This Week In College Viability (TWICV)for Spetember 2 2024

Gary (00:01.678)
It's This Week in College Viability for September 2nd, 2024. I am Gary.

Gary (00:12.654)
It's this week in college viability for September 2nd, 2024. Hi, I'm Gary Stonker. And actually, I just lied to you. I recorded this on September 2nd, but I forgot to turn the little green button on here. So I recorded for 17 minutes and it didn't record anything. So we're gonna do it again on September 3rd and just pretend it's September 2nd.

You know, it was a light higher education news week last week, especially if you ignore the ubiquitous, we are great enrollment announcements. And I guess it begs the question that I wanted to ask for a long time, and others have brought this up to me. And the question is, is it fair to critique the financial health and viability of colleges? Now, I'm a sports enthusiast.

I rarely care who wins, but I enjoy watching the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, as we used to hear on the old wide world of sports on ABC. And recently I noticed local and national sports writers and talking heads break down many games to almost a play by play level. Of course, their analysis is mostly subjective, but it does have elements of data and drawing on their expertise and their experience.

So I'm going to do that with just one story this week. I'm going to go to almost a play -by -play level. It's about a single college. It's more than just a single college. It represents the type of survival spin, the type of survival spin that is happening, I see, across higher education. And I'm going to go do a pretty deep analysis of this college's news release.

and then on data from iPads and other sources as well. Page two, the headline reads, Missouri Valley College reports record enrollment. Now this is an internal press release and they're certainly entitled to do that. Interestingly, I can't find any other news source willing to pick up the story. That's interesting. And...

Gary (02:15.694)
Here's a couple items from their press release. First of all, they talk about grade enrollment, right? That's kind of the theme for this whole story and colleges like that. And from the press release, they note that they're on -campus population of 1 ,564. Now, I do a lot of work with higher education data and I have yet to see a reporting tool that says on -campus population.

And when I see stuff like that, it just makes me wonder about the validity of the number. Does that include faculty? Does that include staff? Does that include people walking across the campus? Now, clearly it doesn't, but you don't know. And so it just says, all right, what kind of spin is taking place here? Now, they want to say the increase, on -campus population increase, was generated through 709 new students.

Now I am at the very least iPads provision. I'm probably one of the better iPads folks around. I know the data, I know how it works. I know what's in there and I know what's not in there. And there's no new student category I'm aware of that I can track. There is full -time equivalence, there's full -time, there's part -time, there's some distance education, all distance education, no distance education.

but I'm nowhere that I'm aware that I have a category called new students. So again, the Gary Stocker alarm bells go off. And then they go on to add something a little bit different topic here. Then I'm gonna read the quote from the story from the internal press release. Something the college, this is Missouri Valley College. Something the college is particularly proud of is the grade point average of incoming freshmen, 3 .11, comma, another campus record.

All right, something to be proud of, something for the students and their families. Did anyone tell these 1 ,564 on -campus population students that the four -year graduation rate at Missouri Valley College has averaged only about 30 % from the last reported years, from 2015 to 2022? The six -year rate averages about 50%.

Gary (04:35.47)
And that one's down 12 points from 2015. And you've heard me say before, if a college cannot graduate at least 40 % of its students in four years, it's not even a college in my mind. It's more of a tuition collection agency because they can't do what they're being paid to do, which is graduate students with diplomas in whatever majors they have chosen. So.

Let's go to the data. We do that all the time, of course, here at College Viability. Now, I don't doubt for a millisecond that the numbers that Missouri Valley College presents are valid. They're spinning them for sure, and they're entitled. It's just too dangerous to make the numbers up because somebody like me is going to find out.

And like many other colleges, both public and private, they're just not providing a full and balanced perspective. So that's why I'm here. So let me continue to serve as your college data quality control specialist. Put that on your business card. Let's go to the data. And this is from IPATS. This is from the National Center for Education Statistics. The college itself reported this data.

Of course, as I just shared, Missouri Valley College has absolutely pathetic four and six year graduation rates. Their endowment isn't much more than college couch money, about $11 million, this is in 2022. And they had the second, again in 2022, they had the second lowest endowment per FTE student in the entire state of Missouri and private colleges.

The news story boasts substantially about the 1 ,564 students in 2024. It wasn't that hard to pull up the college viability app and see that in 2015, Missouri Valley College had 3 ,012 students, about not quite twice as much as they reported in 2024. There's no mention of that in the story. And again, they're entitled to spin.

Gary (06:49.07)
They're not being forthright about the data, but all right, they're entitled. And they also know in 12 months they built two buildings. One was a dormitory of sorts and the other maybe a college, nursing building, something like that. Two buildings in 12 months. Maybe the construction folks in Missouri Valley College area needed business on it, but that seems awfully fast.

And as I recall, they did have some money from, think, a land sale earlier, maybe this year, last year sometime. And it looks to me like they're spending that money on growth speculation, hope for growth speculation, and not really on consolidation of offerings that I think should be happening.

Gary (07:42.446)
Their unfunded institutional grants have increased $7 million. I'm betting they gave away the store this year to get those 1 ,564 students in the door. But of course, no college willingly shares that information. And then check this line out. Again, something else that makes me consider the quality of the data. There is a report in iPads called Percent Admitted.

And from 2017 through 2022, the last reported year, Missouri Valley College reported greater than 100 % admitted. Now, two things that's mathematically impossible to do it correctly. Or they're admitting students that haven't applied. I don't know that's the case or not. just don't know. But they're reporting more than 100%.

students admitted. I don't know how to do that. Their net income using Matt Hendricks data, their net income has been negative for the last, for three of the last eight years. They are digging into their limited endowment piggy bank to fund operations. It was nine percent draw in 2019. That's a big number. Six and a half percent of past two reported years. That's not as big but still notable.

And digging into the piggy bank lowers the amount that the college can generate on earnings for future years. And Matt Hendricks reminds me of that on regular occasion. Interestingly, their cash and cash equivalents are decent. I don't know how unless that's associated with taking their...

cash from their increased endowment draw. I Matt's talked about that before. I looked at the program completion from Missouri Valley. They have some element of strength in bachelor of business programs, bachelor of health professions. Interestingly, they have a strong, comparatively strong bachelor's completion numbers in parks and recreation, and really not much in the graduate level at all. They've got some dibbling in education and some dabbling in health professions.

Gary (09:54.851)
I've just been adding the program completion here recently.

And Missouri Valley College got on my radar because in part, in large part, it was a slow college newsweek. They get the brunt of my critique today, but again, they're exhibiting the same type of spin that I see regularly. For example, if students and their families had access to all of this data, and they do through the college viability app for students and families, would a student really want to go to a college?

with a four year undergraduate graduation rate of around 30%. For every 100 students who started at Missouri Valley College in 2015, 30, really less than that, but around 30 graduated. And there's more, I'm not gonna use it today, maybe for another day, there's more at Missouri Valley, but the point is made. So here's my story. So I went to the bank last week.

and asked if I could deposit 1 ,564, that's Missouri Valley on campus population, I asked if I could deposit 1 ,564 students into my account, into my bank account. The confused teller said, Dr. Stocker, we don't accept student enrollments as actual money that you can deposit into your account.

Well, of course that didn't actually happen. But if you are to read the countless, our enrollment is great stories coming out the past few weeks as colleges count heads, you would think that enrollment is cash, that enrollment pays the bills, that enrollment keeps the lights on. And certainly, certainly enrolled students bring in revenue that is ultimately cash. However, those students are not fungible.

Gary (11:51.852)
And for those that didn't pay attention in accounting and finance classes, fungible means mutually interchangeable. One can replace the other. Students can't replace cash. Cash can't replace students. They're not fungible. Cash is fungible. Faculty, for example, faculty, I'm quite sure at Missouri Valley College, faculty don't accept students as interchangeable or fungible for their paychecks.

And it's my understanding that utility companies, yes, utility companies frown on students showing up at their doorsteps as payment for a college's electric or water bills. Of course, I am being silly. Of course, I'm being facetious. Yet colleges day in and day out, week in and week out, month in, year in, year out, they only share enrollment numbers. And even when they're bad, they find ways to spend them most of the time.

I have yet to see one college in the five plus years I've been doing this report in real time. The net tuition dollars or even the average tuition discount needed to bring in a class of 1 ,654 students. It does show up, but it's two years later. So let me make this simple. Enrollment, heavily reported though it may be, does not pay the bills.

The revenue, the cash generated from those enrollments is the only thing that is fungible. Now I have little to no hope that colleges will be upfront and forthright with their finances. Never have and maybe they never will. It's possible that many higher education data entrepreneurs like Matt Hendricks, myself and others could force their hands, these colleges to be a little bit more data accountable. Not holding my breath here on.

Labor Day plus one in 2024. And maybe even the iDotter and T -Crosser accreditors will realize they provide no real college financial health support comparisons for students. But there is one group in addition to colleges that's really going to be embarrassed by this exclusive focus on enrollment. And I have a letter for them. I'm going to read the letter to you. Dear Mr. and Ms. Reporter.

Gary (14:13.816)
Dear Mr. and Ms. report the enrollment numbers if you must. Make sure you define, please make sure you define the numbers you are reporting. Use the iPad's data source, do Google search, do an AI search, but define the terms. And let me give you some questions to ask. Ask about the net revenue for all those enrolled students. Ask Mr. and Ms. Reporter if it is higher or lower.

than the previous year or years. Ask if that net revenue has gone up enough to give faculty and staff compensation increases sufficient to stay ahead of inflation. Ask what the average tuition discount was to bring in the freshman class, to bring in the entire student body. And ask what the average tuition discount rate was last year. Now,

You may not get answers to this, probably won't in many cases, but that should be able to feed on that to realize colleges aren't sharing the whole story. And what I fear will happen this fall, and I talk about it regularly, what I fear will happen this fall as part of the great FAFSA debacle and the overall declining higher education market is that some of these, we have great enrollment, colleges.

will succumb to the lack of cash and reach for that light off switch near the door and close that college probably probably on short notice.

As always, thanks for making time to listen to this shortened and abbreviated version of This Week in College Viability. I'm always grateful for your time and for your feedback and for the questions you submit to me. I look forward having much more news and commentary on next Monday's, and it'll be on Monday, on next Monday's This Week in College Viability. Until then, this is Gary Stocker for College Viability. Thanks again.