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Mary McGrath, a rising college senior, asks the tough questions about colleges to Dr. Gary Stocker. Dr. Stocker has researched the financial health and viability of every public and private college in the U.S. His College Viability app is used by students and families across the country to compare the financial health and viability of colleges.
If you want more guidance on whether your college is financially strong, we will post this podcast every Wednesday. Mary will have developed questions from the perspective of students and parents to ask Dr. Stocker.
Send your questions to marym@collegeviability.com
Mary McGrath (00:01)
Hello, my name is Mary McGrath and welcome to the premier podcast of Beyond the Brochure, Guidance on College Decisions. I'm a rising college senior at Lyndenwood University in St. Louis, Missouri. And my co -host today will be Dr. Gary Stocker, founder of College Viability. 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 (00:29)
Well, thanks Mary. I got to tell you, I've done many podcast episodes before, but never with one as a college student, as a host on such important topics. So thanks for making time to do this.
Mary McGrath (00:42)
So just to jump right into it, how did you first come up with the idea for creating the College Viability app and what did that beginning phase of its creation look like?
Gary (00:52)
Well, interesting. It was about 10 years ago, about nine years ago, I guess, and I was asked to be the chief of staff to a college president in central Missouri. And I did that. And when we got out there, we realized this college had really been spending down its endowment just to keep the lights on. And the college president said, Gary, I want you to start looking for merger partners. Now, this was well before merger became a more common theme in colleges and higher education.
And I went out to try and find finances, because that's what you look for on mergers, and there was nothing out there. There was something called iPads, which is a database that colleges submit data on their finances and enrollment and graduation rates and much, much more. And so I just ended with that. I couldn't use it for what I wanted, but I got back to St. Louis a couple of years later and I realized there was an opportunity.
And this again, as the undercurrents of college challenges, Mary, started to develop and I realized it was a chance to maybe find a way to organize and compare the financial health and ultimately the viability of colleges. And from that back in 2019 when I started this has become now the college viability series of apps. And we can talk about that in the coming podcasts as well.
Mary McGrath (02:01)
So speaking of the college viability app, what do you believe is the best feature on the app or also is the most impactful on determining whether or not a school will close?
Gary (02:12)
Yeah, great question. And it's easily the comparisons. And the data in the app, and there's versions for students and families, both on the public college side and the private college sides, it provides eight years of comparisons. Eight years of comparisons for things like enrollment and graduation rates and retention rates and tuition and fee revenue. And I'll tell you, Mary, if it's Mary McGrath University,
and your enrollment has gone down for eight consecutive years, if your graduation rates have been around 40 % for eight consecutive years, Mary, that's a trend, and it's not a good trend. And so the app lets users compare those trends. I don't make recommendations, I don't do predictions. Now I have my own mind. I know which colleges are in trouble.
But in my mind, I provide the tools, kind of like the old Kelly Blue Book, and this may predate you. Kelly Blue Book evaluated cars. The folks from Kelly went and kicked the tires on cars and then reported on that. This car is good. This car is not so good. I think I do the same thing with the college viability app. I don't kick tires, of course, but I kick colleges and I kick their enrollment rates. I kick their tuition fees and much, much more. And it's a comparison tool.
And I guess I'll throw one other comparison to it while I think about it, is we're all familiar with the FAFSA and the debacle that we are all experiencing in higher education in 2024. And of course the FAFSA is when families provide colleges with information on the family's finances, right? Fair enough. Well, I really think that the, I believe even that the college viability at Mary is a reverse FAFSA.
It's only fair, for example, your family has shared its finances with the college, that the college share its finances with you. And of course, colleges aren't going to do that on their own. That's one of the many reasons, Mary, that I created the app.
Mary McGrath (04:09)
So besides the comparison tool, do you have any other personal favorite features on the app?
Gary (04:14)
There's one that's kind of an inside baseball and I'll talk about it. And the essence is called, you'll understand this right away, unfunded institutional grants. All right, big name, there's a lot of syllables there. And it's really measures the amount of discounts, merit aid, and even scholarships that colleges award students to go to their college.
And when the unfunded part is, and say, you know, they gave Sam Smith a $15 ,000 merit aid to attend Mary McGrath University. That $15 ,000 is just a discount. It's unfunded. They're not taking $15 ,000 from one college account, Mary, and putting it in Sam Smith's account. They're just discounting that tuition. And so while the student may or may not choose to go to Mary McGrath University,
The college is effectively forgoing that revenue by offering that discount. That's scary. And I'll give you an example. There was a college that closed in about springtime last year, 2023. Iowa Westlake University, they're closed so I can talk about it. They had actually increased their enrollment, about 300 students, as I recall, over the last eight reported years. But they had been given away such large discounts that at the end of the day, they didn't have enough money to meet payroll.
They didn't have enough money to keep the lights on and they closed.
Mary McGrath (05:40)
So based upon the data in the app and also your own knowledge on college closures, do you believe that private institutions are more likely to close due to financial issues than public institutions?
Gary (05:51)
yeah, and that's an easy answer to that, of course. And that's in the general media reporting, that's in the general literature. Public colleges are funded by years of my taxes. Whether we choose to go to private colleges or not, we're still funding public colleges. And there will be very, very few, if any, there will be some, but a really small number of public colleges that close. There have already been, just in 2024, about one private nonprofit college per week closing in 2024.
That will continue to be the case. And it's just like if you and I had the Gary and Mary coffee shop, it's a mom and pop operation. We don't have the capacity to grow beyond our five tables and whatever it is that we have number of seats. The same thing with these colleges. They don't have the resources to withstand difficult economic times. And as a result, they find themselves in a cashflow crunch and they don't have the funds, they don't have the dollars, they don't have the cash to keep the lights on and to meet payroll.
Mary McGrath (06:48)
So let's just say a student attending Murray McGrath University or another one of these private institutions just found out that their school is going to close, whether it be next semester or next year, what would you say should be their first steps?
Gary (07:03)
Well, I'm going to answer it and be kind of smart. I like to start off a little bit. The first step should have been that first decision should have included a look at college finances. Now I know in our country and our culture, and I'm guessing when you looked at colleges for your decision, families just don't look at college finances. Colleges for decades, for centuries, have been assumed to be financially stable, and that's no longer the case. So first time out, if you're a 17 year old, 16 year old, 18 year old sitting down with your family,
To think about colleges, the first thing is to use the college viability app, spend the 29 bucks to get it and compare the financial health of colleges. And it's easy to do. There's demos online. We can post that demo to the show notes. But if the college closes, you've got another chance to kind of redeem yourself. Colleges typically have something, Mary, called teach out agreements. So if Mary McGrath University closes, you create a teach out agreement with Gary College. And I agree to teach out.
provide classes, courses to the students that are leaving the now closing Mary McGrath College to finish their degrees. What I'm finding in the research that I do and the reporting that I do for college viability is that in most cases, the colleges that are closing are sending their students for those teach -out agreements, Mary, to colleges that are at least in as bad and in some case not worse, financial health.
I think I told you last time you and I chatted, I will be interviewing a mom and her daughter. The daughter has chosen two colleges in two consecutive years. They both closed. Just imagine the emotional and mental trauma for the daughter, her classmates, the faculty, the staff. The financial health of college, Mary, is important. We're not there as a culture, as a society, in recognizing that yet, but we're probably getting pretty close.
Mary McGrath (08:40)
Talk about bad luck.
So to kind of flip the perspective on this topic, what would you say is the best way for these endangered colleges to combat this financial failure that they might be facing?
Gary (09:08)
For better or for worse, Mary, I believe that the colleges that are not gonna make it, that the proverbial die is already cast. There's not much you can do. I've written before, I've spoken on my podcast, interviews with others that...
There are no programmatic changes. There are no marketing changes. There are no enrollment changes any financially challenged college can make. And this is an important qualification that will provide materially significant, that's important, new sources of revenue. It may bring in some couch money, a few thousands, a few tens of thousands, a few hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it won't be enough to materially impact, significantly impact the financial health of that college.
If they survive the period of college closures that we're in now, and that may last for another year or so, then they really need to start looking at consolidating merging with other colleges because the mom and pop colleges, and I know that's kind of condescending, but those small colleges cannot reasonably expect to compete against larger colleges, against public colleges, without engaging in some sort of economic scale across five, 10, 15 or more colleges.
as part of one organization. Again, there's some inside baseball stuff associated with that, but that's what I will tell anybody, Mary, who listens to me. And there are quite a few people who do. Some don't like what I say, but many, many listen to me.
Mary McGrath (10:36)
Yeah. So speaking back to the mother and daughter you said you're going to interview, whether it be from that daughter's perspective or from another perspective, high school students perspective, what would you say are your best tips for narrowing down a long list of colleges that they might have to choose from?
Gary (10:54)
I guess the one tip I would give beyond the college finances is there's a place called College Navigator. It's a federal website and it tracks the last few years of graduates by major, graduates by program. And so, and I always use a journalism example. If you're looking at five colleges, go to this College Navigator and look under program completions is the link and see how many graduates they had for the last three or four years in their journalism program.
This is an example. If they had five graduates, four graduates, small number of graduates over the last three or four years, and another college you're looking at has had 20 or 50 or 100, be really, really careful about selecting colleges with low enrollment, low number of graduates in a major because experience is telling us right now that those programs are at greater risk of closure than those with higher enrollment.
Mary McGrath (11:52)
So I know you mentioned a little bit before about being on other podcasts. So what's your favorite thing about creating podcasts or even being featured on other podcasts?
Gary (12:02)
Well, as you can tell, I'm a boring speaker and I never, you know, I never get passionate or excited or anything like that. Of course I'm teasing. The ability to say the written word, share the written word audio only has great value. The written word can do that, but when you can hear somebody speak with passion and conviction and have the data behind it in that podcast format,
I think that is much more useful than just reading stuff on a typed or typed page or on a screen. And I can create the content. I know I've been taught myself how to edit the content, as you and I have discussed. And there's great value in some people hearing not just the words, but the tone and the passion behind the words.
Mary McGrath (12:48)
So to finish us off with our last question, what would you say are your best tips for college students or even high school students when beginning to network or build connections?
Gary (13:01)
For sure, high school seniors and college freshmen, underclassmen, get on LinkedIn. Learn how LinkedIn works. I don't foresee any other app, any other social media tool serving the same value as LinkedIn does. And you and I have talked about this before, I know off microphone. Get a good headshot. Don't make it a cropped image off of some party you went to.
And then just go and see how others put content on there. And I guess if I'd offer one more tip before I give it back to you to wrap up, Mary, is when you're in that high school, college age period and you're doing assignments for whatever the class is, put those projects, LinkedIn gives you a chance to put those projects on your LinkedIn profile. Do it time after time after time, because trust me, there are recruiters looking for you and they're looking not only for your major,
They're not only looking for your GPA, they're looking for a list of things that you have done that maybe are relevant to the type of candidate that they're looking for.
Mary McGrath (14:04)
All right, Dr. Stocker, well, thank you so much for your time, and let's conclude this first episode of Beyond the Brochure.
guidance on college decisions where we talk about the financial health and viability of different colleges as well as different college decisions that a prospective student may be facing. Thank you.