In this tutorial, Gary Stocker, founder of College Viability, demonstrates the College Strategic Compass product from Perspective Data Science, focusing on two core modules: revenue benchmarking and net tuition price benchmarking. He explains that the platform ingests audited financial statements, IRS Form 990 filings, and IPEDS data (2016‑2023, with some 2024 data) using OCR and AI to create a unified data set. Using a k‑nearest‑normal algorithm, the system builds statistically similar peer groups for each institution. Through a demo college, Stocker walks through revenue components—total operating revenue, net tuition and fees, auxiliary revenue, and other operating revenue—showing how the college compares to its peer set (e.g., $42 M actual vs. $39.3 M expected). He illustrates multiple visualization modes (raw values, per‑student, percent of operating revenue, scattergrams) and the ability to toggle peer groups or customize them. The net tuition price module is then explored, highlighting income‑bracket ranges (e.g., $48‑$75 k family income) and showing the demo college’s consistently higher tuition relative to peers, alongside declining enrollment and Title IV participation. Stocker outlines practical uses: institutions can benchmark financial, staffing, and admissions data against statistical or custom peer groups, examine 8‑year trends across 16 reports, and leverage insights to adjust policies, pricing, and strategic decisions such as partnerships or mergers. The tutorial concludes with a call to action for private demos.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Gary Stocker, founder of College Viability, back with another tutorial on the College Strategic Compass. It's a product from Perspective Data Science. We're going to cover these two modules today. We're going to look at the revenue module, and we're going to look at the net tuition price benchmarking and comparisons for both. For those of you who are first-time viewers of these tutorials, The data used in the Strategic Compass comes from a college's financial, audited financial statements, its IRS Form 990 submissions, and of course its IPEDS data. And that's from the National Center for Education Statistics. And the time period for all data is 2016 through 2023, although some 2024 data is now showing up in the system as well. Perspective Data Science uses an AI technology that captures images of the financial statements, and the IRS Form 990s and converts those images through an optical character recognition software program. These data points then become the basis for all of the Perspective data science products available. Let's take a look at the revenue and net tuition price benchmarking and comparisons in the College Strategic Compass product.
So let's continue with looking at the tutorial on these two modules, and we're looking at the revenue benchmarking for this first module. And this is from a demo college that we have set up with actual data that we use for all of these demos. We're looking at four basic components of the revenue, and as before, red means higher than expected average. Let me step you through that. So the fiscal year 2023 actual value Total operating revenue for this college was $42 million. The expected based on its peer set was $39.3 million. The difference is $2.9 million more for our demo college. Now again, for those of you watching for the first time, our data, our peer schools, come from a data set using a k-nearest normal program developed. The data comes from The data comes from a k-normal— k— the data comes from a k-nearest normal tool used to bring schools into the peer set that are very similar across many different statistical fields that we talked about in Module 1. Let's go back to the revenue comparison. We see the data here. You can look at that. They're up a little bit. I'm sorry, low. Let's go back and look at the revenue benchmarking. We can see that our demo college is low on net tuition and fees. We'll see why in a minute. We can see they're a little bit high, quite a bit high, on auxiliary revenue and getting quite a bit high on other operating revenues compared to that statistically determined peer group. I would add that you can also have your own proximate peer group added to your Strategic Compass product that's developed for you. We can look at this a couple different ways. We can look at this in this gram, this graphic, and we can look at it for a series of years, and we can see as we click through a handful of years, the data doesn't change much. You can actually alter this, alter the scale so it actually moves around so you can see what the actual numbers would be, and you don't see that move much from period to period. We can look at it as a per-student value. We can look at it as a raw value, doesn't change much, and we can look at it as a percent of operating revenue. And again, we can adjust that graphic as needed to show what those percentage numbers might be around the entire 360 degrees of the graphic image. We can also go down, and you've seen this before if you've watched some of the other tutorials, and we can look at those same 4 fields. Leave the top total operating revenue for now from 2016 through 2023. The 2024 data will populate soon enough. Again, we can see that total operating revenue has been consistently high based, based on the peer group. The peer group is in blue, our demo college is in red. We can look at the other factors as well, and we'll see net tuition has dropped. It used to be in the same general area as a peer group, but has dropped precipitously in the last 8 years or so. And we can look at the other factors as well. We can look at room and board, auxiliary enterprises. And again, clearly this college has worked hard to raise their prices. We'll see that in a few minutes when we look at the net price index as well. And then as we had the scattergram, we can turn off the peer schools to see just where our demo school lies. We can turn the peer schools back on and actually lay it, roll over our pointer on top of them to see which schools might be outliers, maybe which schools to look at for other reasons to talk about partnerships, mergers, which are more closer to the mean. There's lots of uses for this kind of data. And then we can also go back up and take a look then at the net price. Again, here's our peer group. The peer group in this case has looked at the different data ranges, different income ranges available in IPEDS. And we can see those different ranges here. Let's start with kind of a middle of the pack, those family incomes $48,000 to $75,000. We can see that our demo school is high compared to the mean, which is the red line across. It's, you know, there are a couple even higher than that. And again, these are colleges you might want to use this data to investigate, to talk to about what they're doing differently than you are. And we can again look at this. This is the one I like the most, where we can actually compare— this is the one I like the most, where we can actually compare the changes over the course of the years tracked. And we can see from 2010, with rare exception 2017, our demo college has been aggressively keeping their prices high, whether it's at the $110,000 and above or something much less. They've consistently been higher than— the ranges vary. Let's look at that middle range one more time, 48 to 75, clearly higher. Now let me just jump around for a second. I'm going to go to enrollment benchmarking. We saw— we'll see this one on a future tutorial. Look what's happened in that same time period. The enrollment has plummeted. Now part of it is just the demographics, part of it is fewer colleges, fewer students looking at colleges, but you've got to think part of this demo colleges issue is associated with what we're seeing with net benchmark, net price benchmarking. They just are consistently higher than what we're seeing from their peer groups. And then finally, let's just take a look at, at the number of students in Title IV funds. Again, we can see that the number has gone down. In the $48,000 to $75,000 range. And there's all sorts of uses for this data. The number's also gone down for the full-time with income, family incomes above $110,000. Scattergram again, we can turn off the peer school to see where our school lies, typically above on price, we know that. And again, click that back on, you can roll over the top of these schools to see what their actual data points are in relationship to the group mean. So how can an individual college use the College Financial Compass? The data, of course, would not be the data you saw for our demo college. It will be one customized for your college, pulled from your audited financial statements, your Form 990s, and of course your IPEDS data. There are 3 basic ways to use the data, and there are probably many others that you can discover on your own because you're gonna know a lot more about your organization. You can compare your financial, your staffing, admissions data, and much, much more with either a statistically similar peer group or a peer group, approximate peer group that you put together on your own that will happily put in the peer set for you. You can turn 'em off and on. You can customize the peer groups. There's a lot of functionality I didn't go over today. It's the 8-year trends. You can look at the 8-year trends to learn how others have performed in that same period. And again, others is that statistically determined peer group. And if you want your, your approximate peer group as well, and you can do these comparisons across 16 different reports. All on your college's operations and of course across its peer groups. It's, it's a lot of data that you can use to alter policies, alter procedures, to really focus on what you can do to differentiate yourself where you're strong and to find ways to fix areas where you're not as strong as you'd like to be. So for Matt Hendricks at Perspective Data Science, I'm Gary Stocker, founder of College Viability. Thanks for making time to watch this tutorial on the College Strategic Compass on revenue and net pricing. This is one in a series of 7 features and benefit tutorials on the Strategic Compass. Thanks for making time to listen. I'll be back with more tutorials soon. If you'd like to schedule a private demo, reach out to me at gary@collegeviability.com. That's one word, gary@collegeviability.com.
