- The next accreditation review was scheduled for July 1, 2016.
Academic/career counseling services
Employment services for current students
Placement services for program completers
Weekend college
If students come back for a second year, that suggests they are satisfied and able to succeed. The schools with satisfied freshmen should score above that dark gray 50% mark.
How many people transfer out of Altierus Career College - Bissonnet within 8 years of entering? If you're considering a school with lots of transfers, be sure to find out why it was a bad fit for so many other students!
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.
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.
Even if you don't need financial aid, the ability of past students to successfully repay loans speaks to the value of the education received.
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. Read below for details on the typical loan burden, and keep in mind that a low default rate may be more important than loan amounts in predicting your future success.
At Altierus Career College - Bissonnet, 82% of full-time degree-seeking freshmen receive federal student loans, averaging $6,724 each in just the freshman year. We have much more details about the full loan burden students experience in our Cost and Financial Aid Section.
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.
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.
Who might be attending school with you? We'll look at what degrees most students have received, whether they are on campus or online, a little about their path, and the overall student body size. Our aim is to give some idea of what the campus culture might be.
This donut chart shows you what degrees were awarded by Altierus Career College - Bissonnet last year, and gives you a good idea of this school's focus. Make sure this school's focus matches your goals.
There are performance problems with many online-focused schools -- you can read about this in an Ididio case study, but you may want some online options to give you greater flexibility.
You will be most happy at a school with a large number of students who are like you, whether that's someone who enters right out of high school, or someone who is transferring, or someone who isn't ready to work towards a degree.
Another breakdown that can help is a view of the student body size. Here we show student counts, including part-time versus full-time students. If the proportion of students that best describes you is relatively small, then is it possible that another school might be better-prepared to meet your needs?
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.
The NPR article A Campus More Colorful Than Reality: Beware That College Brochure emphasizes the importance of judging a school's diversity based on solid data as promotional materials are eager to suggest a multicultural student body.
Student race is only categorized for non-international students, and international students are listed separately.
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.
There are multiple outside factors that can affect the gender balance of students recruited by schools. As an example, within less-affluent families higher education is more frequently attained by women than by men, a phenomenon explored in the Atlantic. Therefore, schools serving lower-income populations may be more likely to see a gender imbalance. On the other hand, some colleges may offer predominantly degrees that are stereotypically associated with a single gender, affecting the ratio of men to women accordingly.
In the folders below, you can explore your options for study. The folders are grouped and colored by broad field, and you can see the number of students who have completed degrees in each field by following the colors in our chart showing graduations. You can...
- Filter the programs by the award level that interests you.
- Use the search key to limit the listings to all relevant progrmas.
- Select a specific program from this menu to see some great details!
- Healthcare Technologists and Aids
- Healthcare office support
- Contruction Trades
- Engineering and Science Technologies
Check out the number of disciplinary actions (implemented within the school) and arrests (implemented by law enforcement external to the school).
There are very few offenses classified as criminal at most schools. For clarity, we omitted statistics for the most rare crimes, such as murder or manslaughter, and combined sex-related crimes (whose precise names and definitions have changed over time) as well as burglaries and robberies.
This school does not report any housing for students.
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.
- Credit for Military Training
- Dedicated point of contact for support services for veterans, military servicemembers, and their families
- Member of Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges
- Yellow Ribbon Program
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 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.
You can find a myriad of articles about the enrollment crises expected across US colleges and universities due to fewer births during the 2008 recession and other demographic shifts. The end result to you is that you need to protect your college investment by researching the financial stability of schools that you are considering. Many of our metrics are based on the excellent advice of Forbes' Financial Health Grades.
Ididio does not want to see you stuck with debt and no degree.
The core operating margin is the percentage by which core revenues exceed (or, when negative, fall short of) core expenses, so higher is better here. This margin excludes finances for non-academic expenses such as housing, hospitals, or other independent operations. For schools with large endowments, this measure can be volitile from year-to-year without indicating concern because investment losses and gains are driving this figure, but if an institution's margin is trending downwards or consistently negative, you should be concerned.
Altierus Career College - Bissonnet 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.
We divided revenue and expenses for Altierus Career College - Bissonnet 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.
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 Altierus Career College - Bissonnet's resources by selecting from the buttons below.
Here we examine assets at Altierus Career College - Bissonnet 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.
