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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 (00:00)
Yeah, so as of right now, obviously it's late July, college is gonna start in a few short weeks. So what would you say the impact of the fast food buckle is gonna have this
Gary (00:11)
There's a fafsa debacle. I didn't know that, Sarcasm, big time. Thanks, yeah. He just stunned me. That was funny. That was sarcasm on my part. It's gonna be a mess. It's gonna be a mess. And I think I've talked about this a couple of times on the podcast. What I'm both hearing and reading about the media and the college leaders that I talked to is something called prior year to date deposits.
Mary McGrath (00:15)
I hate to be the one to tell you.
Gary (00:39)
which is students, whether they're freshmen or seniors like yourself, sending in their deposits, usually a couple hundred dollars, say, hey, I'm going to be there. And it's down about 10%, give or take. A little bit higher some places, a little bit lower some places. So the vision that I see on this is as colleges start to realize that their revenue for that fall semester, or this fall semester, is not where it needs to be.
they're going to look ahead to December and say, this is it. Or maybe some might look ahead into the first semester, the spring semester of 2025 and say, all right, we're out of here, but we can hold on until May of 2025. As we talked about before, we're looking at about one private college closure per week, not quite.
I'm thinking we're looking starting in October, November of this year into March, maybe April of next year, two to three private colleges closing per week. And that may not sound like much in the single case, but envision two colleges a week closing for four months. That's almost, that's more than 30 colleges closing in a short period of time. And there will be impacts to the industry. I'm not smart enough, Mary, to know what those will be.
but I worry that many, many future college consumers will start to categorize private colleges as high risk and start to focus more on publics. That's not fair and that's not reasonable because like Lindenwood, there are many, many, many strong private colleges, but you need to use these students need to use tools like what you and I promote, which is a college viability app. And again, I'll remind listeners that we have the 2024.
private college viability app for students and families. And we also have a similar version for public colleges.