A walkthrough of the College Viability App comparing six private colleges on enrollment, endowment, graduation rates, admissions selectivity, and yield. The app flags rising expenses at Ottawa and Benedictine, helping students and families assess financial health and market strength before choosing a school.
Chapters
In Part 2 of the demo of how to use the 2022 College Viability App, we're going to look at enrollment again. We're going to look at the total endowment for each of the 6 colleges. We're going to look at the 4-year graduation rate, and then some new features this year. We're going to look at the percent admitted, the yield popularity, the yield or the popularity, and the total expenses. Let's start off with quickly looking at enrollment again, and if you watched the first video, you saw this. And we can see the 6 colleges that are part of our comparison. You can see the actual numbers of enrolled students, full-time equivalent enrolled students, If you wanted to quickly see what the changes were for the previous 6 years, you could go back and see that Benedictine grew a little bit, Baker dropped a little bit, and on and on the comparisons go. Now let's jump ahead, and I want to look at the total endowment. And let's go ahead and jump to 2022. I'm going to sort this from highest to lowest. And the, the standard, the threshold that I use is $50 million as a minimum as a minimum threshold for an endowment. And again, endowments are measured by the gifts you have received from students, alumni, friends, the community, and others. And we can see that of our 6 colleges, that really only Friends University barely exceeds our minimum threshold of $50 million. The other 5 are slightly below. In the case of Mid-America, St. Mary's, and even Ottawa, substantially below that threshold. Does it mean they're bad colleges? Not my decision to make. It means by comparison, their capacity, their historical capacity to raise gifts, to raise funds from alumni, friends, and others, is not as strong as those with higher endowments. Let's take a look at the 4-year graduation rate. And if you recall from the first video in the series, we looked at 6 years because colleges are moving toward that in part because they're not particularly proud of their 4-year graduation rates. And we can see why. You can see for all 6 of these, over the course of what is conceived or viewed as traditional, at best, Baker University graduates 50% of its students in 4 years. Benedictine, a little bit better. Ottawa at 27%. University of St. Mary at 38%. MidAmerican Nazarene slightly above that. It's a comparison. Given all things equal, would you rather have your student go to a college where the graduation rate was 80% over 4 years or 30% over 4 years? Your decision to make. The College Viability app just lets you make that comparison relatively easily. Now let's look at the 2 new features. The Percent Admitted shows out of every 100 students, this is the number of students a college accepts, the percent admitted. So we can see in this case, and let me sort this for the year 2020, Benedictine and Baker accepted an exceedingly high percentage of students. Apply here, get admitted might as well have been their motto. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can also be reflective of a college's need to drive revenue. From those admissions. You can see that of the other 4, they're all relatively good with accepting students, but it's a comparison. What I think is a little bit more interesting to look at is the next field, and that is the yield. It is what percentage of students enroll at a college that has accepted them. Popularity. Again, let me sort this for the year 2020, and we can see it ranges from modest at 32% for Friends to pretty abysmal at 15% for Ottawa. St. Mary's and Benedictine not that much better. None of these are that good, but it gives you a chance to compare the relative popularity. You can make the case that Friends University is twice as more popular with the students it accepts as is Ottawa. And then lastly for this Part 2 video, let's look at total expenses. And the reason I include this, and again we'll look at 2020 here, is what has happened to total expenses over the 6-year period. Again, we saw the changes in the 6-Year Changes button, and we can see that Ottawa and Benedictine have had quite a considerable increase in expenses over those 6 years. And this gives you the actual number. In the third video, we'll show actual comparisons of how colleges invest these expenses for each of these categories that you see down below. And we will take a look at that in the third video.
