In this July 2025 episode of the College Financial Health Show, host Gary Stocker and analyst Dr. Matt Hendricks examine Campbellsville University’s financial condition. They note that the university has enjoyed several years of operating surpluses and a dramatic 202 % endowment increase, largely driven by large contributions and low appropriations. However, operating and net tuition revenues have been falling since 2019 despite a modest rise in undergraduate enrollment and a six‑fold surge in graduate enrollment. The per‑student net tuition price has dropped from about $12,300 in 2019 to roughly $9,000 now—a 22 % decline in real terms—raising sustainability concerns. The analysts flag unusually high vendor and marketing expenditures, including a $8–9 million multi‑year marketing contract that represents 8–9 % of total revenue and an advertising spend of $112,000 per $1 million of revenue (far above the typical $10,000). Program‑level market‑share analysis shows many low‑enrollment majors and a weak external share in Kentucky, suggesting potential program rationalization. Recommendations focus on raising net price, renegotiating or eliminating the oversized marketing contract, and reviewing low‑enrollment programs to improve cost‑per‑student ratios. Throughout, they reference the Advanced Compass benchmarking tool that provides comparative vendor and market‑share data across more than 1,300 private colleges.
Chapters
Hey, it's first day of July 2025. Welcome back to the College Financial Health Show. I think it's the only show where we look at the financial health of colleges and even their viability. Hi, my name is Gary Stopp. I'll be joined by Matt Hendricks shortly, who's going to start looking at colleges for us today. And Dr. Hendricks, what's the first college we have on our review list for July Bullsville.
This is really similar, similar actually, um, to the last case. I think you'll see the similarities here, uh, with the pricing issues and stuff like that potentially. So, um, I'll show you that, but let me go back to the beginning here. Go net income margin. All right, so again, similar to the previous school, they had really actually big surpluses here, uh, and then just a tiny loss again in 2024. So I'm not worried about that. That's excellent. Their cash flow is going to be high positive value as well. So there's no, uh, like risk of closure or anything like that. Of course the school's doing fine financially, um, but there, there were some things that I flagged here. So unlike the last school though, their endowment has grown like crazy. So let's show you that, uh, endowment end of year value, percent change, and this thing's up 202%. Um, and so there are some reasons for that, uh, that look really nice. So one is, you can probably see they have these big surpluses back here. So a lot of times that money just goes straight into the quasi-endowment, and that appears to be what's happening. I'll show you the contributions, um, as a percent of the beginning year in value. So you got these really big contributions in several years here to the endowment, uh, relative to its beginning of values— of beginning value, beginning of year value. They also have returns that don't look terrible. They're kind of mixed and their appropriations are low. So again, they're not really using their endowment. Yeah, these, this is their appropriations. Yeah, not very nice. So that'll make your endowment grow really fast. You know, that, that, that would be great if that were happening at previous school we looked at, William Penn. Yeah, but it's not. Um, okay, so endowment looks great. They have really positive net incomes every year except for just a small loss in 2024. That's not a big deal. But let's take a look at revenues are declining since 2019. This is a bit, um, concerning. So let's take a look at total revenue, operating revenue. All right, so this is just raw value. So we had this sharp increase here, which I, I should probably looked at that. I don't know what the what that's all about. But this is the part I'm kind of concerned about. It's not normal to have your operating revenues to be declining since 2019. It's normal for them to grow slightly. Yeah, you can see that percentage change-wise since 2019, about up 5% versus up 17%. So they've sort of got the opposite trend happening here with operating revenues. And so part of the reason their revenues are dropping off is their net tuition revenue. Is doing the same thing. So their net tuition revenue is declining since 2019, and I've calculated that— that's— they've decreased. So the first thing I want to show you is— so the raw value, I don't have the exact number on that, but here's the same issue as the last school. Their net price, it appears, is declining significantly. The average student paid about $12,300 in 2019 to attend the school, and now they're paying about $9,000.
Goodness gracious.
So, um, again, there could be a lot of explanations for this that don't have to do with price. It could be changes in different types of students, stuff like that. But this is a really, really low price. It really doesn't matter what the explanation— that is a really low price and really hard to sustain this sort of business— it's not really a business, but to sustain a university sustainably, you probably need them to pay significantly more than that unless you have a massive endowment, which the school does not. Okay, so why the reduction in price here? Again, look closely at this. That's a 22% decrease, by the way, per student net TR, net tuition revenue. So yeah, look at that. Why, why is that happening? Does it have to happen again? I bet the answer is no. They probably didn't have to do that. So bring it back up would be my—
So Matt, what was the net tuition, the per-student tuition in 2016? What was that number?
$2,600.
So essentially the same tuition.
On real basis though, it's way, way less. Remember that we've had significant inflation over this time period. I don't know what the cumulative since 2016, but it's a lot. So yeah, I mean, I think it'd be safe to say that this price is way higher than this price, even though in nominal terms they are the same. Okay. So the shocking thing about their net tuition revenue decreasing, so again, raw values from $105 million down to $93 million, is that their enrollment's going up. And again, how does that happen? And sorry, students.
And while you're bringing that up, the grad— we'll also hear in a couple of minutes the graduate student enrollment has almost gone up sixfold in the last 2 years.
So their enrollment's increasing over the same time period that their net tuition revenue is declining. Again, it's because they've significantly reduced their real price, right? Nominal price and real price, the net price that students are paying. So again, I suspect that that is a problem with the financial aid packages. They need to look at their formula, what they're doing, experiment with higher prices. Again, I suspect they can increase the price significantly and not lose any freshmen. Okay, so once again, I think we have the same situation here where the revenue is going to be really low per student. Yeah, so, so dealing with schools like this, a little bit tricky to benchmark because they just don't have a lot of revenue for their size, so they can't you can't judge them on the same scale. Essentially, they can't afford to spend $35,000 per student, right? So when I check out their employees and their contractors, really, they need to be low on all those things per student and probably relative to their revenues. So let's take a look at expenses though. So employees, I didn't flag anything just because they look, you know, Looks about normal, but again, keep in mind that this school doesn't have very much revenue, right? And they need to be really low per FTE. So they are, yeah, but relative to their revenue, so I guess that does sort of put it all on the same scale. This looks normal. That looks fine. So contractors, I mean, these are just sort of quick checks that every school should do all the time, right? Super easy. That looks fine. So contractors look fine, but there is something up here and I'll show you what I found. So I've— there's a ton of stuff on here that I did off camera that to show you. So I do fees for services. All right, so fees for services are not normal. So this is probably contractor spend, right? Even though the number of contracts looks normal, they have some probably really big ones, right? That's what this says. And so their contractor spend is really high for their revenue. And, you know, again, their students aren't paying that much, but this is a big red flag. That's not sustainable, probably. It's going to cause some stress on them. So what is it? Well, I think I found it. I go down to the contractor table.
You're going to the vendor table, aren't you?
For some big contracts that are sort of Gonna stick out. There we go.
You can have your spell if you like, man.
Oh man, almost ready for vacation here.
Okay.
So, oh, I also flagged a really high advertising spend before I even found this. So this is where it's showing up.
Interesting.
You gotta look closely at this $9 million contract for marketing. Again, may, it may not be an issue, but I suspect it is. This is really, again, 2 standard deviations or higher, at least that standard deviation and a half higher than normal. For your revenue. So yeah, it's high for your FTE as well. So this is a massive contract, which is probably what's pushing up that fees for services spend above what's normal. But everything else looks pretty good here.
Like, and like we've seen before, we've got the FTE students in that 4th column over. They're paying a large marketing budget and their enrollment is growing— is shrinking.
Yeah. So yeah, this is your chance, right, to pull $9 million potentially off your books if it's not generating the kind of revenue, if it's not generating at least $9 million in revenue, right? Don't pay it, right? That's the simple test to check. And, you know, even if they are meeting that, you can probably negotiate this down, I'd imagine. There's other vendors here potentially, but again, I don't know all the details of this contract, but suspect this is not, uh, helping the university on net. But that's just my—
that's not just a one-year thing. I see at least 3 years where they're—
yeah, let's see what else. Do they have it? They have it down here. Yeah, here, $9 million.
Same thing on 2022.
Yeah, $8 million. Wow, that's— yeah, I, I, yeah, I don't like that. Um, I would look at it. It's a lot to spend. How big is their revenue in total? So there's $9 million revenue or $9 million expense on just that. Let's just take a look at their total revenue, total operating revenue. Okay. So like $120 million.
So 8 or 9%. Yeah.
Just marketing. I don't, again, that's, I'll show you advertising spend, what looks normal for advertising. Again, that may be labeled wrong, but, um, normal schools don't spend that much on advertising.
Goodness gracious.
So normal schools spend $10,000 per $1 million. They're spending $112,000 per $1 million. So yeah, that's— so it's not even just that contract. They have other expenses other than the $9 million. 11% of their budget on advertising. So again, really look closely at this advertising spend, not just that contract, but that definitely that contract, but there's some other stuff too. All right, I'll pass it back to you, Gary.
So, and one of the interesting aspects of Campbellsville University— I talked about that briefly while you were sharing that— is their enrollment. And I'm going to, I'm going to show the undergrad enrollment, which you showed. So the full-time undergraduate enrollment, all right, up a little bit, up about 400 students over the last 8 years. But look at their graduate enrollment. From almost 1,000 to almost 6,000. Now that's fascinating because they still have that low per-student tuition amount. So makes me wonder what they're charging for graduate tuition admissions as well. I've never seen a growth that much for me, for a small school overall, from 1,000 to 6,000 students in 8 years. That caught my attention because we can look at, we can look at that tuition revenue Tuition fee revenue for Campbellsville. I mean, I show it up a lot. Matt, do we have inconsistent data here? What do you think is going on with Campbellsville?
It's hard to say.
Um, but my dad has iPads. Yours is from the phone.
Oh wait, we have something conflicting with our data.
Yeah. Yeah.
What's conflicting? Tuition fees.
That's a $64 million growth in tuition fee revenue.
Oh, I was looking since 2019. So yeah, there's a significant drop since 2019, down to 90 million. You see that? 105.
I see that.
Yeah, down to 90. So that was the part.
That's what you showed, wasn't it? So, all right, so the data—
I mean, I showed the whole, the whole thing, but that—
yeah, so the data is fine.
That's declining since 2019.
Something positive happened here. Something less than positive happened since 2019. Mm-hmm. Let's take a look at the market share for this. And first of all, for William Penn, for Campbellsville, let's look where they're strong. And again, when we look at this, we're looking for high numbers above 30%. This is internal market share. Social work, we don't see that very much as a high-volume course, high-volume major. That's, that's unique for Campbellsville. A lot of these are common high volumes. And again, if we're looking at opportunities to cut back on majors, we can look at these low enrollment majors and everything from human resources, film, journalism, down to math, chemistry, public relations. Most, more than half of their stuff is really low enrollment majors, Matt. They need to focus on upping those majors or look at the costs associated with those and maybe cutting back on some of those programs. And we see that happening lots. There are many, many colleges cutting back programs and laying off faculty. Maybe that's a consideration for some of these low enrollment margins. Majors. And let's go to Kentucky for our state and look at the external market share. And again, this is Economics Days, we're going to look at economics. Campbellsville has 2 majors, 1.3% of the market. You can see that reflected down here. We can make it bigger for everybody, and we can see the dominant public and private colleges in Kentucky are Central College, University of Kentucky, And look at the small players. Campbellsville is one of them. Transylvania University is one of them. Thomas More. Again, this is the tool that colleges can use to make an informed, comparative, trend-based decision on majors. Don't you call it, you know, the folks at Campbellsville or anybody else looking at this, don't just look at your own data. Tools like this, tools like this provide some capacity to compare your market share to others. And Matt, we just don't see that happen Very much. Your assessment of the financial health of Campbellsville University in Kentucky is what?
Yeah, again, they had many years of surplus. I just don't like the trajectory right now. And we highlighted some things they can focus on. So again, look at bringing the net price up. At the same time, bringing down the marketing spend. Actually, I'm looking at this university hub. They may be doing more than marketing. So, right, to be fair, yeah, context always matters.
I know.
Yeah, but it's definitely worth your time to look very closely at this $9 million contract. Um, it may sound weird, but, you know, there's a lot of politics involved. Whoever set up this contract, they want it to do well, but even though it's not doing well, right? So there's a tendency to let these things go much longer than they should. So I would say, you know, take an unbiased look at it. Look for other alternatives and see what you can come up with. So I'll leave it at that.
And again, let's talk about that vendor table. And there's a lot of valuable data in the Advanced Compass that we use on the show. Sometimes we use Matt's Strategic Compass, but that vendor table, it's, it's the comparison. You know, colleges at Campbellsville and all the other colleges that we do on the show, over 120 colleges we reviewed now, you know what your spend is, but you have no idea what other colleges are spending. And that vendor table is just one small part of that Advanced Compass. And it's probably the easiest way to justify the fee, and it's not much, for that Advanced Compass is just savings to be able to go back to a vendor and say, hey, we are way above the median value for your services. And again, context is important. And that hub marketing here at Campbellsville, they may do more than just basic marketing, but the data shows that's a really high number compared to some, what, Matt, 1,300 private colleges, something like that.
Yeah, over many years, right? So those color codes are based on the standard deviation within that year for that contract type, and they're high every year, right? So yeah, you're way— so if you know a normal bell curve, right, to non-stats people, they're way over in the tail, right? Tail, right?
Right.
Probably almost everybody in the class is lower than them. So that's what we're looking for, stuff like that.
If you're a Campbellsville University leader, if you're on the board at Campbellsville University, even faculty and staff, These are the kind of data points that you can use to make informed decisions. Don't just stay on the inside. Don't just look at your budget. Don't just look at your financial statements. Look at the tools that Matt Hendricks and I provide you that offer you comparisons. So for Matt Hendricks, I'm Gary Stocker. Thanks for watching. We'll be back next week.
