation rate is down a couple of points. Let's take a look at what the actual number is. And Haverford is at 90%, a stunningly good number. They really know how to get students from start to finish at this college. Again, a good tool to compare one college to another. Let's go back and look at tuition and fees. Tuition and fees for Haverford are up about $8 million. Not a big number, but on revenue of $40 million, a pretty decent increase over the 6-year period. And then lastly, we'll look at their endowment. And as we saw a minute ago, Haverford at $80 million. And let's go look at the endowment for Haverford, and we can see it's over half a billion dollars. Again, a very strong endowment presence, another factor to use in comparing the financial health and viability of these colleges. Keystone College is going to be one to be concerned about. If we look at a decreasing enrollment of almost 600 students over 6 years Let's go look at their actual enrollment number over here on the right-hand side, and we'll see that Keystone has dropped from about 1,800 students to about 1,200 students, 1,250, over the last 6 years. That's a substantial decrease. Again, compared with others in this list, their changes, their increases and decreases, is something to consider. Going back to the comparisons, we can see that Keystone, the admissions yield has gone up, So some increase in popularity, their graduation rate has gone up 10 points. Let's look at the actual numbers for graduation rate for Keystone. Not good. It's gone up 10 points, but it's gone up from 39%. So 39 out of 100 graduate from Keystone after 6 years, up to 49, still at best a modest number. Let's look at tuition and fees. And we can see tuition and fees for Keystone have gone down over $2 million. You just don't like to have a business whose revenue has decreased, especially over a 6-year period of time. Let's look finally at endowment for Keystone, and a very, very small endowment number. Again, make your own judgments, but you can compare the financial health and viability of these colleges by comparing each and every one of these numbers that we looked at today to come to your own conclusions. Moravian College is one you have to be pleased with the comparisons. Let's take a quick look. We can see their enrollment has gone up over 630 students over the course of 6 years, and it's about the same size that we saw as Keystone. But in this case, Moravian has gone from about where Keystone was in 2013 to, to almost doubling the enrollment that Keystone has 6 years later. Very good numbers for that from that perspective. Let's look at the admission rate. For Moravian, it's down a couple points, not a big deal in the overall scheme of things. Graduation rate is down a little bit. Let's take a look at what that actual number is. And over 6 years, that's almost 70%. It has gone down a little bit. You can ask questions to the folks at Moravian, why has it gone down? But still a decent number at 69% in 2018. And lastly, I look at the endowment. And we can see the total endowment in 2018 at $116 million and change. Again, this was 3 years ago from the most recent federal data available. Not a bad number at all. Again, use that to compare with other colleges that you're considering. And last in our list is the University of Scranton. We can see their enrollment is down not quite 500 students. Let's look at the actual numbers by clicking on the enrollment button. And we can see it's the second largest of this set of 7, and they've lost about 10% of their enrollment from 2013 to 2018. Again, the most recent data published by the federal government. We can go back and look at their admissions yield, which is down a couple points, not a big deal. Their graduation rate is up a couple of points. Let's take a look at what the actual number is for Scranton, and we can see again a really strong number. They show good presence of systems and processes to get students graduated. We'll look at tuition and fees for Scranton, have gone up Essentially nothing. They've been flat over the course of the 6 years. Essentially $100 million over those 6 years. Not a good trend in terms of revenue sources for the colleges. And lastly, let's look at endowment for Scranton. And the endowment at $205 million is strong for sure. So again, these are the factors that we use to compare these colleges, whether they're in Pennsylvania or Illinois or Vermont or Arkansas or Florida, the College Viability app— and I'll provide you with a link to that, and I'll provide you with a link to the free version of the College Viability app in the description down below— it lets you compare the financial health and ultimately the viability of the private colleges you're considering. So to continue receiving updates about the colleges, the private colleges that I will do comparisons of in the coming weeks and months, make sure to hit the subscribe button below. And as always, if you have a set of private colleges you would like me to compare side by side, make sure to comment down below and I will add that to the list of videos that I will do.