Riding the wave: America's changing demographics and its effect on the enrollment and financial strength of private colleges and universities

This quantitative study explored the relationship between diversity, enrollment size, and financial strength at America's private, four-year colleges and universities. Based on principles of environmental scanning, this study examined the external environment for these institutions in light of changes predicted by the Department of Education's Projections of Education Statistics to 2022. This study created diversity and financial strength scores for all schools in the sample. A correlation test was conducted to determine the correlation coefficient for each pair of variables. Schools were separated into their five size classifications and means were calculated for each variable in each size category. These means were then compared. Scatter plots were created in an attempt to determine any visual clues to the relationships among the variables. Means were calculated separately for the member schools of the Association of Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) in each IPEDS size category. Those means were compared to the means of the peer group as a whole to determine the differences between institutions of biblical higher education and their secular peers. Finally, the financial strength variable was modified to account for the predicted demographic changes. The change between the original financial strength score and the modified score was used as a variable in another round of correlation measurements and comparisons. This study found that it is far too simplistic to say that bigger schools are more diverse or are financially stronger than smaller schools. Likewise, ABHE member schools are not less diverse or financially weaker than their secular peers. Instead, the relationships between diversity, enrollment size, and financial strength are much more nuanced and less intuitive.