College Tipsheet

Gary (00:02.626)
Welcome to Uh-Oh! College, the podcast for October 4th, 2023. Hi, my name is Gary Stocker and I'm asking students, college students and their families and even college faculty and staff to let me be your fiduciary.

What is a fiduciary? What does that mean? A fiduciary in a general sense is someone who looks out for your best interests above and beyond what they're paid for. Now I'm not paid to do anything. And so what I do is I provide a perspective for college students and their families and also for faculty and staff that college leaders don't. And let me tell you why. College leaders, the president, the CFO and others do have...

a legitimate fiduciary responsibility to their college. And it makes sense. They are paid to look out for the best interests of the college above and beyond what they're paid for. But that doesn't mean they look out at the same time for the best interests of the students or their families or the faculty and staff. So somebody needs to do that. And we do that in large part through these kinds of communication events that we do and certainly through our college viability app that I'll talk about a little bit later. And so...

We're primarily for college students and their families. And what we really wanna do through the podcast and through our social media posts is to provide a balanced source of college related information. And the S to focus tends to be on finances, tends to be on viability, tends to be on enrollment and graduation rates. But colleges spin this stuff. So instead of the usual one way hype colleges use to get students to enroll, we really challenge their messages.

to you in what we hope is an entertaining and provocative way so that we can provide you with a new perspective, a different perspective. You'll learn what is good about colleges, and there's much. And you'll learn what is garbage, and there's much too much of that. So this is the time of year when colleges release their enrollment numbers, their fall 2023 enrollment numbers. And I track this stuff through a Google Alert that I use, and I get these emails 20, 30, 40 a day.

Gary (02:18.23)
with colleges saying our enrollment is up. And that's fine. Many are legitimately so. There are way too many that are spinning their enrollment. And I'll tell you why. The colleges that come out and say, our enrollment is up 10% over last year, or 20% over the last two years. Well, guys, I hope so. 2021 and 2022 are following what kind of worldwide, global calamity, a pandemic?

If your enrollment numbers were not up in 2023 from the last two years, you've got lots of problems. But that's even a small part of the story. The rest of the story, as the late Paul Harvey would say, would be those colleges who you can't find anything about in the media. Those colleges who are saying nothing about their fall 2023 enrollment. And you know why? Because it ain't good. And I use ain't on purpose.

their enrollment is flat or down and they don't want the world to know. We can show you the trends on the college viability app, but these colleges don't want you to know that their enrollment is down. Now here's what to do about it. If you're looking at a college or are already at a college and they haven't released anything about their enrollment, go to their website, go to the news section, see if they've got anything about enrollment, and then start asking, why not? And I know the answer.

Why not? Because it's bad news. So really, in terms of enrollment for the fall 2023, no news is bad news.

Cointos College, what is a Cointos College? It's a term we created, and it's really one of the hidden traumas, one of the hidden challenges of higher education in the United States, across both public and private colleges. And that is a Cointos College is a college that does not even graduate 50% of its students over four years.

Gary (04:21.878)
So if 100 students show up at college A, Gary Stocker College, today, and I have a 65% graduation rate, which is really good after four years, that means 65 out of those 100 who started at Gary Stocker University graduated. There are ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, way, way too many colleges whose four year undergraduate graduation rate is below 50%.

And so you're better off tossing a coin and picking a college and going to a college who can't even graduate 50% of its students. We provide that information on the college viability app for the parent version and for the faculty and staff version as well. So let's move on to the news. So this is from Michael Neitzel, who's a senior contributor to Forbes. And his headline reads, not surprisingly, more colleges and universities announced budget cuts amid financial woes.

Mr. Neesel is just referencing four colleges, Christian Brothers University in Tennessee, St. Norbert in Wisconsin, San Francisco State University and Dickinson State University, I think that's in New Jersey, all recently announced that they were cutting budgets to regain what they're calling fiscal stability and in some cases remain open. Let's just think about this. So if you are looking at any of these four colleges or others in this particular story and they say bad news about finances.

you really have to consider how many students and their families will take that college off their possibilities list, off their college list. Or how many students in this era of increasingly large numbers, increasingly frequent college closures will say, you know what, maybe it's time to transfer to a college that has some financial stability. And trust me, there are many that do. So this particular announcement is a combination of two private

and two public colleges and spending in just the last week or two.

Gary (06:25.274)
making announcements about their financial future. Now I'm going to argue that the details aren't really that important because they're all the same. Enrollment is down, tuition and fee revenue is down, graduation rates are down, retention is down, something called admissions yield is down. It's a similar pattern everywhere, but it's the trend. It is the continuing trend that I have talked about endlessly over the last many years that should concern students and their families.

faculty and staff, community stakeholders, and even college leaders, although I'm gonna make the argument that college leaders are the last to worry about the details. They're so busy trying to hide their financial challenges that they don't even consider its impact on their communities. So there are two ways to look at this. If you have a student or aren't a student, and you're either looking at a private college or currently enrolled in a private college, get access to our college viability app.

I'm going to offer a special version of that. It retails at $47 from now through the end of December 2023. I'm going to make it available for less than 20 bucks, $19.97. I'll make sure that link is available in the show notes down below. And use it to make sure that the college you are using or considering is showing positive financial enrollment and outcome trends. And I've got videos that show you how to do this. It's not really that tough. If it is a public college.

It is highly unlikely that many, if any of them, will close. The politics are just too intense.

It may happen, but it's not likely to happen. But publics are already cutting programs and majors and courses and faculty and staff across the country. It's Emporia State in Kansas, it's West Virginia University in West Virginia, and public colleges regularly have announcements showing up where they're cutting back on stuff. They're not gonna close. And here's a tip, students, families, students and their families for public colleges. If you have a particular major that you're really focused on,

Gary (08:30.862)
ask the admissions representative that you're working with to share with you the number of students who graduated from that major in the last five to ten years.

If that trend is flat or growing, that's good. If it's decreasing, that's not good. It's also not good if the admissions rep can't or won't show you what that trend is. If they can't show you the data in the era of data about enrollments in a major, they're hiding something. They've got to have access to that data. And I would encourage you to look elsewhere. For example, there's a college in Milwaukee,

Gary (09:12.286)
I just saw the other day has posted a fabulous, fabulous data piece that shows the enrollment across all their majors and colleges. I've never seen anything as good as that. I'm going to do a podcast and video on that in the coming days. But you want that kind of data should be available. And so you're looking at low enrollment for private colleges. If that trend is downward, if it's less than a thousand students, be concerned.

And for public colleges, you're looking to be aware of and probably avoid colleges that have low enrollment. And I can't really give you a number on that. If it's single digits, for sure that's a low number, but trends that are going downward in any given major. If you're a public relations or a journalism major at a college and that number of majors has trended down over the last five to 10 years, be concerned because this college, if it's public, probably won't close.

that they could certainly in looking to balance their budgets, because they have responsibilities for that, look to cut majors like those with decreasing enrollment majors. And as always, email me your questions, comments, concerns, challenges. I'll even entertain the occasional insults to gary at collegeviability.com. gary at collegeviability.com. And if you're a regular follower of my college viability posts and podcasts and videos, I'm going to ask a favor.

I'd like to ask you to specifically help me spread the awareness of Uh-Oh! College. It's a relatively new podcast and I need help. College leaders and boards are not likely to change at all without considerable public awareness, feedback, pushback, however you want to categorize it. So please share the Uh-Oh! College podcast link with your friends and family on your social media, your websites, your blogs, your emails. I'll be grateful.

And you'll also be doing the higher education industry a favor by helping challenge and even change the perspective of college consumers. So this is from Katherine Knott from a publication called Inside Higher Education. And again, it's focused on those whose professional careers are in higher education. And the headline reads, higher ed groups have a plan to improve financial aid offers. Higher ed groups have a plan to improve financial aid offers.

Gary (11:33.934)
The story behind this is forever colleges have buried bad news in financial aid offers without explaining it well. And there are stories after stories after stories whining and complaining, and legitimately so, about colleges trying to trick you into getting to accept their financial aid offer and not being able to differentiate which are grants, which are actual discounts, which are loans, which are work-study, all sorts of things like that. And so 350 colleges have come together and they're going to try and find a way to make this better.

All right, God bless them, go get them, good luck. But here's a plug for my friend Mark Salisbury who founded a website called tuitionfit.org. That's tuitionfit, one word, dot org. And if you wanna be able to compare the financial aid package you have received from one or more public or private colleges, go to Mark's website, tuitionfit.org. He's got there a system and some processes in place.

that anonymizes financial aid offers for your student or from your student and for students submitting from all other colleges in the country that participate. And it lets you compare college offers. Now there's no names, no personal names attached to that. It's all anonymized, but you can use that data to see if the offer from, I'll say here in St. Louis, St. Louis University, that your student may receive a similar offer from, like I said before, Marquette University.

similar kind of colleges and similar geographies. You can compare the aid offered, the financial packages offered, and if one is significantly better than the other, you can take that one or you can use that to leverage the second one. So guys, this other college has a better offer than you do. Can you match it?

And if you have recently had a student apply and you've received the financial aid offer, so that's kind of early in the year for this year, you know how inconsistent and incomplete and disorienting those financial aid packages can be. Mark has fixed that because his system lets you compare the actuals. And what colleges do, it's all part of the spin game that colleges do, that colleges play to make you think that your financial aid package is probably better.

Gary (13:48.866)
than it really is. And I'm increasingly hearing from experts in the field that ideally, this is gonna be tough, ideally your students should take out very few, if any college loans to go to colleges. And then let's look at our example of college spin. Our specific example of college spin, we're going to William Penn University in Iowa, and their headline reads, William Penn University Reaches Record Enrollment in 2023.

Gary (14:20.14)
It's a William Pem University press release so they can do anything they want to with their press release.

But students and parents and guardians, faculty and staff, I'm gonna put before you as I always do the data. We always go to the data to refute colleges trying to spin enrollment data or other data on incomplete total picture, total information. So here's the quote from the press release from William Penn. Again, they're entitled to write anything they want. The quote reads, this is the largest traditional campus enrollment ever recorded in its 150 year.

I didn't even type it right. It's third person. It should be first person. It's 150 year history with 1,118 traditional students and marks a 5% increase in traditional campus enrollment from the previous fall. Let's do the Gary Stocker dissection and largest traditional campus enrollment. Anytime there's a qualification and the word traditional means something to the folks at William Penn. I'm not sure what it means, but they're qualifying that.

They're not lying. Don't think for a second they're lying, because they're not. And rarely, if ever, do colleges lie about their enrollment, although I'm sure it happens on occasion. But they're spinning it such, though, so that they can qualify it and be accurate. And they are. In the 150-year history, so 15 decades, they've been around 1,100 students. That's barely over what most experts, including me, consider a bare minimum of 1,000 students. And a 5% increase, all right, 5% is better than 0%.

from the previous fall. And like I mentioned earlier, let's see, previous fall was the fall of 2022, which was immediately after a worldwide pandemic. Goodness gracious. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, here at Uh-Oh College, we would like to think that every college in America has enrollment growth from the pandemic era. That's not true. There are many who didn't. But when you say from the previous fall, you're picking and choosing the data. So we're gonna do, let's go to the data.

Gary (16:25.474)
And I'm going to the college viability app. And our data there comes from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. It's inside baseball, inside college kind of stuff. So something called the full-time equivalent enrollment, which is a standard way of counting students. From the last eight reported years, 2014 to 2021, shows William Penn University down 368 students. That's down 22%. They went from about 1600 to about 1300, plus or minus a little bit.

So over the last eight years, your enrollment is down, not quite 400 students, 368 students. That's a trend. That it went up 5% over one year. Good, I would certainly hope so from a post pandemic year. Something called, looking at the next data point, there are four I wanna talk about, something called the admissions yield. And this again is an inside baseball, inside college term. It references the percentage of students that a college accepts.

in this case, William Penn University, show up and pay tuition. So the admission yield, I also call it the popularity indicator because it reflects a college's popularity amongst its accepted students. The admission yield popularity indicator is down 13 points, from 55% to 42% over the last eight years. And the retention average was a smidge below 60%. 60% is not a good retention number. It should be much closer to 80% or more.

So the students that William Penn University does enroll, and that number has gone down, they tend to leave. After the first year, only six in 10 stay. That's not good. And while the focus this time of year is always on enrollment, enrollment by itself does not pay the bill. So as we go to the data from the college viability app, the tuition and fees revenue,

that private colleges like William Penn and most private colleges, not all, but most private colleges was flat over the last eight years. Now it was actually down about one million and change, but it didn't change much over the last eight years. Now imagine your income stayed effectively flat or went down a little bit over the last eight years. Would you be happy or not? And the folks at William Penn University are choosing not to share this data. That's why we want, that's why I want, to be your fiduciary.

Gary (18:50.542)
to look out for your best interest and share this kind of information for you. And maybe even though these first three data points from the data are not good, the worst may be the endowment at William Penn University. In 2021, it wasn't even $7 million. And the minimum threshold we use at college viability is 50 million, five zero million. So not even 20%.

and had actually decreased about a half a million in eight years. Now this is educated speculation on my part, but then anytime an endowment goes down, either the university was spending endowment funds to keep the lights on to make payroll or had really bad investment advisors. So what do you do about that? If you are looking at William Penn or other colleges, here's three questions you can ask. Ask them, what was your enrollment goal for 2023?

And how much over that goal or under that goal were you? And here's kind of an inside baseball question to get a feel for whether they're spinning you or not. Ask if this is an enrollment for total students or FTE, full-time equivalent students. There's a big difference in how those are counted. If you want to know more information, drop me a note at gary at collegeviability.com and I'll be glad to send you an explanation of what the difference is. And then what has been the five to 10?

year trend and tuition and fee revenue. Now you're gonna get two responses to that. I don't know. Maybe three responses. And I don't know. I can't tell you. Or the final one may be where they say, let me get back to you. All right, well, again, we're in the era of data. I can tell you what every private and public colleges tuition and fee revenue has been for the last eight years, just from the college viability app. Certainly they can as well. And if not, it's just another indication.

Are they on top of things or not? Are they hiding things from you or not? So folks, in the case of William Penn, and this is just an example, even though the data points are accurate and my rebuttals are accurate, I'm painting a much bigger, much broader picture than the good folks at William Penn University are offering. They can do anything they want.

Gary (21:07.998)
And it's not a good picture. The trends across the board for this college, for William Penn University, are bad. And you can do your own comparisons. And again, we go back to the college, the parents version of the college viability app. I'm going to make it available for less than $20. And now it's at the end of the year. And I'll have that link down below. Use the data. I recall when we buy cars here in the Stocker House, we always used to use the blue book.

I think it's an electronic version now, to compare the value of cars. The college viability app is essentially the blue book for college pricing, college tuition, college finances, and college viability. So we're going to continue to work hard to serve as your college fiduciary, looking out for your best interests when colleges are looking out for theirs. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Gary (22:04.758)
Their best interests are not always your best interests. This is Gary Stocker. Until next week, when we will continue to educate and entertain students and their families, along with faculty and staff who are in need, I think, of their own fiduciary, college leaders are typically hesitant to share financial news, especially bad news. And we are here to do that through our College Viability app and our regular podcasts, posts, and videos. Until next week, this is Gary Stocker.