OverviewProgramsCostsFinancial AidUndergraduate OutcomesClassroomHousingServicesResearchStudent BodySchool Finances
Overview
Founded in 1927, American College of Financial Services is in a large suburb with more than 250,000 residents. It is in the Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington PA-NJ-DE-MD area.
Highlights
Largest undergraduate program (2,101): Financial Planning and Services
Institutional Control
American College of Financial Services is a private not-for-profit organization.
Fewer details
Accreditation
Accreditation provides important oversight over a school's instructional practices and institutional stability.
American College of Financial Services holds an accreditation from one of the seven regional accreditors, which should ensure that credits earned transfer easily to other schools.
Accreditation History
Middle States Commission on Higher Education (Accredited July 1, 1978 - present)
- The next accreditation review was scheduled for November 30, 2019.
Undergraduate Students
Not all students attend their first college full time to completion. While some schools are focused on those that population, many schools focus on transfer and or part time students. What types of of student does this school support.
Full-time first-time students
Full-time transfer students
Part-time first-time students
Part-time transfer students
Programs
American College of Financial Services program offerings
What award level are you pursuing?
0-1 Year Certificate
Select a degree to see the details, or use the sankey below to explore the options.
Select a degree
Quantitative/Technology
Business
Costs
Undergraduate costs
Here's a quick summary of costs to attend American College of Financial Services. You will find the most up-to-date information at their website for admissions.
View
All
Charge
Per-credit charges
Cost
$316
Financial Aid
Financial aid overview
Understanding the rules and process that determine who gets financial aid can be intimidating. Here are some quick links to help:
- Visit American College of Financial Services's Net Price Calculator for the most accurate estimate of your anticipated costs. Every school publishes a Net Price Calculator that does its best to give you a fair estimate of what you might expect to pay. Many calculators consider your high school record as part of the calculation. This will be far more accurate than any of the averages or published tuition values that you see here.
- FederalStudentAid, a government site that will walk you through the federal financial aid process. There are a number of kinds of student loans and other aid, and this site can walk you through all of the choices you will need to make.
Undergraduate Outcomes
Graduation Rate
No undergraduate students were full-time. In the last reporting year, 31% of students, including those who were part-time or transfer students, received a degree within 8 years.
Time to complete
4 years
6 years
8 years
Context: Graduation rate
These numbers reflect eight-year graduation rates for all degrees at the colleges and universities in your chosen context group. This reporting is for undergraduate students inclusive of transfer students and full/part-time students.
Fewer details
Are students graduating on time?
Let us tell you all about low graduation rates!
Across the country, graduation rates are surprisingly low. In fact, Forbes Magazine suggests that they are unacceptably low. However, from another point of view, sometimes graduation rates simply reflect the relative preparation of the students who enter. Colleges with a mission to help people coming from less advantaged backgrounds, such as first-generation and low-income students, may have low graduation rates despite relatively strong outcomes for students who face many obstacles to success. Without the context provided in these views of completion rates, it can be tricky to separate predatory schools that take financial advantage of under-prepared students from those that are actively seeking to encourage and help those students.
For the consumer choosing a school, once you have narrowed your list to those schools that you can afford and that seem likely to admit you, consider the outcome measures in this section and choose the specific measures that best describe your plans. Very simply, schools with high graduation rates and high loan repayment rates will likely give you the best opportunity to succeed.
Context: the impact of wealth and transfer status on degree completion
We took a close look lagging success for students with financial need in a case study. Here's a chance to compare schools based on student successes with a better appreciation of how circumstances may impact success. One word of caution: the statistics for some categories may consist of only a handful of students -- see the details by hovering or long-pressing on the bars.
Full-time first-time students
Full-time transfer students
Part-time first-time students
Part-time transfer students
Choose a student group
Part-time transfer students
Years after enrolling.
4
6
8
Part-time transfer students who received a certificate within 8 years after enrolling
Context and trends: Repayment Rate
How much progress do you think you'll be able to make towards paying down your college loans seven years after leaving school? In our research, we discovered that a surprisingly large number of students don't default on their loans, but also aren't making progress in paying down their principal amount. The percentages here count alumni who have decreased their loan amounts by at least $1.
Context and trends: are the loan default rates as small as possible?
The default rate is the percentage of students who are already delinquent on their loans within three years of leaving the school. If a school has a high default rate, that sends an alarm out that the students' educations are not sufficient to earn enough to repay those loans. Keep in mind that a low default rate may be more important than loan amounts in predicting your future success.
Not so much?
Classroom Experience
Student attention at American College of Financial Services
Schools are required to report the ratio of students per instructor, but look for a small number of students for every full-time instructor as your best indicator of personal attention and a modern well-integrated curriculum.
Fewer details
Full-time and long-term instructors at American College of Financial Services
Full-time faculty are mostly likely to be on campus and available for interaction, and to craft up-to-date courses and programs. American College of Financial Services has 70% full-time instructors, and 75% of the context schools have a lower percentage of full-time faculty. Faculty with multi-year contracts provide additional stability and commitment to the school and its students.Within the full-time instructors at American College of Financial Services, 94% have multi-year employment contracts. 84% of the context schools have a lower percentage of faculty with multi-year contracts.
Full-time instructors
Long-term instructors
Not so much?
Faculty Diversity
Here's an opportunity to explore the faculty's diversity. For many schools, attracting a diverse teaching faculty can be a challenge. It's important to judge their success with the reality check of what their peer schools have accomplished.
Number of full-time instructors
The chart shows male instructors to the left, and female to the right, with the races/origins included along the bars. Select the context graph to see how this diversity profile compares to the schools that interest you.
Housing
Activities and Services
Programs for Veterans
If you are a veteran, it's worth digging around to find a military-friendly campus. We think this article about how colleges might help veterans might be a good starting point for questions to ask the Admissions office before you choose to attend. It's also good to be aware that many for-profit schools are behaving as predators, hungry for GI Bill dollars. Watching out for those schools is no different for veterans than for all students: judge very critically using our "Student Satisfaction and Success" tab for undergraduate programs. We wish we had the same data to support graduate programs; however, we think the undergraduate data is a good starting point for judging overall quality.
- Dedicated point of contact for support services for veterans, military servicemembers, and their families
Research
The library is the backbone of academic learning and research
A rigorous academic program requires that students and faculty alike are engaging in independent research, and that activity requires strong library support. You can get some useful information here:
- How strong and how balanced between traditional physical books and easily-accessed (but expensive) electronic journals and other resources is this library?
- How much is this library borrowing from other libraries? The number of interlibrary loans received can indicate the school's commitment to getting the resources on-campus researchers need, and also of the research activity on campus.
- How big a resource is this library to other libraries? A large number of outgoing interlibrary loans speaks highly of the value of its content.
The presence of a library in and of itself is a good thing. Increasingly, libraries are comfortable and inviting spaces for individual and group study sessions. Librarians can be incredibly friendly guides in your quest to find materials that aid your learning.
Comparison of library resources per student
How do the per-student library resources at American College of Financial Services compare to other schools?
Comparison of library loans per student
A small library could make up for a small collection by allowing a large number of interlibrary loans to be received. An excellent library can show its strength by its number of loans given.
Research funding: the best indicator of post-baccalaureate academic rigor
Any school that reports at least $150,000 in research and development expenditures in a given year should have submitted out the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) survey to the National Science Foundation (NSF). We did not find HERD data for $American College of Financial Services, so there would at most modest graduate-level academic scholarship campus-wide.
Student Body
Undergraduate Study Types
All undergraduate students are part-time. About 100% of undergraduate students take all of their courses via distance education, while another 0% take some courses online.
Undergraduate Full-time
Undergraduate Online classes
Context: Student body size
American College of Financial Services enrolled 14,769 students over the past academic year. The the student body size is larger than 86% of the context schools.
Undergraduate student gender
Is the gender balance of American College of Financial Services undergraduate students important to you? You can see the breakdown in this donut chart.
Gender
Men
Women
Undergraduate student race/origin
American College of Financial Services reports that 9% of undergraduate students are minority, which is near the middle of the context schools. Similarly, this school's 0 of international students is near the middle proportion of international students within the context schools.
Race/Origin
White
Black
Pacific Islander
Hispanic
Asian
American Indian
Multiracial
Not Reported
Fewer details
Context: Gender Balance
It is very difficult for many types of schools to achieve a gender balance, and this context is valuable in evaluating the balance at American College of Financial Services.
Context: Percentage of women
With 28% women undergraduate students, American College of Financial Services has a lower percentage of women than 97% of context schools.
Context: Undergraduate student race/origin
Here is how American College of Financial Services compares to the rest of the context group in terms of diversity in the student race and origin.
Freshman residences
A high proportion of international and out-of-state students speaks to reputation and offers an opportunity for diverse interactions in and out of class.
Freshman residence
In-state
Out-of-state
International
Not Reported
Undergraduate student age distribution
The age distribution at a school can tell you a lot about its mission. If you're looking for a traditional undergraduate experience, you may prefer to see students who are mostly younger than 25 (lighter shades), but if you want support as a returning student, a large number of students 25 and older (darker shades) may better suit your needs.
Age range
20-21
22-24
25-29
30-34
35-39
40-49
50-64
65 and over
Unknown
School Finances
American College of Financial Services: What its budget can tell you about classroom quality
Where a school spends and collects its money can suggest a lot about the educational experience it offers. The tabs below offer a look at spending that is important for the quality of your experience if you attend.
Instructional spending
Student services spending
Research spending
Context and trends: Instructional expenditures per student
Instructional expenses are primarily the salary and benefits paid to the heart of a school: its full-time instructors. High expenditures in this area suggest care in hiring enough highly qualified full-time faculty to provide personal attention and up-to-date subject-area excellence.
Fewer details
Does incoming revenue consistently cover expenses?
American College of Financial Services is a private not-for-profit school. Along with publicly-controlled schools, not-for-profit schools do not have the goal of annual profit, but they do want to have healthy finances with adequate revenue to meet all expenses. On the other hand, private for-profit schools have creating a profit for shareholders as an annual goal.
Total revenue and expenses by category
We divided revenue and expenses for American College of Financial Services into categories to give some insight to what may have influenced peaks and ditches in the chart above. The purple shades correspond most directly to student education. The blue shades, auxiliary expenses and revenue, are often related to room and board. We show investment gains and losses in apricot.
Investment gains
Tuition and fees revenue
Government appropriations etc.
Private and capital gifts
Educational sales revenue
Other revenue
Investment losses
Instructional expenses
Student services expenses
Academic support expenses
Institutional support expenses
Research expenses
Other expenses
Not so much?
The power of a large endowment
Related to the previous question of whether the annual revenue stream is stable is the question, "How deep are this school's pockets?" For many schools, a major source of annual income is investment growth. Schools with large endowments have a built-in revenue stream, although you'll see in the accompanying graphs that this revenue stream is highly dependent on the nation's economy. You can choose how to examine the depth of American College of Financial Services's resources by selecting from the buttons below.
Choose asset category
Net Assets
Total Endowment
Endowment Growth Rate
Net Assets Per Student
Here we examine assets at American College of Financial Services in context, and it seems most fair to adjust for the size of the institution. We examine the assets per full-time-equivalent student so that we level the playing field for size.
There's a catch to these assets, though. Many gifts to a school's endowment have strings attached; the money is restricted to a specific purpose. Assets shown in green below are unrestricted, and are very important to a school's ability to meet its financial obligations. Some assets are the land and buildings that a school must have in order to function, and these may appear as green (unrestricted assets) but are nonetheless less helpful in meeting annual financial commitments. This look at assets is only a piece of the puzzle as we decide if a school is stable.
Restricted net assets
Unrestricted net assets
Context: 2019 net assets per student
