College Tipsheet

Mary McGrath (00:04)
Hello, welcome to the premiere podcast of the Mary McGrath podcast. My name is Mary McGrath. I'm a rising college senior. My cohost is Dr. Gary Stocker, who is also the founder of Kyle College Viability. And I will host our weekly podcast as Dr. Stocker and I discuss and debate the challenges both students and families face in making decisions about college careers and much more. Dr. Stocker, welcome to the podcast.

Gary (00:28)
Well, thanks Mary. I gotta tell you, I've done many podcast episodes before with a lot of different people, but I don't think, Mary, I've ever done one with students before.

Mary McGrath (00:37)
Well, thank you for coming today. We're great. I'm very happy to have you. So I'll just jump right into it with some questions. So right off the bat, just how did you come up with the idea for the College Viability app and what did those beginning phases of its creation look like?

Gary (00:52)
I'll be honest, it was ugly when we first got started and the Reader's Digest version was back in 2015. I was actually teaching full -time at Lyndon Wood, where you go to college at, and I was asked by a college dean here in St. Louis. He had been just selected as the president at Westminster College out in Fulton, and he asked me to go out there as his chief of staff, and I did.

And when we got out there, we realized that the folks at that college had been spending down their endowment to keep the lights on. And one of the early assignments he gave me, Mary, was Gary find us some merger partners. Well, this game was almost 10 years ago and that even wasn't even spoken of hardly back then. And when I went out to look for financial data associated with private and public colleges, there was nothing of ease. So fast forward a couple of years, I'm back in St. Louis and I realized that there was an opportunity because the market had started to evolve. We were starting to see college closures and I

I realized there was an opportunity to create a tool, to create a resource, Mary, where really lots of different folks, but we're going to focus on students and their families to be able to compare the financial health and viability of colleges. You and I have talked before about the FAFSA, and we all know about the FAFSA debacle this year. Well, the college viability app is kind of the reverse FAFSA. I'm guessing your family has filled out FAFSAs over the years and your parents have shared your family finances. Well, the college viability.

lets families look at the college variability app, lets families look at the financial health of the colleges they're considering. And so from that, I've developed some ugly versions of the app, but the 2024 version includes special apps for public and one for private colleges. And the ones you and I are going to focus on are for students and their families.

Mary McGrath (02:36)
Very nice. So what would you say are your best tips when beginning to network or build connections for a student coming right out of college who might not have a lot of experience in doing so?

Gary (02:49)
Well, Mary, I would offer, and I probably have done this with you and your teammates at Lyndenwood, don't wait till you're back out of college. I remember being in a meeting with the upperclassmen on the Lyndenwood women's basketball team this past fall. And I said, get out there now. You need to be on LinkedIn. You need to be on LinkedIn probably from the day you start college. And you need to start having a nice headshot, a professional headshot.

You need to use some of the projects you'll do associated with many of the classes you take and post them to LinkedIn so that when you become a college senior and you start looking for that first gig, whatever it may be, you've got a whole repertoire of projects that you have developed that are already on LinkedIn. And trust me, recruiters across every major industry and minor industries are looking at LinkedIn to hire you and your peers.

Mary McGrath (03:37)
Yeah, like you said, important to set yourself up for success. And I think LinkedIn is a really great tool for that. So moving into the next question, would you say that private institutions are more likely to close due to financial troubles than public institutions?

Gary (03:52)
Well, it's an easy answer to that, and the easy answer is yes. Private colleges don't have the availability of public funding, taxes, and they rely on mostly tuition fee revenue. They rely on gifts from friends of the college, either alumni, community members, or others. That's typically called an endowment.

So when they went out of funds, when they can't get students to enroll, we're in the middle of that right now, and we'll be talking about that in the coming weeks, I'm sure, they don't have the resources, they don't have the cash to keep the doors open. Now, it's important to note also that public colleges will rarely, Mary, if ever close. However, when you follow the media, and I know you do this, there are almost as many public college announcements of layoffs and cutbacks.

letting off faculty staff and cutting back majors and programs as there are on the private side. So while publics will never close, if you're looking at a public college for yourself or your family member, you really want to look at colleges that have not cut back programs. And there's some tools I can give you access to. We'll talk about that in a future podcast that's available from the government that will let you know which colleges would be more likely and less likely to cut back on programs.

Mary McGrath (05:12)
So getting into more specifics about the actual College of Viability app, what feature do you believe on the app is most important or most impactful on determining whether or not a school will close?

Gary (05:28)
Well, that's easy, and that's the comparison tool. There's nobody in the world who can find a single factor, Mary, that will predict the closure or success of a college. It just doesn't exist. So what I've done with the College Viability app is I grab the last eight years of data for every private and public four -year college out there, and you as a user, or students, families, even faculty, staff, college leaders, can compare.

a college's revenue, its expenses, its enrollment, its graduation rates, its discounts, its tuition and fees against others. We talked about the reverse fafsa a minute ago, and you may be too young for this, but back in the day, there was something called the college blue book, I'm sorry, the Kelly blue book that would compare cars and ask your parents about that, ask your grandparents about that. I'm sure they knew that. And the folks at Kelly kicked tires on cars.

and they were reviews about what car was good, what car wasn't good. And I'm doing the same thing with the college viability app. Instead of kicking tires, I'm kicking finances, I'm kicking enrollment trends, I'm kicking graduation rates, and the app lets users compare which colleges are doing better and which are not doing so well.

Mary McGrath (06:37)
So would you say that that comparison tool is your personal favorite feature on the app, or is there something else that you would like to highlight as well?

Gary (06:44)
The useful part of the app is to be able to compare eight years worth of data, and here's why. If you have Mary McGrath University, and for the last eight years Mary McGrath University has had decreasing enrollment, both at the undergraduate and or graduate level, don't tell me that you can turn it around in one year. You just cannot do it.

If your graduation rate has been around 45 % after four years for the last eight years, don't tell me that you can change, you get up to 55 % in a year. You can't do it. And so that's why the trend is important. It is an obvious historical pattern. And remember, Mary, the colleges themselves submit the data that I use. They submit it to the National Center for Education Statistics and it's iPad's database. The iPad's database is a god -awful database, but I figured out how to use it.

And now I make it easy for folks to use it to compare private and public colleges.

Mary McGrath (07:42)
So let's just say a student just found out that their school is closing, whether it be next year or even the next semester. What would be the next steps for them?

Gary (07:52)
I said again for me.

Mary McGrath (07:53)
So let's say a student just found out that their school is closing whether it be next year or even next semester What would you say the first step should be?

Gary (08:02)
Yeah, so far in 2024, there's been a private nonprofit college closure about once a week, not quite. There wasn't one this last week, but there was one every other week, at least one every other week prior to that, as I recall. But your question is, you've just gotten the bad news via email or meeting that the college is closing. And I'll give an example, Fontbonne University here in St. Louis. I could have told you three years ago they weren't going to make it. But when they decided to close in March of this year,

I do give them credit because they're holding on until next year. They're giving students, as many students as they can, the chance to take as many courses as they can to get to graduation or really close to graduation. If that happens to you...

It's tough. It's tough for a couple reasons. One is just a human reason. You have been disappointed because you picked this college because for whatever reason you liked it, whatever reasons you liked it, and now all of a sudden they're dumping on you. It's not the best choice of words, but I'm going to go with it anyway. And when that happens and you have to look for another college, colleges have something called teach -out agreements. So Gary Stock University is going to close, and I'm going to recommend that my students go to Mary McGrath College.

because Madame McGrath College has courses that they can offer that will help my students graduate. Well, I have no incentive as my closing college to pick a strong financial college. And what I increasingly see is colleges like Fontbonne, they're guilty of this. They're sending their students to other private colleges who, when I look at their financial data, they're not in much better shape than Fontbonne. So really, the guidance that we want to give folks is when you're a high school junior, when you're a high school senior,

It's important that you look, especially in this day and age with so many closures and so many colleges and such financial straits, that you look at the financial data. And I'll be honest, Mary, the best source is our college viability app. Nobody does it like we do. And at least you can start with that. You can at least look for colleges where the enrollment's going up. You can at least look for colleges where they graduate for crying out loud at least half their students after four years. Because more than half of both public and private colleges in the United States, Mary McGrath,

don't even graduate half their students in four years. That is a trauma. That is a tragedy.

Mary McGrath (10:26)
So speaking of students actually picking schools and coming up with a list of schools in their later years of high school, what would you say are your best tips for narrowing down a long list of schools to choose from?

Gary (10:39)
And historically, I'm guessing you did this in your family. I know I did this when I went to college and our children, we did the same thing. We culturally, we have come to grow into we look at the college, the campus, the athletics, the humanities, the tuition, the majors, the faculty, all that kind of stuff. And that's fine. But I will offer to anybody who will listen, Mary, that the first thing you look at in this day and age is a college's financial health and viability. None of those other things matter, Mary, if a college can't meet payroll.

A college can't keep the lights on because they don't have enough tuition, fee revenue or other sources of revenue to provide their students, not just with a scrappy, barely get by college experience, but one like you're experiencing on Lindwood. It's a strong experience. Lindwood isn't by shape. It's one of the few that is. And too many colleges, while many will close, many will not. But you don't want to send your child, you don't go yourself to a college.

who's kind of living tuition payment to tuition payment. That's dangerous. You're not gonna get the kind of college experience that you want.

Mary McGrath (11:47)
So you obviously have a lot of experiences being on podcasts and even hosting quite a few podcasts yourself. So what would you say is your favorite thing about creating podcasts or even being featured on?

Gary (11:59)
Yeah, and I've done many of both, as you well know, and you heard me talk and I bring a little bit of passion. I bring a little bit of conviction to these stories because I, if there was such a thing as a top 10 list of college financial health researchers in the country, Mary, I don't know where I would be on that list, but I sure as heck would be on that list. Nobody looks at college finances and college financial health as much as I do. Nobody comments on it as much as I do.

And the value of the podcast over the written word is you can hear my voice. You can hear the passion. And I tell folks all the time, I'm right. It may sound a little cocky and I recognize that. But again, I'm going to go back to the point, Mary, where I have I have researched this stuff. I am off camera, off podcast. I'll give you a list of colleges that aren't going to make it. I'm not going to make it publicly available because I don't want the grief that goes with it. But there are families right now.

even with this fast semester, sitting down this weekend and Mary, they're trying to decide which college to choose, public or private. And if they invited me to their kitchen table to have that conversation, I could tell them which ones to steer away from. But you know what, Mary? They won't have access to that information. And it just saddens me to realize how many families will choose a college this weekend or sometime soon. Then I know darn good and well cannot.

and will not survive. It is an avoidable tragedy. And that's why working with you and others to get the message out that look at college finances, look at their graduation rates, look at their enrollment trends, look at their tuition discounts. You got to do that. If you don't, you're on the risk of making a bad choice.

Mary McGrath (13:44)
So looking at the other side of this issue, what do you believe is the best way for endangered colleges to combat this possible financial failure? What steps should they take?

Gary (13:57)
That's a really good question. And I was on a Zoom earlier today, it wasn't a podcast, with a gentleman who wants to research college financial health. And I shared with him what I share with many others. I'm going to answer your question. In most cases, Mary, the die is already cast and there's not much they can do.

And all goes back to economics. I'm guessing you've taken the economics class or two at Lindenwood. And one of the basic premises of economics is supply and demand, right? And there are way, way, way, way too many college seats and not enough students willing to pay whatever tuition and fees associated with those seats. And as a result, colleges are diving to the bottom with tuition discounts.

and they're losing more and more revenue. And at the end of the day, many of them won't have the cash on hand to be able to make payroll and to be able to keep the lights on. We've seen that for the last five or six years, and we'll see that for another year or two.

Mary McGrath (15:00)
Well, thank you so much for coming on today, Dr. Gary Sacher. We really appreciate it and all your insightful answers. So let's conclude this first episode of the MiramaGraph podcast where we talked about the financial health and viability of different colleges, as well as some steps to take when making those tough decisions. We'll see you guys next week.