Gary Stocker demonstrates the College Financial Health Strategic Compass, an app with 18 reports that analyzes private college finances using IPEDS data and IRS filings from 2016-2022. The tool lets schools choose between machine-learning peer groups or self-reported comparisons, then see how their tuition revenue and expenses rank against peers.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Gary Stocker, founder of College Viability. In this video tutorial series, I'll be walking you through how to use the College Financial Health Strategic Compass. It's a product developed by Perspective Data Science out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It is a visualization app with 18 reports that focus on how your college compares to an equivalent set of data peers. That's an important part, and I'll talk about that more in this video. The Strategic Compass enables individual private colleges to intimately analyze their operations, their finances, policies, and business practices without a need for pricey consultants. In turn, each of these factors can be adjusted for better financial positioning for the future. Over the course of these tutorials, we will explore key financials, including endowment, expenses, revenue and debt. We'll compare staffing and contractors. We'll compare tuition pricing and enrollment trends, and we even have an enrollment simulator for future years to show you. And finally, we cover housing applications, market share, and each of your degree programs. Each of these reports will include comparisons to statistically determined peer groups. Let's get started with Tutorial 1: Key Insights. And Peer Institutions. So for this first tutorial, we're going to take a look at Key Insights and Peer Institutions, and we'll cover the other reports during the course of the video tutorials that we put together and present on our YouTube channel. Key Insights is really the first one, and this is where the raw data is stored. All of the audits are stored in this location, and you can see that the Form 990s for the colleges— our sample is our demo— are are stored here from 2016 through 2022. And the same thing for audited financial statements. All the raw data is here. You can go back and check on it or use it to expand your look at your college with an easy access. Then we go back and look at what else is going on. So the data comes from IPEDS. We talked about the data coming from the IRS Form 990 and from audited financial statements. Now, of course, if any of those points have had changed data, it's going to change the results of these reports, which may or may not be reflected in the actual visualization that you see. And so that's, that's really what the key insights are, just provides the raw data. When we move on to peer institutions, I mentioned this in the introduction, this is a different model than I think anybody else uses. But before we get to that, let's just look at what the background is. So I'm going to click on school filter here, and all the functionality that I show you tonight— today will be available on your version of the app should you choose to move forward with it. And so we look at We can clear all of these. We can look at the statistical peers that are chosen by the application, or we can look at the self-reported. These are the peers that this university, this college would have chosen on their own. We're going to collect— they're going to look at them all and go back to the, to the report. And here, as we see, just kind of how the data is chosen. Gary, delete that as well. You can see the geographical spread right here. And as we scroll down We're going to see just the peer characteristics based on Carnegie and some other items. All these have dropdown menus. You can look at those on your own. But this shows what each of those data fields is used to choose this, this KNN is what it's called, KNN peer group. It's a machine learning language that is used for this report. And you can see total students, undergrad enrollment, all those kind of things. We'll click on tuition and fee revenue. You can see the average, you can see where your college would rank, and you can see, of course, that there are some right at the average, below the average, and above the average. It gives you a quick feel in each of these data fields as to how your college compares to those in this peer group. You may like some of the comparisons, you may not like some of the comparisons, but they are derived from a statistically valid selection process. And we'll look at total expenses. Again, you see the same kind of pattern throughout the report. So when we look at these, this is what the peer group is used for all these other reports. And when I get into those, you'll get to see how that peer group relates as it compares to your college. Do that again. You'll see how your college relates to the peer group. You can choose whether it's just your peer group or whether you want that to be the K&N peer group. Either one works. Again, you can using— again, using the school filter, you can choose either your peer group that you've chosen for your college or the KNN machine learning algorithm peer group chosen by the data and all the fields that we saw before. And all of the fields that we saw before. The next video tutorial will be on key financials and ratios. And the next report will be on key financials and ratios. If you have some interest in looking at this app in more detail, drop me a note at gary@collegeviability.com. That's one word, gary@collegeviability.com. And we'll schedule a time to look at this, this, and we'll schedule a time to look at the Strategic Compass in more detail. You'll have a chance to ask more questions and get more in-depth analysis of what this Strategic Compass could do for your organization.
