Winter 2024 Private College Viability App Webinar

Welcome to the Winter 2024 College Viability App webinars. My name is Gary Stocker. We wanted to spend just some time talking about the development of the app just for a few minutes, and I'm gonna show you various versions of the app, and then I'll wrap things up with, um, with some guidance on how to acquire the version that might be best for you and your organization. And there's 4 basic questions that I want to address in our webinar this evening. I'll let you read those on your own, but I wanna talk about how there's a report that shows how popular a college is. I wanna talk about the costs associated for individual students with poor graduation rates and how to determine that, and how to determine if a college has got enough of an endowment, which is the item in the green down there. And then enrollment trends matter, and it's not the data from last year or this year or next year or previous years. It's the 5 to 10 year trend that you look for. And in all of the versions of the College Viability App, we use 8 years, the last 8 years worth of data. And for the 2024 version, those are years, the years 2015 to 2022, the last reported data. And that came out in January, believe it or not, that came out in January of 2024. And these are the groups. We have a version for college leaders, a version for college faculty and staff, and a version for students and their families. Each has a different set of reports and some slightly different functionality. I'll show you those. And then community stakeholders, government leaders, civic leaders, social leaders, those kind of folks. There's an app in this whole mix that you can use as well. So you could do this yourself. You could create your own version of the College Viability App. But really what I wanna do is show you the background behind where the app comes very briefly. And what I did when I originally developed this app 3 years ago was I went out and captured thousands, I think about 3,000 individual unique identifiers for every private and public 2- and 4-year college in the country from the federal, from the federal government's reporting site. IPEDS is the name of the database. I captured those, then I went into something called the IPEDS database, which I just referenced, and you could do this too. You could go in and capture the fields you want for the years that you want. You can see what that looks like here. Certainly doable. It's no fun. It takes a lot of time, but it's doable. And then once you get that data, you can put it in some kind of flat file format and put it to some kind of visualization tool and create your own version of the College Viability App. You're welcome to do that. What we have done is this: all of those previous 3 slides combined into a functional visualization that allows users to compare colleges' financial health outcomes enrollment over 8 years. And for the private college version, as you'll see in a couple minutes, there's almost 1,300 private colleges in the database. You can see examples of the reports down below, and I'll show you specific examples of those in a minute before we go to the app itself. So the first question was, what's the report that shows how popular a college is? Now again, this is from the IPEDS database and the National Center for Education Statistics. And there's an inside baseball term associated with this. It's called admissions yield. You can see on the screen that I have kind of lovingly called it a popularity indicator. That's my name, not theirs. And you can see the last 8 years worth of data, and I've grabbed a set of Illinois private colleges. What I've highlighted is the 8-year change. You can see the individual data points from 2015 to 2016 to see if it's gone consistently up or consistently down. I'll let you do that on your own. But look at the change. So we see Illinois Wesleyan University really is the only college in this set of 8 or 10 that has had an increase in the number of students who, once accepted by the college, actually show up and pay tuition. Only one of these 8 or 9 colleges. Quincy was flat, but look at the pattern we see for most of the rest. And I see this in every, almost every set of reports that I do. Most private colleges and most public colleges in the country have a decreased admissions yield over the past 8 years. Now there's a couple things going on with that. Some students are selecting other colleges, other colleges, that's a true indication, and it's not good. For example, Blackburn College, they're down from 27 points, which is a decent number, to 21 points, which is borderline not good, but they're down 6 points. So that suggests that the market is saying, hey, Blackburn College, We have found other options, and it's not you. Now there's one other thing that's probably happening here is that there are many students, because it's so easy to apply through the Common App online, that many students are probably— this is just educated speculation on my part— are probably applying to a lot of colleges and not going to any of them, which would drag down the overall admission yield rate. What about graduation rates? This is the 4-year graduation rate. And here at College Viability, we've set our own minimum threshold of 50%, 5-0%. If a college can't graduate half of its students in 4 years, we've also coined a term called coin toss college. For obvious reasons, you might as well toss a coin to decide if your student or yourself is gonna graduate in 4 years or not. We can see the 8-year change, and you can see I've highlighted that, but I wanna just focus on the number. So in this set of 8 or 10, 3 of this set of— 8, it looks like, 9— have a graduation rate above 50%. That's not good. Look at the numbers for some of these other colleges. Now, I'll grant you a couple are close. That's your decision. I can give you the data. I can give you the comparison tool. You decide if a 47% graduation rate at 4 years at Milliken University is acceptable, or 43% at Eureka College. You make that determination along with all the other stuff that you look at. But it's the comparisons that matter. Look at the trend each and every year. Because we made it easier this year to look at the trends. In addition to the data tables that we showed you here, there is a chart for the reports. And for the graduation rate, we've actually drawn a marginal line. That shows that 50% mark. And you can see in a half a heartbeat that only really 2 of these colleges in this set have graduation rates at 4 years that exceed 50%. Is that good? Is that bad? That's your decision to make. The app just provides you with that kind of information. Let's move on to the next question, and that is the closure. There's a lot of college closures. It's been about Not quite one college per month since 2016. The endowment is what you're looking at here, and looking at the value of the endowment assets for the last 8 reported years. And what we want to look at is the minimum. So I've got that highlighted in kind of the gold outline there. Again, we at College Viability, we have a minimum threshold of $50 million, and you can see, really, that just 2 meet that threshold. Now, the $50 million is ours. Raise it, lower it, doesn't matter. But if you have to have— the reason we have $50 million is we think over the entire history of a college, and in many cases, almost all cases, it's decades, and in some cases it's centuries, if a college hasn't raised at least $50 million and they run into financial trouble, which many are these days, it is exceedingly difficult for them to raise funds of any consequential nature in a short period of time. Matter of fact, in a lot of the media that I do, if there's a college in trouble and they've raised, for example, I'll pick on Greenville this time, they've raised $23 million over the entire history of their organization, and that's decades if not centuries, and they say we're gonna raise $5 million in the next 3 years to help us fight through whatever financial challenges that we meet. I, I, it's not going to happen. It's, you know, in almost all situations it's not going to happen. It's a pipe dream. It's what we call management by public relations. They say they're going to raise the $5 million, but if you've only raised $20-some-odd million in decades, it's just not likely. And the final one before we go to the app itself is enrollment. And we use FTE, and that stands for full-time equivalent enrollment. And there's a reason for that, because we believe that's a standardized reporting format. And there's, there's some total enrollment and other numbers. We can talk about that another day. Again, we're going to look at the pattern across these 9 or 10 colleges. Look at the pattern in the 8-year change. Looks like I didn't highlight that one. Only one of the set has actually grown enrollment over the last 8 reported years. And again, I picked a set of Illinois private colleges. It really wouldn't have mattered what set of colleges I picked. Most colleges— and I had the numbers here somewhere— most colleges, I think it's greater than 50%, have had enrollment decreases over the last 8 years. Now, anybody can have a short drop in the business, a year or two, fewer customers. But if you have fewer customers— in this, fewer customers, in this case, fewer students— over the last 8 or more reported years, ladies and gentlemen, that's a trend, and that's not a good trend. On the other hand, Aurora University is doing something right. They have grown their enrollment almost over 700 students, not quite 100 students. So let's go to the app. So I mentioned when we got started there are 3 versions of the app. The one you see in front of you is the one for executive analysis. It's for college leaders, board members, those kind of folks. And it has 30+ reports. Now there's not 30 here, there's some of these links have more than one report. In addition, there is an 8-Year Changes report and a Ratios report that has multiple reports on one page. But the navigation is pretty straightforward, and you can see there's almost 1,300 private colleges in the database. And let's just quickly grab a state, and I'll grab Colorado because I know it doesn't have a lot of private colleges. We can select them by different types, and in Colorado there's just regional and religious. We've included elite, super elite, specialty religious as well. So let's look at just regional, and we can see that there are 4 regional private colleges in Colorado. We can actually scroll through the list here. Let's start with FTE enrollment just to show you the basic functionality, and you're getting access to a free version of this as part of your participation award for joining the webinar. And you can see the data for the last 8 years for the 4 colleges that we selected. You can see the 2015 to 2022 data You can see the 8-year change, and that's reflected as a percentage. We've also added for this set of 4, and whatever set you would have selected, the 8-year average change was down 400 students. So we can see that, and it's an interesting set, that 3 of the 4 grew a little bit, at least, over the course of the 4 years, but Regis University has gone down from 6,500 down to 4,000 students. Big drop. All right. But that's the average. You can look after this group, it would vary. We also have the chart functionality. So for those 4 colleges, this provides a quick glance. Flat over 8 years, lower number, flat over 8 years, not good at all over 8 years. And actually, as I roll over the top, you can see the $6,450 for Regis in 2015 and the $3,941 for Regis in 2022 to get the data points. And again, you can see University of Denver has been up and down Tough to call the pattern. The navigation goes up here in the upper left, and we can look at all the reports, and I'm just gonna grab a couple. The 4-year graduation rate, we saw an example, there it is, and you can see, you know, 3 of these 4 show some good numbers. You'd really, if I were in Colorado and my child was looking for a private college, I'd really be concerned about Naropa graduating barely 2 in 10 students. But I'd really consider University of Denver if graduation rates were important. And of course the chart will show what that looks like. There's a chart, you can see that 3 of the 4 are at least dancing around the 50% mark. And then I wanna show one called Institutional Grants right here. And I point this out because in this day and age, colleges are giving away lots of tuition discounts. They call it merit aid, they call it in many cases scholarships. And really what they are are unfunded, you see in the bottom left, unfunded institutional grants. A quick look on the upper level, funded institutional grants is in 2022, Colorado College had $15 million and change. Regis had $2 million. University of Denver had $23 million. These are funded. These are the Gary Stockard Data Analytics Scholarship, for really smart data analytics students. I funded it, I've given $1 million, whatever, and the student uses scholarship money from the earnings on that $1 million. On the bottom level, this is the unfunded, and what we look at is the 8-year change. Let me click on this to sort it. I click on 8-year change, and we can see each of the 4 colleges, the first 2 have significantly increased the amount of unfunded merit aid, unfunded discounts, sometimes they're called the presidential scholarship. Great, call it what you want, but it's unfunded in almost all cases. They've given away an increase of $66 million. And we'll just look at the number from Colorado College. It went from $22 million in 2015 to $36 million in 2022. And they're certainly welcome to do that, but that reflects the growing pressure, the continuing pressure on colleges to discount their tuition to get students to enroll. Now right off the bat, you've gotta be thinking, well, Gary, that's great for students, and it is, it's absolutely great for students, but at some point the colleges need that tuition and fee revenue to make payroll, to keep the lights on, and as I talked about before, there's been about one private college per month, not quite, one private college per month close, and in significant part because they can't generate the revenue from tuition and fees because of the intense pressure on enrollment and on discounting. This is a basic situation of supply and demand. There's a too large of a supply, there's a too large supply of college seats and too low of a demand of college-age or college students generally willing to pay for those seats. Let's just look at one more before I show you the other couple of apps. And let's take a look at the ratios page. This is on the high end. This is new this year, so we've taken some basic ratios and applied them to that same set of colleges. The admit draw rate is a discussion for another day. This is a reflection essentially of net sales, and any number over 100 suggests the college has, has generated more revenue than expenses in 2022. The assets over liabilities— if you're an accounting accountant person or a finance person, it's called a current ratio. The higher the number, the better. I think the average I saw for this data when I was working with those stats was 9, so each of these 6 is a little bit below that. Take that with a grain of salt. I'm not sure there's an actual official standard for that. I just averaged the group of 1,200 colleges. And the 4-year graduation rates, it's really important. We do 6-year graduation rates as well. Our threshold for that is 70%, and again, 2 of the 4 make it easily, we're just not that far off. Again, Naropa only graduates 34 out of every 100 students that started there. After 6 years. So let's go ahead, I'm gonna go back to, that's the executive analysis version, and I'm gonna jump over to the faculty and staff version. And this is dedicated for faculty and staff because what's happening in this day and age, and it's in the news media, the higher ed news media all the time, is that faculty and staff know that their college is in trouble. It doesn't matter whether it's public or private colleges, and they don't have resources to see how they compare. So the College Viability App, when we created the master version, which was kind of that executive analysis one, we added the faculty and staff version. You can see it's much fewer reports. It's the ones we think are the most important for faculty and staff. Certainly there could be others we could add, and maybe we will in coming versions. Same functionality, same approach. And let's just grab a— let's look at all— let's do it differently here. Let's look at all religious colleges. And in the United States, there are 220 religious private colleges. You can scroll through the list right there. And let's look at, so we'll just do something different. Let's look at percent admitted. And I'm gonna click on, I'm not even gonna click on this. So look at 2022. Look at all the colleges that admit 100% of their students. And look at, it's still a decent set that admit 9 out of 10. And even a fair number that mid-80s up. That's fine. Colleges are welcome to admit whoever they want. But again, one of the phrases we have coined is if you're admitting almost everybody, we kind of teasingly call that the "have heartbeat, will admit" approach to getting students to enroll. And again, colleges can make their own decision, but if you're not selective, you know where that shows up? Shows up in the graduation rates. It shows I can make the argument with the data that it shows a college is more focused on enrolling students for the tuition fee revenue, and they don't have the systems and processes in place to graduate those students in 4 years or even 6 years. Now granted, some students are better prepared than others, but if you're admitting almost everybody, if the colleges you're looking at, California Lutheran at 87%, that's pretty high. If you're looking at Boise Bible College at 100% in 2022. Ask them why are they accepting everybody. Let's look at one more before I show you the patient and before I show you the, the student and family version. Let's look at— we did admission yield before— let's look at tuition and fees. And I put this one in for faculty and staff because I can make the case, if you're faculty and staff listening to this, that you don't always have all of the data that you need. Your focus is on your, on your discipline, on your major, on your students, as well it should be. But the tuition and fee revenue is what we're looking at here, and the overall average for the 8-year change for these 220 colleges was it went up $248,000. That's over 8 years. That's not even couch money. So let's do this. I'm going to kind of scroll over to the right a little bit, and I'm going to look at the 8-year change. I'm going to click on that, and it's going to sort it So we can look at Bethel University. Bethel University in Tennessee, the tuition and fee revenue is down almost $30 million over the last 8 years. And you can see many, many, many, many colleges have decreased tuition and fee revenue over the last 8 years, 8 reported years. That can't be a good thing. They're still open, but what that's being reflected in now, almost daily, for sure weekly, is private and public colleges alike, and we'll have the public college viability app available in March of 2024. Public and private colleges in general rely on that tuition and fee revenue. If they can't generate it, they are now engaging in cutbacks of programs, majors, sections of courses, and they're laying off faculty and staff. It's an indicator of the overall trend of the market, but in large part it's reflected by how many colleges have had decreased tuition and fee revenue. Now let me flip this one more time. And we do show the percentages on the far right-hand side. There are some colleges who've been able, religious colleges, of this 220 throughout the country, who've been able to drive increased tuition and fee revenue. Good for them. That's an indication that their product, their service is valued. That folks are willing to pay increased amounts in each of the previous 8 years, that's an indication of that a college might be financially stronger if they're able to raise their tuition and fee revenue over the course of time. And then finally, the final version is for students and their families. And it's gonna be the same layout. We took a little artistic license with the menu. It's still the same 1,297 colleges. I'll filter that here in a second. And these cute little artistic icons, whatever they are, are where the rates are. And there's just 5 reports here. And let's take a look at, let's go to Illinois, 'cause I know there's some good data in Illinois. And in Illinois, there are 61 private colleges, mix of religious, a mix of religious, closed, closing, all those in Illinois. Let's just take a look at the regional, 'cause that's gonna give us some data. And in Illinois, there are 38 regional private colleges. And we can look at the whole list. Let's take a look at the average net price for those colleges. And the data's there. The average net price, you know, has gone down $10,000 at Millikin. It's a result, a consequence of the market pressures. We can flip that and it has gone up about $7,000 at Blackburn. It's up 50% almost. Again, that's an indication of, are these colleges able to raise prices? It's, it's not necessarily a good thing for students, but it is a necessary thing in large part for colleges to be able to survive. Let's go back to the menu again for these 5. Let's take a look at the enrollment. This will be the last one that we look at. And again, let's look at the 8-year change. So I'm going to click on the header here. And we can see that some colleges have grown FTE enrollment, but it's not very many. There's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 colleges out of the 38 in Illinois that have been able to grow enrollment. Let's flip that one more time, and you can see not only the decrease in FTE enrollment, but the actual percentage change in the app. The overall change was down 200 students, You have to go down here to about somewhere between Greenville and Wheaton to get to that average. These colleges above it have had worse-than-average enrollment trends. Again, you can see it reflected in the chart. It's gonna be a busy chart because I have so many colleges. But at a quick glance, you can see down, down, up, looks like Rush University's up, flat, down big time, up big time, flat, down. You can see the pattern all across. DePaul University. And they have had some layoffs and cutbacks, as I recall. Enrollment is down. Again, you can scroll over the top to get what the actual numbers are. So who needs the 2024 Private College Viability App? And I can make the case, if you're a college leader, president, CFO, marketing, enrollment leader, board member, that this is a resource to compare yourself to your competitors, for better or for worse. For faculty and staff, I read constantly where these folks, particularly faculty, don't have access to the data they need to engage in educated discussions with their leadership about improving their financial situation. The College Viability App for faculty and staff enables you to look at the data not just for your organization, but for your competitors as well. And for students and families, I make the argument this may be the most important thing I talk about in the webinar, that you've already filled out the FAFSA. And I know there's delays in getting the data out to colleges now, but the FAFSA, of course, is where colleges look at your financial data, your financial health. The College Liability App is effectively a reverse FAFSA. It's where students and families, even faculty and staff, can look at the financial health and viability and outcomes and enrollment trends of colleges they are considering. It evens the playing field, especially for students and their families. So with that, what happens next? So all the versions of the 2024 Private College Viability App are released. The public college version again will be out in March of 2024. And in the email that you receive this link in, you'll get notification of some special promotional pricing for all versions of the app You're welcome to, of course, purchase those. You're, of course, welcome to follow me across social media, where I will continue to engage in blog posts, video analysis of colleges, and podcasts as well. Again, thanks for spending time with me this evening. I appreciate that time, and I look forward to speaking with you again about the financial health and viability of colleges throughout the United States. My name is Gary Stocker.