📊 Toggle and Ye Shall Find: Comparing Denominational Performance
Welcome to what might be the most divine use of toggle buttons you’ve seen all day.
The chart below compares private religious universities by their average performance in four areas:
- Market Saturation (How competitive is your state? Is your school lost in a crowd?)
- Academic Efficiency (Are you giving out enough diplomas to justify the electric bill?)
- aCFI (Adjusted Composite Financial Index — our custom, no-nonsense version of university financial health)
- Survivability (A weighted blend of the above — the big enchilada)
🔄 Use the toggle buttons to switch between these categories and see how the denominations stack up. Bars change size and color based on performance. The greener, the better. No red letters here, just red warning signs.
😇 What Does This Chart Actually Show?
This visualization ranks religious affiliations based on how their affiliated universities are performing — academically, financially, and competitively — as the enrollment cliff looms ever closer.
Some quick tips:
- The bars are sorted alphabetically (because fairness matters).
- The default view is "Survivability", our overall score of institutional health.
- Hover over a bar to see the score to the third decimal (because we like our accuracy like we like our coffee — a little over the top).
🧐 Observations from the Pew (and Spreadsheet)
Now to the juicy bits.
1. General beats specific
Broad religious categories like "Protestant" and "Roman Catholic" scored consistently well across all metrics. Why? Likely because:
- They have lots of universities, which smooths out the odd financial whoopsie here and there.
- They’ve invested in branding, scale, and infrastructure that can weather demographic decline.
In short, they’re playing the long game.
2. Wesleyans: The Divine Dark Horse
Here’s the curveball — Wesleyan-affiliated schools scored extremely well, even though their theological specificity would suggest a smaller footprint.
How did they pull this off?
- Maybe Wesleyans just run tight ships.
- Maybe they’ve got better spreadsheets than everyone else.
- Or maybe they just prayed harder.
We’ll dig more into that mystery later, but let’s just say the Wesleyans are currently Methodically beating the Methodists. 😏
🙏 One Final Note
As always, the data here is sourced from federal reports, public disclosures, and IPEDS. The denominations are how schools self-identify in government filings, so if you think a university has been mis-categorized, shoot me an email at james_long@friends.edu.
We’ll fix it, or at the very least, start a spirited theological debate about it.
Now go ahead, click around. Let the toggling commence.