Will Your College Close? Compare College Finances with the 2022 College Viability App

The finances and demographic trends of private colleges continue to be challenging. Reasonable higher education experts who study these market conditions are concerned about the financial health and viability of many private colleges. 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 first-ever College Viability App. The 2022 update of the College Viability App has more comparisons to help you create and adjust your list of financially healthy or unhealthy private colleges. During this video and others, I'll show you how to quickly and easily compare the financial health of some private colleges that you may be considering. I can help you become more informed, more comfortable, and more confident in your final college decision. I'm going to use these 6 private Kansas colleges to demonstrate the new functions and features and how to use the 2022 College Viability App. Those 6 colleges are Baker University, Benedictine College, MidAmerica Nazarene University, Friends University, University of St. Mary, and the Ottawa campus of Ottawa University. To make it easier for you, there are 3 videos in this series that demonstrate how to use the 2022 College Viability App. In this first video, we'll be looking at changes that have occurred in the last 6 years at these colleges for enrollment and finances. We'll look at their enrollment numbers. We'll look at tuition and fee revenue over the course of 6 years, the endowment per student—and I'll explain that later—and the 6-year graduation rate. In the second video, we'll look at total enrollment, the percent of students admitted, the admissions yields of those students, or popularity as a common reference, the 4-year graduation rates, and the total endowment for each of these colleges. And then in the last video, we'll take a look at some per-student costs on academics, instructions, administrative or institutional, and some retention rates. This is the home screen of the 2022 version of the College Viability App. And you can see in the big blue boxes on the left-hand center part of the screen, you can select different combinations of states, different types of colleges, and then individual colleges. You can also search for colleges in the search box here just by typing in the name of the college you might be searching for. Let's take a look at these Kansas colleges. So I'm going to go ahead and select on Kansas, and then I just selected regional colleges, and I quickly selected Baker University, Benedictine, Friends University, MidAmerica Ottawa in Ottawa, and the University of St. Mary's. From this selection, all of the different fields will now compare each different parameter, each different field, each different comparison for each of these colleges. You can see the count of colleges is noted up here in the upper right-hand portion. If you want to start over, click on Reset Search and all colleges will reshow and you can start your search again. And then as you go through the data, I've created the Read and Understand Data screen. So by clicking on that, and it's available anywhere, you can scroll through and get definitions and examples of what each of the fields means for your search for financially healthy and viable private colleges. In this first video of the series of three, we're going to compare the 6-year changes the enrollment, tuition and fees, the endowment per student or per FTE student, and FTE stands for full-time equivalent, the 6-year graduation rate. Let's get started. So I'm going to go ahead and click on 6-Year Changes, and we'll see what comes up is each of the 6 colleges in our comparison, and I'll comment on these as we go through. And each of these headings is sortable. So let's just kind of select the FT enrollment, but the enrollment has changed over the last 6 years, and reporting period is 2015 through 2020, the most recent data available. And we can see that of the 6, 4 of them have had decreasing enrollment, and the other 2 have had modest enrollment increases at best. We can do the same thing for tuition and fees, and we can see that Ottawa University has been pretty successful in raising tuition and fees increasing their tuition fees over $16 million, and some of the others less so. And we can see that both Baker and Friends have actually had decreases in their tuition and fees revenue collected over this 6-year period. Not necessarily a good thing. Same thing for 4-year graduation rates, and we can see that Baker has improved theirs a little bit. Ottawa has had some issues develop. We look at the 6-year graduation rate And we can see that the University of St. Mary shows some big improvement from 4 to 6 years. That's interesting. And we can again see Ottawa continues to have some issues. Baker University, um, it just goes up 1 point from, from 1 year, from 4 years to 6 years. There's some meaning behind that, but that's a discussion for another video. And the percent admitted has gone up 11 points for Baker. Up 11 for the University of St. Mary. That just suggests they're admitting more students. Probably, educated speculation on my part, they need those students to meet their budget numbers. And then admissions yield, we'll look at more closely. That's simply an indication of popularity. It shows what percentage of students that a college accepted and admitted ultimately chose to enroll in that college. And again, we can see some interesting patterns here. Let me sort this. And we can see that Baker has managed to increase their admissions yield a little bit. But 4 of the 6, their admissions yield has decreased. Again, it's one of many indicators you can use to compare these colleges, but it can suggest over time, and this is a 6-year time period, that that college is becoming less popular with the students it accepts. And I also like to look at the total expenses. Because in this era of challenging finances, those that are able to manage their expenses better have better financial outlooks, more likely financial viability. And we can see that Ottawa and Benedictine have driven expenses up quite a bit over the last 6 years, and we can see that both Baker and Friends have either anticipated issues or are just cutting courses, faculty, staff, whatever the case may be. But that's how you can compare total expenses over the 6 years. And then retention, one last select on this, and we can see that, you know, Benedictine and Baker have had some modest success in increasing their retention rates. There's an actual comparison of retention down here that we'll look at in another video. And that Mid-America and St. Mary's and Friends, some issues in keeping students staying at their college once they've started. And then when we look at the actual fields for each of these comparisons, we click on enrollment, and we can see that these colleges are essentially similar in size. Ottawa University is a little bit on the smaller size, but they're very similar in size. You can actually see the numbers, so it's grown at Benedictine, for example, from about 1,900 up to about 2,000, so a gain of 100-some-odd students, and you can see that Ottawa has gained 50-ish students, something like that. Tuition and fees is the actual numbers from the 6-year change comparison that we had, and we can see that Baker has gone from $29 million down to $25 million. We can see that Ottawa University has gone from $27 million and change up to $43 million and change. So they are doing something to be able to drive tuition and fees revenue. Let's look at the endowment per FTE, and this really shows what the gifts, donations from friends, alumni, and others are per full-time enrolled student. And so again, the comparisons are here. We can see that Friends University is by far the best endowed. If we clicked on the Endowment button, as we will later, we'll see what their number is. And we can see that, you know, organizations like Ottawa and Mid-America, to a lesser extent St. Mary's Benedictine and even Baker, their resources aren't as substantial per student as Friends University. Again, a comparison you can use to decide, is this college financially healthy enough? Is it viable enough for myself or my student to attend? And then let's look at the 6-year graduation rate, and we'll look at the 4-year graduation rate on another video. Most colleges are starting to report 6-year graduation rates and focus that number on 6 years because they're having issues with 4-year graduation rates. So what we're looking at here is the actual graduation rates for undergraduates for each of these colleges. And we can see they go from, eh, okay at Baker and Benedictine to much less okay. Let me sort it here. They're okay at Benedictine and Baker. I use 70% as my minimum threshold, so they're even below that a little bit, to very disturbing at Ottawa and Friends, to a slightly lesser extent at Mid-America. The example that I use on this is if there are 100 students who start at any one of these colleges, And since my pointer's on Mid-America, we'll leave it there. Of every 100 who started at Mid-America, only 48 ended up with a bachelor's degree from Mid-America Nazarene in 6 years. Now, some may have transferred elsewhere and gotten their bachelor's degree. Some may be continuing on past 6 years. But for comparison purposes, we can see that Benedictine, for example, is not quite twice as successful. As Ottawa in graduating its students. So clearly some colleges have performed better than others over the past 6 reported years. You can make your own comparisons using the College Viability App. You can make your own judgments. And by the way, if you would like to see comparisons of other private colleges, leave a list of those colleges in the descriptions below. I get those requests on a regular basis. I'll be glad to do your list and post it to YouTube in the coming weeks and months. I don't do predictions. I am not doing predictions. I'm not engaging in any guesswork. This is data from the government, from the federal government, that the colleges themselves reported. I'm just providing simple comparisons of data the colleges themselves have provided to the federal government. It's all publicly available information. You deserve a quality college education. I want to give you information to help you make the best possible college decision that includes comparisons of private colleges' financial health and viability. You have looked at the majors, at the campus, the faculty, the online offerings, the amenities. Let's add a comparison of the college's finances to your decision-making process. If you would like access to the College Viability App for your own purposes, I've got some links down below. For those who just want a quick look, it's $21 for 21 days for just the basic 5 comparisons. The full app that includes all 16 comparisons is also available, and the link is also down below, for a one-time fee of $49.