Alverno College (WI) & La Grange College (GA).: Inside Their Financial Health 2-10-26 CFH Show

It is the Private College Financial Health Show with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker, where each week we look at the financial health and even the viability of private colleges throughout the country. And we use data that no one else uses. We use data from audited financial statements. We use data from IRS 1990s, and we, we look at it for trends. We look at patterns associated with colleges throughout the country. And joining us from Tulsa today is Dr. Matt Hendricks, who has developed some phenomenal tools, and one we're going to use today is the Financial Compass. And I bet, Matt Hendricks, sometime during the session we might talk about the Strategic Compass and other tools that are out there. What do you think?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so we're doing Alverno and LaGrange.

So yeah, and we have guests joining us today. So we're looking at Alverno College and we're looking at LaGrange in Georgia. And you— the show is yours, sir. Go for it.

Alverno in Wisconsin. Okay, so let's double-check the peer set first. All right, right here. Uh, okay, so we have some They must not have submitted their own peer set to the Department of Ed, so their peer group here is schools that have reported them as a peer. So McKendree, Walsh, Metropolitan College in New York, Lakeland. So it's not the best peer set. They may not agree with it, but we'll— we still have the national median to compare back to as well. All right, I'm gonna go into the key metrics. Okay, a lot of red here. That is generally not a good thing. I'm flagging all of the line items that are, um, abnormal. Um, so we need to look further at those. So, so really everything here except for expenses are flagged, but even those should be flagged because they've grown faster than revenues.

Oh yeah.

Um, okay, so let's start at the top. So total net assets We're looking at a 5, 5-year snapshot here. They're at about $59 million in total net assets but have decreased from $77 million. That's a 24% reduction in total net assets in the last 5 years. Totally abnormal. It's normal, uh, you'll see schools are growing substantially in their net assets in the last 5 years. Unrestricted net assets are down almost 50%. UNAP down 100%. Um, yeah, UNAP's basically zero now. That means they've essentially— remember, UNAP is the amount of liquid unrestricted assets that they can use to cover expenses and deficits and so on. Um, and they went from $21 million 5 years ago to now zero. Which means, um, it's bad. All right, it means there's not much. Yeah, there's, there's not— trying to think, how else can they cover losses? You can take out loans and stuff like that, but, uh, very few banks are going to do that. You can try to sell, take out a loan from your restricted assets, which requires the Attorney General's approval generally. Um, so this is a pretty dire situation here on the UNAP and liquidity. I'll go through these again in a second. Revenues are down 17% in 5 years. At the same time, expenses are up almost 8%.

Not good.

So massive disconnect between what's happening on the revenue side and what's happening with expenses. Generally, these need to move together, um, and that's not happening right now. Uh, net income losses are massive. 33% net income margin loss deficit in 2023. That means That means if they're, um, see, I'll make sure I get this right. If they— well, basically I can show you that they lost $11 million in 2023 on only $32, $33 million in revenue. So if you take 3% divided by that, 33%. And they did the same thing again in fiscal year 2024, lost almost $11 million again on only $30 million in revenue. So those are massive losses. That, that needs immediate attention. Can't do that very long. And I don't, I don't know that the runway— this is fiscal year '24. If they did this again in '25, uh, yeah, I'm not sure how they would have covered their expenses in that case unless they're taking out loans from restricted assets, which is totally possible. Um, all right, FTE enrollments, shockingly, is not all that bad, only down 8% in the last 5 years. Uh, net student revenues are down 20% though, so they're probably discounting significantly today compared to what they were even 5 years ago. Little to no investment in the physical plant, also a red flag. Endowment value is growing slowly. Okay, almost, almost certainly growing slowly because it's all restricted they can't probably access it, or they're taking loans against it. So on paper it's still there, but it may not be actually in the accounts anymore. So it exists— in other words, it exists on the, on the statement, on the audit, but the cash has been already extracted in, in the form of a loan, which can cause this to grow really slowly like it is. Or, um, or they're just pulling out all of their well, you've got these big draws, so they're pulling out all of the money they can take out, uh, from the endowments legally, um, and not reinvesting like most schools do. So you've got a 17% draw here. That, that might be that. All right, lots to unpack, um, starting with UNEP. You can see there UNEP actually was— well, this is percent change. Let's do raw values here. Right.

Okay.

So UNEP was negative for several years, then went positive, but now negative again. So this is a long history of, of lack of liquidity, it looks like, assuming these numbers are representing actually liquidity. There are some— this is an estimated UNEP number, so it can be off a little bit, but certainly the trend will reveal what's happening. And you don't go from 27 to zero and, uh, not ask a lot of questions about what's happening to liquidity.

But those funds in 2020 and 2021 are probably post-pandemic funds from the government, right?

Oh yeah, good point. Uh, unrestricted net assets, there's a surge, or maybe a reclassification. I'll have to double-check, uh, surge, but we're right back to where we were basically. Unrestricted net assets are, are are falling fast. Total net assets— there must have been a reclass because the total net assets haven't changed. Yeah, total net asset change is down 25% since 2016. Just a sharp decline post-pandemic here. Um, not good. We'll go net income margin. Yeah, so When's the last time they had a positive net income? A very small positive in, it looks like, 2017, but since then, never, never positive. And these, these are catastrophic losses here. Um, and notice their peer set's not doing great either, but much, much better than Alverno is. And the, a typical school will be around +1% on average here, and and that's nowhere close to that. All right, this looks really concerning, to be honest.

Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely.

And we don't have 2025, so just keep that in mind. Maybe things got better, but if this trend continued in 2025, their position would have eroded even more, which it probably did. It's really hard to turn a 33% net income loss or 35% back to neutral in one year unless you do some massive cutting. Not going to do it on the revenue side unless you get a one-time gift or something. But, um, yeah, that looks pretty dire. All right, let's take a look at the revenue side, starting with total, uh, operating revenues. Yeah, operating revenues are down 28%, uh, since 2016 and a sharp decline since 2022. That's all in line with what we're seeing with net income losses as well. Net tuition revenue or net student revenue. All right. Net student revenue is down 36%. Again, that's just persistent losses there. Remember, we thought that they might be discounting more. We can check that with the per-student net tuition revenue. Yeah, there's a sharp drop here. In 2020 and further drops. So they're charging really low price, it appears, um, which is probably making their problem worse.

Um, they were around $20,000 back in 2016.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, I mean, I see what they're trying to do. They're trying to keep enrollment constant and by reducing the price, but, um, I think that's actually making things worse. Probably better to trade a higher price for lower enrollment in this case, potentially.

Take a look at enrollment, see if it did go up.

Yeah, enrollment is down, I think. But, um, $15,000 net for, uh, room and board and net tuition is quite low. That's below the 25th percentile. Um, let's take a look at the— what was I going to check?

Enrollment.

Yeah, students percent change. Yeah, so they're try— they're trying to keep enrollment constant. And it's actually the opposite of what their peers have done, it appears. So they should probably do what their peers have done and keep the price up and sacrifice enrollments. It's better for your bottom line, probably. I would need to do some more investigation on this, but I suspect the significant— you know, it's about what we call price elasticity of demand. So they've reduced their price significantly, but without seeing much change at all in the quantity demanded. So it works in the opposite direction too. They could probably bring their price back up and not see much of a loss in enrollment. So that would immediately provide some relief to the budget, I would imagine.

Well, you economists can explain everything, can't you?

Yeah, yeah. I try not to use so much jargon, but yes, I think— I suspect they need to immediately bring that net price back into in line with their peer set, um, or at least above the 25th percentile of all schools. School's in Milwaukee, if I remember right.

Yeah, right, South Milwaukee.

Yeah, yeah, it shouldn't be that, that cheap. Um, all right, okay, that on the revenue side, I, I would say that they need to do a deep dive on their pricing strategy right now. If they have consultants telling them not to do it, disregard that advice because I've heard that they're just wrong a lot in cases like this, uh, where your price is just really out of line with what the market is. They have a model that they're really overconfident with. Do not listen to them.

Yeah, it's not like it's a single year. It's not like it's a single year. There's a trend.

There's a clear trend. You just significantly reduce your price and enrollment continue to be flat or decline. So it says your elasticity is pretty low, really close to zero, which means you can change the price and not impact enrollment very much. All right, uh, let's go to the expense side. That's really going to be where they're going to have to dig out quick. Um, so we'll take a look at, um, staffing first. I'll do salaries, wages, and benefits. And that— the reason I say that, again, if you haven't watched the show, it it takes a long time. Even if they do everything I just said on the revenue side and bring the price up back immediately, don't see any change in enrollment, that you won't see the full benefit of that for 4 years, right? Yeah, unless you're going to ratchet up the price for all of your current students, which is not a common policy, but they could do that as well, and then you see a more immediate impact. Um, all right, salaries, wages per $1 million. Okay, this is a problem. Oh my, the 75th percentile is like not even close to where they're at on payroll spends per $1 million in revenue. They're spending over 75% of their revenue on payroll. Normal is about 60%, 55%. All right, their peer set is at 60%, which is also high. And remember, this peer set is also running deficits. So Big problem here with staffing. I suspect they just have too many people. Again, when you spend 76% of your budget on payroll, that leaves very, very little for everything else, like maintaining buildings, for example, and paying the electric bill and, and so on. So it's pretty, um, pretty dire if you're going to spend that much on staffing. All right, uh, let's see if it's the count of staff. Let's go to W-2 employees. Per 1 million. Yep, yep, as we suspected, just a lot of people. 28, 28 employees per 1 million in revenue. Again, this is a really bad situation. Uh, and per student, we can do that as well. Per student looks okay. They just have really low revenue because again, they adjusted their price way down. We shouldn't have done that, uh, in hindsight, of course. But now they have 5 years of data to see that didn't work, so bring it back. Immediately. All right, um, all right, so this is just too many employees for their revenue, um, and that's driving probably a good deal of that salary and wage issue that we just saw in the previous graph. So that we need to cut staff and get close to 17 staff per $1 million in revenue, and they're currently at 28. So that's a significant cut. All right, and just the number of W-2 employees that you have at your institution. All right, they, they would really benefit from a strategic compass. I can show them the exact occupations that are high and also help them narrow that down to the department. So we'd help by occupation and department and exact numbers of folks that are normal for that department and occupation versus what they currently have. To help them do this in a way that is data-driven. All right. So what else should I do? Let's go to the contractor side. So if they're high on staff, hopefully they're low on contractors. All right.

Yeah.

And that looks good. They're about right. So it's really all a staffing issue for FTE. Yeah, that looks fine. All right, so actually, they may be in a situation where some vendors can help them with their budget, reducing staff and reducing costs at the same time. So we'll see. Keep your eye out for vendors that can substitute in in-house staff, food service, for example, and marketing, IT. All right. Before I go into, let's check fees for services though. That could be another check here. Yeah, this is a problem. Okay, so they don't have a lot of contractors, but they do have a high vendor spend. So you have, you can't do both. No college that I've ever seen can really do both, to have both a high in-house payroll and a high spend on vendors at the same time. Almost always catastrophic. And it appears that's the case here. Again, way too high spend on vendors and in-house staff. So I'll help them in a second to try to identify which vendors are odd here. But before we do that, let's take a look at some of these other big expense items like advertising. It looks okay. IT. Okay, IT is a huge problem. Okay, they're spending— I have that right— they're spending 8.5% of their budget, 8.5% of their revenue on IT. Uh, that's not normal. Uh, we're normally at about 2%, right? Is that what that would be? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Less than 2%. Check IT. So we've got in-house staff, vendors, IT. We'll have to check for an IT vendor. It could be that, it could be—

And we're seeing the same pattern, Matt. We see so many places. I think it's a little bit worse here, a lot worse here.

Yeah. Fundraising expenses are high.

Colleges chronically, inability to manage expenses in relationship to revenue everywhere almost.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's just they don't know where to start, right? Like, and this is where you start. You do what I'm doing right here. You flag all this stuff and then start digging into it. Um, travel, fundraising, office, insurance. No insurance, that's probably incorrectly—

they're not in Florida, so probably not an issue.

Yeah, they're not, they're not reporting that, right? I don't think. Uh, travel. Okay, so, all right, I think IT vendors, in-house staff, and, uh, most granular support I can give them on the contractor side with just this app. Let's see what we can do. We may see a IT contracts here. Sure enough, there it is. Yeah, okay, so there's a bunch of stuff here. Let me try to make this so that our viewers can see what's going on. So we have FTE students, we have the vendor name, we have the description, and then this first one is amount per FTE, second one is amount per revenue. For $1 million, right? For $1 million in revenue. So actually, they're spending 10% of their budget on this Allucian contract. That's way, way high. Um, maybe one of the highest in the entire country on a revenue basis. So this one immediately needs to be looked at. Uh, a $3 million spend on this is, is way out of line. Okay. And, and even it was $2 million just a few years ago. Yeah, something's really, really wrong with this. So check that. Here's another one. This is $5 million for online program partner. These rarely worked out in many cases for schools. Um, thankfully a lot of the schools cut, cut them loose before they really damaged their bottom line, but, uh Double-check this. Are you getting an ROI on this? That's a $5 billion investment with almost certainly not paying for itself right now. We need to reevaluate that. Are we going to live long enough to pay to get to the point where this starts paying off? Those are sort of—

they just started that 2 years, not even 2 years ago, and it's time to get that.

That may be the— this huge new contract may be why they're greater net income. In the last couple years. All right, so we have a big issue here with these two vendor contracts. That's $8 million. Um, that's probably more than they're spending on their entire instruction budget, right? Um, so, or close. I'd have to look back, but that's significant amount of spend on just a $30 million revenue school. Yeah. All right, so double-check those. There's some others here too. Janitorial looks high. This should be dropped. $650K for EAB, that's way too high for, for this school. Again, this is too high of a spend for their revenue and size. Yeah, lots of things to sort through here. So there's significant savings here if we cut loose a lot of these vendors. The school can survive certainly without these vendors and may not if they keep these keep these around.

Yeah, yeah.

So let's start there. Um, and then of course you got to do a deep dive on the staffing side, as I mentioned earlier. Um, so that's the best advice I can give them with just this high-level analysis. We do the strategic compass, which goes very deep. As I mentioned, I can flag many more contracts than this. Um, this is only the top 5 that I can see. If they can give me a whole list of all their vendors, I can tell them which ones are look abnormal and should be renegotiated and/or dropped. And yeah, the staffing side, I can point to the department level and occupation code and do that with them. So yeah, I'd be really— urge them to reach out. I'd be happy to help them. And this looks quite urgent, to be honest.

Yeah, their runway is not very long at all.

No, no. Uh, what was the other college we were looking at?

Let's go to Georgia, Matt. Let's go to the LaGrange College in Georgia.

Grange, Georgia. All right. Oh, great peer set. Lots of double confirmed peer sets. Uh, they can't argue with this because both schools are saying that they're peers, so that's great. Uh, we've got a very robust peer set here. I'm gonna go straight down to the Table, we got some things we flag. Okay, unrestricted net assets have declined. Definitely need to look at that. Revenues are down 9%. Um, we've got, let's see, changing net assets from operations. That's okay because that's such a small base. They, they've got a basically balanced budget here. That's good. Um, students FTE is down only 4%. Not too bad. Net student revenues are up though. See, they're doing the opposite. They brought their price up essentially, right? Uh, so that's the only way you can do that. You can have declining students and more student revenue if the price is, is going up per student on average. CapEx, okay, this is a red flag. They're not investing. There may be some deferred maintenance issues here. Um, the CapEx to depreciation ratio is averaged 0.5. That's half of what it should be over a 5-year span just to maintain your capital stock. So we'll look at property equipment. Remind me on that. And endowment draws look okay. There was a big one back here in 2021, but they've since fixed it. Looks fine. All right, let's take a look at unrestricted net assets as we're shrinking. Percent change. Okay, we were looking since here. So yeah, that snapshot from 5 years, doesn't look so great. But if you take in the, the, the previous 5-year block was excellent, massive growth in unrestricted net assets. So zooming out a little bit, this looks much, much better. Their unrestricted net assets are actually up 87% since 2016. So I don't have an issue with that, looks great. Although this, um, stagnation and even decline in the last 5 years is something to look at.

Again, we see that pattern, that post-pandemic pattern. There are many colleges that just simply haven't recovered.

Yeah, net income margin. All right, okay. Oh, how did I miss that? They had— they do have losses. Let me go back down to this chart. Uh, net income margin. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I just totally missed this. They've had big losses in '23 and '24, and then back positive again in '25. All right, this is great. If, if this, this certainly looks like a, uh, budget issue that they then fixed. Let me see if they— what they did. Yeah, they, they reduced their expenses here substantially, about a million plus million dollars, and revenues went up by another $2 million. So that's how they dealt with it. It looks good.

It's a really small college though with those kind of numbers.

Yeah, it's really similar size to Alverno in terms of revenue. Yeah, $30 million I think Alverno was. So that's good. They, they had a, they had an issue here with losses in '23 and '24, but since fixed it, grew, grew revenue a little bit and cut about $2 million out of their budget, which is a significant part of a— it's 10% of their budget, right? Almost. Yeah, I like it. I like it. All right. Okay, so they currently have a balanced budget, it looks like, and they didn't have to draw a lot on their endowment to do that. But let's do the same sort of routine here, go back through their student revenues, see how that's looking. Yeah, they did get a bump here in '25 from student revenues, which helps get them back in line. On a balanced budget. Let's see how they did it. All right, price per student went up a little bit, and I wonder what happened to their enrollment. Um, students. So if you didn't see what I just showed you there, yeah, the, the price per student was up a little bit, and they also had a, a growth year. I'll do percentage change. They had a bump in enrollments in one year.

Interesting.

So whatever they're doing right now seems to be working. Hopefully this continues. Like I said, these things build momentum. If this is actual, like, traditional 4-year undergrads, uh, they do the same thing 4 years in a row, they should see significant growth in enrollment here doing that. All right, looks great. Um, so let's take a look at the expense side. I know they did get back to a balanced budget, but they may have more work to do on this side. Let's take a look at first salaries and wages, biggest component of the budget. And per $1 million, actually looks good. Uh, in-house staff spend is actually quite low. It looks much different than what we just saw at Alberno. Yeah, uh, actually a bit low. So if they feel like they're understaffed, you may feel that way if this is the case. Let's do per student. Yeah, it looks like that in order to balance the budget, they did make some significant cuts to payroll. $11.5 down to $10.6, $10.9. You know, this is the kind of evidence I like to see from leadership, like really quickly correcting the ship, right? Yeah, yeah, I like it. Um, so there were some, some cuts to salaries and wages. Let's see what they did to the W-2 staff. Oops, W-2 employees, just raw values. They went from $583 down to $568. So not a huge cut there. But I wonder, um, one thing I wouldn't necessarily like is if the, the way that they cut salary, wages, and benefits spend is if they just paused retirement benefits. It's kind of like a Band-Aid rather than fixing the real problem here. But Yeah, it looks like they still have work to do on the staffing side.

Still a little high.

Yeah, even though their overall spend on salaries, wages, and benefits is low, they do have a lot of staff. So there's a potential here that you get, um, you have a lot of staff and they're all low paid, but you get very low morale, and that sort of creates a feedback loop where it impacts enrollment and so on with low morale. So that's one of the risks that you have if you have a lot of staff You're not paying them a lot. You can potentially get this kind of issue showing up, but I want to jump in with a question that we've not done before.

So this view is the count per $1 million in operating revenue. Explain why that is a nice standard measure that we use on a regular basis.

I like it because it puts everybody on the same axis, right? So for $1 million in revenue, how many employees does that support? Really generally supports about 18, um, and here we have LaGrange at 24, right? So the only way that that works out for them is if they're just paying their employees a lot less than what is normal, um, and which is why I brought up the issue potentially of having low morale, right? If you're not paying a lot, but they're also in Georgia, maybe wages are low, um, we need to check that, but their peers are really close to the, to the norm here. So I would try to get that down if they could and make sure that compensation is at the market level. Otherwise, you're going to have morale issues like I was talking about.

So it's fair to say that raw values is not a good standard measure, but per $1 million in operating revenue is a nice standard measure.

Yeah, and per student as well. So again, they have a lot of You know, for every 100 students, they have 87 employees, right? That's not the norm. It's normally about for every 100 students you have 63 employees. Okay, does that make sense? Yep. So it's a really a lot of— all right, so that would be number one I would look at. Again, staffing. Um, let's take a look at their contractor spend. Contractors paid over $100K per $1 million. That's a little bit high. All right, so similar, although not nearly as bad as what we saw with El Berno. Fees for service spend looks low, so I think it's mostly an in-house staffing issue. If they want to get, uh, some more money pulled out, make sure everybody's paid really well, um, and have a balanced budget, you probably need to cut back on the number of people employed and, and then bring up compensation at the same time per employee. All right, let's check some of these other big groups. Advertising, that's actually right in line with their peers and quite low. IT, zero. That's almost surely a mistake. Yeah, it can't be zero, right? So yeah, this should cover all the equipment and, uh, any vendors they have for IT. It doesn't include the staff salaries in IT, but, uh, certainly wouldn't be zero. So that $990,000—

you can see their peer group was much higher than they were.

Yeah. Uh, insurance— we've been checking these more lately because they have been wonky, but yeah, insurance looks really low.

And again, to show the value in this data, Matt and I have been doing a couple Florida colleges over the last month or so. And every time we ring up insurance for those Florida colleges, Matt, you and I know what happens. It skyrockets. So this is the value of the data. You live in Florida, whether it's a house or a college, your insurance has gone up. And you can compare what it is in Florida, where there's lots of weather issues, to Milwaukee, where there's not so many weather issues. And it's an important comparison to make.

Uh, I just wanted to do a quick check of their— okay, here's some more money for them if they want to, or maybe they already did it. No, they didn't. Okay, this food service contract is higher than normal. Again, $1,700 is normal, as I've said many, many times. So I would double-check this. That's significant savings potentially if you want to cut more money out of your budget. And there's probably a way to negotiate this with Aramark to get closer to that $1,700 mark, which is the norm. So I would do that. It's really high value, low costs kind of, Effort. Same with the janitorial contracts. These actually may be linked. I'm not sure. I can't remember if Aramark and these are sort of linked to these, these two companies, but also high. So both of those should get a hard look. And at least at a minimum, just go get more bids. If these haven't been put up to bid for a long time, which it looks like they may not have been. Aramark, National Management. I'm just looking. They've got the same two vendors for a long time now.

Yeah, you can actually click on the vendor heading and it would sort them, and you could see how long you've been using that vendor.

Yeah, so I would recommend they put those out for a new bid and, and then, and then negotiate and/or switch vendors. Um, easy thing to do, doesn't cost much, just a little bit of time. Could save millions. In this case, probably conservatively about $1 million. So that might be another avenue that they look at. All right, I'll kick it back to you, Gary.

So Matt, I have important news to share. Uh-oh, the College Viability app no longer exists as a for-sale product. You and I have talked about this before. Of course I'm teasing. Uh, Matt Hendricks' data is so good, but I did create one. I created one because you and I use the data from us. So this is my own internal app. I'm not going to sell it, it's just kind of raw because we look at the graduation rates, we look at retention, we look at admission yield because it's IPEDS data. And so that's how it exists. I use it for reporting, I use it for media posts. I've already done some screenshots on this. So Matt, when you and I do the show all year this year, since I've teased you so many times, your data is so much better than mine, but still there's some utility in the IPEDS data. And again, we're looking at 4-year graduation rates for both Alverno and LaGrange. And we've seen a lot worse, but of course the minimum threshold is 50%, and really neither of these colleges are graduating even half of their students in, in 4 years. And the other thing that I've added this year, um, I want to look at applications because so many times it's a big deal, we've got a lot of applications this year. And so I'm just bringing that out. I've never tracked this one before, but I've added it to my own for my own use. And you can see really for the most part, applications for the last 3 reported years— IPEDS just has those last 3 years in there— pretty flat. And I would offer— and it's even negative for Alverno. Matt, that's not a good indication, because applications, as I have teased so many times, it's, it's so easy. It's like ordering another ingredient on your pizza to send another application to a college. And if your numbers aren't going up for either of these colleges— and again, for the College Viability app, I can look at this for some 3,000-ish public and private colleges throughout the country. And then Matt, lastly, the College Majors Completion app. You might have seen some social media posts on that this week. We're tracking 14 million completions from 2020 through 2024. We're looking at across 165 majors, 2,700 colleges, and we can look at it by degrees. Matter of fact, there were 3 million, almost 4 million associate degrees, awarded. There were 7 million and change bachelor's degrees, and there were 3 million and such master's degrees. And we can track them by college. Now, sitting there in Tulsa where the sun is shining and the air is warm, you probably say, well, Gary, how can I use this? Thank you, Matt. I'll ask, I'll ask and answer that question. And again, you've seen me use this previous versions on the show, is both for high volumes, and we're going to look at a college here, Sabaline Christian, because it's top of the alphabet, has some good programs in psychology, communications, speech language, business administration, some modest programs, political science, accounting, but look at the low enrollment programs they have. Two ways colleges can look at these low enrollment programs, and I'm not going to bring up ours for today, I'm just going to show you the software, and that is looking at partnerships for these kind of programs or asking yourself, why am I in IT when I've only averaged 3 majors completions over the last 5 years? That's just an example. Colleges know internally what they've got, but look at all the other colleges. If you're looking at— and I will cheat, I'll go to a state— let's just go to Arizona. These are the colleges in Arizona. Let's just go to the private colleges in Arizona, private 4 years. These are the colleges, and you can look at these and say, hey, where am I strong, where am I weak? And I'll wrap with that, Matt, because as you and I have shared so many times, it is indeed the Moneyball era. You use audited financial statements for your tools, you use IRS 990s, a little bit of IPEDS. I know mine is mostly IPEDS focused, and folks, college leaders community leaders, faculty, staff, consultants, reporters. The data is out there, and if you're not using it, people like Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker are. And you're not using that data, especially what Matt shows you on— look at that, 10 years worth of audited financial statements compiled for every private college in the country. And Matt, I believe the public college version comes sometime, right?

Yes, I'm going to, I'm going to push the publics that I do have. There's issue with the publics in that a lot of them are wrapped into the state audit, which is really huge. But some are standalone audits, and I'm going to push the ones I do have as standalone audits pretty soon.

And I think it goes back to the data. And, and, you know, you've heard me say, Matt, before that we are in the consolidation era, and there will continue to be many closures. And sometime after that, there will be a period of mergers and acquisitions. My personal belief is that they will be large-scale, 10 or more colleges coming together in the coming years to get the scales of both academic and non-academic opportunities in the industry. You can look at the data and do that, or you can live in your own parochial world and not do that. The risks you run as a college by not using the data, as Matt talked about with his financial compass, or with his Strategic Compass that he briefly referenced, I'll be honest, you're making a mistake. And, and it's inexpensive. You're welcome to pay hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for a consulting firm. I can tell you the Financial Compass, $219, Matt Hendricks has essentially given it away. The Strategic Compass, a little bit pricier than that, but a lot, a lot less than what you would see for any kind of consulting firm. If you want to see a demo, drop me a note. I'll put my email address in the show notes. Drop me a note. Matt and/or myself will show you what it can do, and we can take it from there. So, Matt, before we close, I'm going to go back to Alverno. And you and I will never, ever, ever, ever say a college will close. But boy, when you look at the financials, the finances, the financials at Alverno, you got to be concerned.

Yeah, it's, it's among the most dire cases I've seen. I think we did a show on them last year, didn't we?

Yeah, sure did.

Yeah, yeah, I, I really— maybe we should revisit them when we get their '25 audit. Um, but I'm, I'm more curious now because that looks quite dire, um, at, at this point and at the end of fiscal year '24, and we're well beyond that now.

So, um, again, for, for regular viewers of the show, Matt and I never choose colleges. We get people sending us requests to do colleges, and so Alverno and LaGrange, somebody requested that It's always anonymous. We don't share those on the show, although I've got the information. So yeah, there's a lot of interest in colleges. Most of the time it's for colleges in trouble. Most of the time— many times for colleges people just wonder. On occasion, Matt, I think folks reach out to us when the college is doing well. And I know from my perspective, I love when you're going over a college doing, doing really well financially because there aren't that many of them. So Matt, I suggest we do this again next Tuesday. We'll look at two more private colleges on the College Private— on the Private College Financial Health Show with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker. Until then, thanks for making time to watch. We'll be back next week.