Drexel University and Jacksonville University: Inside Their Financial Numbers 1-20-26 CFH Show

In this episode of the College Financial Health Show, hosts Gary Stocker and Dr. Matt Hendricks conduct a data‑driven deep‑dive into the financial health of two private institutions—Drexel University (PA) and Jacksonville University (FL). Using audited financial statements (2016‑2025), IRS Form 990s, and IPEDS data, they benchmark each school against peer groups and national medians. For Drexel they find net assets grew only 24% versus a 47% median and 62% peer set, while unrestricted net assets fell 23% in real terms, and operating margins are negative in multiple years. Revenue growth (12% since 2020) lags expense growth (21%), with enrollment down 12.5% since 2016, explaining stagnant student revenue. Expense analysis reveals several line items—advertising ($12.3 M), IT, and especially insurance ($29 M)—that are above peer averages, contributing to budget pressure. For Jacksonville University, net assets are flat and unrestricted assets have shrunk dramatically, leaving only $33 M in unrestricted reserves. The school shows a pattern of deficits (12% loss in 2024) despite total revenue growth (17% including non‑operating income). Expenses have surged 50% since 2016, driven largely by payroll spikes and high advertising spend. Both schools also exhibit low 4‑year graduation rates and reliance on large tuition discounting (unfunded institutional grants). The hosts discuss diagnostic next steps—funnel/admissions analysis, vendor and insurance reviews—using their Strategic Compass product, and contemplate strategic options such as mergers or acquisitions, citing Vanderbilt’s recent expansion as a model. The episode ends with a call for future analyses of additional colleges.
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It is the College Financial Health Show with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker, where each Tuesday and every Tuesday we join to talk about the financial health of private colleges throughout the United States. We look at the good, the bad, we talk about trends, and we use the college's data. We use their audited financial statements Right now it's from 2016 through increasingly 2025, and we look at their IRS 990 forms, and on occasion we look at their IPEDS data as well. Always a pleasure to do this show. Matt Hendricks, we've done this for— headed for 2 years now. What 2 colleges are we looking at today?
All right, today we have Drexel University in Pennsylvania and Jacksonville University in Florida, and I'll get right into it. Okay, here's Drexel. I pulled it up already. And again, the peer set here is— I added some more detail to the app so you can see exactly where the peers are coming from. I don't know if you can see it. I'll zoom in a little bit. All these peers are RB coded. That means that they're reported by the peer institution. So these are schools that said Drexel was one of their peers, but Drexel didn't submit apparently a peer sheet to the Department of Ed. So the ones that are reporting Drexel is their peers: Syracuse, Loyola, Rochester. These look reasonable to me. Yeah, Nova Scotia, St. John's, Denver. These are all, I would say, probably pretty good peer set here. But again, you can customize this on the app if you're using it. And I'll start right in on their total net assets. I'm looking at percentage change since 2016. And again, uh, really important to, to benchmark these things because if you just look at the raw growth, 24% growth in net assets since 2016, without a frame of reference you might say that that's pretty good, but it's actually not very good. Um, the median school is up 47%, their peer set's up 62%, so they're really falling behind their peer set here. In terms of net asset growth. I'll check unrestricted net assets.
So Jaxell's in the blue and the peer group is in orange?
Yep, peer group's in orange. And then I have these percent— 75th percentile, median, and 25th percentile for the nation, which is really important. Uh, some people are like, why don't you just have the peer set? Well, sometimes the peer sets are not very doing very well either, so it's good to have this national frame of reference as well.
Good point.
Uh, okay, so Drexel's same story with unrestricted net assets actually barely changed since 2016. Um, and again, if I adjusted for inflation, you can see the, the big problem with that there. If you look in real terms, in inflation-adjusted, unrestricted net assets are down 23%. That, that shouldn't happen, right? You want to be growing in real terms, and the median school is doing that. And their peer set is up 25% adjusted for inflation, nominally up 63%. So the takeaway from the first two graphs are pretty clear that, uh, Trexel's net asset is— net asset growth is underperforming relative to peers. Um, let's take a look at why. They're probably running some deficits, but we'll confirm this right now by looking at net income margin. And yes, okay, again, so you see the peer set in yellow. Looks like their peers usually run a positive net income margin of about 3 to 4%. That's a bit higher than normal. The median school is usually around 1%. And again, what does this mean? It means this is sort of like the profit the school generates. Again, these are nonprofits, so you don't, you're not looking to maximize profit, but you do want to have a buffer a plus 4 or 5% in the case of these peers. Uh, you don't want to run negative, at least not very long. And you can see Drexel has many years of negative net assets, changing net assets from operations, so that negative 2%, negative 7, negative 1, and negative 5. All right, so that's certainly part of the explanation, or maybe all of the explanation, uh, for the sort of, uh, slow growth in net assets, uh, happening there. Um, okay, so let's take a look. Let's check their endowments. Um, actually, let me go down to the summary table and I'll check a few things here with you really quick. I'm going to zoom this out. All right, so it looks good on the screen. Okay, so as I just mentioned, uh, they're, uh, running deficit. So they lost $56 million from operation in operations in 2024. That sounds like a ton of money. It's a huge amount of money for most schools, but it's pretty small for Drexel. It's only 5% of their operating revenue. So a fairly modest loss relative to their revenue, but still a loss. All right, so a couple other things to take a look at. So we have net student revenues. I'll double check. Let me start with overall revenues first. Their overall revenues have grown by 12% since 2020. Expenses have grown by 21%. So that's probably an issue that's causing the deficits. We have really fast expense growth and we have revenue growth, but it's slower. Next, net student revenue growth is 4.6% since 2020. So again, I think that's going to be pretty good when we benchmark that. But again, their expenses are up 20%. 21%. Uh, CapEx to depreciation, again, you want this number, and I flag it here if it's below 1 on average for the last 5 years. And so their capital stock is probably decreasing over this period, and that's what that says. Uh, so I'll benchmark the property and equipment just to show you that. Cash and investments, flat. Again, they're probably making big draws off of their cash investments, and you can see that here. Yes. Big draw here, big draw, big draw, big draw off the endowment. So again, this should be about 4.5%, and they did 8.9%, 5.4%, 5.6%. So again, several indicators here of financial stress. Let me show you their property, plant, and equipment since I mentioned that. Property and equipment percent change— this must be an error. In the data extract. I'll check that, I'll check that. But let me, uh, it kind of messes with the scale here, but you can see their property, plant, and equipment is up. Oh, I actually, I think this— so I was benchmarking relative to 2020 on the CapEx, but I think that's right. Uh, so they were at 4% up and now they're at 16% up Looks like they're falling a little bit behind on the CapEx, but it kind of looks skewed because of that error. I'll make a note to check this. Again, the AI is pulling out all of this stuff, and there's several cross-checks, but sometimes errors.
They have just gotten rid of some property and plant PPE then.
So the CapEx number is pulled from the cash flow, so that would be right. I can show you CapEx depreciation. I think the— that, that number I was showing you right there is pulled from the balance sheet, and, uh, they should line up. But again, these CapEx— normally CapEx, so spending on property, plant, equipment relative to depreciation, should be about 1 or higher. And you see about 1 or higher, and then— but they've got several years here below. But honestly, it doesn't look too bad because they're above.
No, no, not at all.
So I think this looks okay. It looks a little misleading, I think, on the, on the sheet below because it started at 2020, and since 2020 they did have a couple years below 1, but, uh, before that they were higher. All right, I'm going to focus on now the overall expenses and, um, revenues. So start with operating revenue. Total operating revenue percent change. So here, this is a problem. Just not keeping up with their peers in terms of revenue growth. Peers are up 34%. Median school's up 18%. They're down 1.3% on operating revenue. And remember, their expenses look like they're growing fast. So let's take a look at what that looks like compared to every other school and their peer set.
Oh my.
And change. Yeah, okay, right. So the table below again was the context from 2020 to 2024. So there is significant growth here, but their expenses are up 7%, revenues are down 2%, 1%, whatever I just showed on the previous. So yeah, um, looks like they're doing a decent job of keeping expenses in line, but it's still growing faster than their revenues. And, uh, again, their peers are off and running because they're growing. Yeah. Let's take a look at student revenues. And at this point, we're going to dig a little bit deeper and try to understand what's happening to revenues, why they're so stagnant. Starting with student revenues. Student— if I can spell. Next—
keyboard's still not working. Yeah.
Okay. Net student revenues are down 1.7% since 2016. Peers over that same period up 20%. Yeah, their peer group's got a lot of really good schools. Yeah, strong financial schools. Um, the median school's up 5%, so they're falling— they're well behind.
This is— you can actually show each— you can actually show in each individual peer, right, Matt?
Yeah, yeah, I can show you each comparison school. It gets really cluttered fast, but you got Syracuse, Denver— I mean, there's some of the elite schools in the country. Yeah, Rochester. St. Louis University, St. John's, New York, and University of Dayton. But, um, I'm gonna go back to the less cluttered version. Okay, so, um, revenues— net student revenues are segment actually declining a bit. Let's, let's try to understand why first by checking the per-student revenue they generate. Um, so this is a decent proxy, as we've mentioned in previous shows, for the price.
Right.
And the price is pretty much in line with their peers. Um, that looks totally normal, actually gone up a little bit. Um, so we must see enrollment losses happening here to explain what's happening. So I'm going to flip into enrollment right now and percent change. Yes, enrollment's down 12.5% since 2016. Yeah, and that's certainly what's explaining the stagnant revenue growth. Student revenues sort of offsetting a little bit with the higher price, but their peers are growing. Peers are up 4.4% on average. There's the median peer on average. Okay, so why are they losing students? They need to figure that out, right? They shouldn't be losing students. Their peer sets aren't. So they, they need to do a deep dive on the full funnel, right? For both graduate and undergrads, check the number of apps, if that looks normal. And again, you do this regression, regression analysis is what we do use. We get a predicted number of apps they should have based on their peers versus actual and look for variances. Same with the admit rate, yield rate, retention rates. I'll check everything. 'Cause issues can pop up at any moment in that whole funnel and retention sort of stream there. All of that is interconnected.
And the product you're talking about is the Strategic Compass, right? That you have.
Yeah, Strategic Compass. And it's always different. Some schools have issues with applications. Some have issues with just low admit rates, lower than what you would expect, and they don't really know why. Uh, others have issues with yields, right? Some have issues with their price, which is causing the yield to be very low. Uh, lots of stuff to check, and I'd be happy to do that with them and investigate. I'm gonna flip over to the expense side now and try to figure out why the expenses are growing so much and what they might do with it.
Do I get a guess? Do I get a guess?
Yeah, yeah, we'll start, we'll start with employees. Salaries. I'm gonna go to salaries and benefits spend per $1 million. Okay, that looks, um, not bad. Yeah, okay, they're spending about— so this says they're spending about 61% of their revenue on salaries, benefits, and wages. Um, looks to be about right for their peer set. Peer set's at 60% or so, a little bit high. Um, so it doesn't look way out of line. That looks about right for Drexel. So Perhaps that's not the issue. We'll check, um, number of employees, just another check on this per 1 million. That looks normal, actually a little bit below the peer set. Okay, so right now those first two checks are suggesting it's not a staffing issue.
Yeah, interesting.
Um, which is interesting. I actually didn't do this beforehand, so we'll kind of try to figure this out together. Um, So if it's not a staffing issue, it usually turns out to be a vendor spend issue. So let's start with the number of contracts. Yeah, it's higher than their peer set, but doesn't look way out of line by any means. So that is a bit of an enigma. Let me check fees for services per $1 million. Again, that looks about right. $1 million. All right. I'm a little bit curious now as to what we're going to find. So it looks like payroll was okay.
Employees over $100,000. There's over $100K employees or $100,000.
Oh, that's contractors. Sorry. Employees paid over $100K. Okay. That is higher than the peer set, but again, not way out of line what you'd expect with a school running a big deficit. Um, not super big, but kind of big compensation. Oh, let me check. Uh, non-officer employer contributions, non-officer salaries and wages. We're doing this investigation live here, right? I'm trying to figure out what's causing some deficits. All right, that is a bit high, so maybe a little bit on the staffing side, particularly non-officer salaries and wages. Uh, so what I'm looking at here is how much they're spending on that for every $1 million in revenue per student and per $1 million in revenue high on non-officer salaries and wages. But we've got to find some smoking gun here, right? Payroll taxes. That looks about right. All right, I'm going to go through some of the big expense items and see if we can figure out what's causing— okay, here might be one.
There we go.
Inflation. Okay, advertising spend is pretty high compared to the peer set. So maybe in this case, maybe just a lot of things that are just a bit high, right? Not one big smoking gun, but a lot of different things.
So go back to the raw value for that. Go back to the raw value for that one.
Value is $12.3 million per year on advertising. Um, so that's a bit high for their revenue. Okay, so that that. We have advertising. Looks like we're gonna have another one right here. IT spend is high for their revenue. You have a bunch of little things that are—
yeah, that's what— yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking.
Wow. Um, yeah, this— okay, they're spending $30— $29 million on insurance. That's insanely high. Okay, that's very, very high. Uh, so you have a third thing here. We had— what do we have? Advertising, IT, and now insurance, also high. Office expenses, it looks okay. And again, the way I say it's okay, it looks similar to their peer set. Um, and let's see, office fundraising expenses per $1 million, that looks okay. Fundraising, total travel. I think that's going to be okay. Yeah, yep. Travel, conferences, fees for services. And I already checked this one, right? Okay, so I think it's a sort of a combination of several things that are a bit high, right? Like the, the salaries and wages is a bit high, advertising a bit high. Um, what else do we have?
Uh, IT and insurance. IT and insurance.
Insurance. Yeah, all those things a bit high. And then in aggregate, of course, you end up quite high, right, on spending relative to peers. And let's just confirm that total expenses— did I, did I show that? Yeah, total expenses per $1 million of operating revenue, right? Yeah.
Oh, actually not so much.
That's travel.
Sorry, that's travel. That's right. It's different.
Yeah, I was going to say That doesn't make sense. Yeah, total expenses, operating expenses. There we go.
Okay, there we go.
Per $1 million in revenue, high.
Yeah.
And per FTE, high. Okay. Yeah. So right, looks like it's a combination of a bunch of smaller things leading to a big variance at the end. All right. So that's, that's our That's the takeaway here. Lots of buckets that look out of line relative to their peers, and then in aggregate that's causing a bigger issue for the budget, it appears. So I advise them to do that, to check through all of those. Insurance is one that doesn't pop up very often, but I was going to check their contractors really quick. I don't see any color here, so it's all good. AirMark, $900 per student. Um, that's actually quite low, so I wonder if that's covering all their food service or if they've got some kind of hybrid, um, advertising. So we said advertising spend was high, so that kind of puts this contract under the microscope. You should check this one. Uh, food service, bear mark, construction. Okay. Um, yeah, I don't see any big flags there other than check this because it'll be bucketed in the advertising is expense. Okay, that's Drexel. Again, I guess my impression is that they have some budget issues. They're huge though, they have a ton of assets, no risk of course of closing or anything like that, but, uh, certainly want to bounce back behind—
they're falling behind their competition.
Yep, and you can see why. They're spending a bit more than really on several areas than their peers, which is putting pressure on that budget. All right, I'm gonna switch over to Jacksonville University in Florida. Uh, same thing here, they don't have a self-identified peer set, um, so I'm using peer— their peer set in this case are these 6 schools that said Jacksonville was a peer. Um, so this is a little— it's quite a bit less reliable than the double confirmed sets that we have for most schools, but, um, we'll roll with it. I'm not sure if this is great, but again, we have the national median. Uh, so do the same sort of approach. Check net assets, percent change. Yeah, again, flat, flat net assets since 2016. Not ideal.
Unrestricted net assets since 2016, shrinking by a lot and below the 25th, one of the worst in the country.
Yeah, so this school is shrinking in net assets. And unlike Drexel though, this school doesn't have a lot of unrestricted net assets remaining, only $33 million remaining, which is quite small. Um, Drexel has hundreds of millions in unrestricted net assets. Um, okay, so this looks problematic. Let's check Their net income margin. Okay. All right. So we've got many years of deficits here. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 out of the last 9, including this one, which was very large, 12% loss here in 2024. All right. So clearly not ideal. We can check the actual value for that. Changing that assets from— they lost $14 million in 2024. So certainly an issue here. We'll check the revenues again. Oh, by the way, I did check the audits for these. These are not strictly operating revenues, so keep that in mind. Some schools don't break out operating and non-operating. So They are including like investment income and stuff like that in here, which is not ideal, but will work, I guess. So their operating revenues are up— these are total revenues, including non-operating, up 17%. That actually looks okay. But again, it's including investment income, which other schools are excluding. Most schools are excluding expenses. This should be a decent gauge. All right, expenses are skyrocketing, up 50% since 2016. Okay, so that— so you have like normal growth in revenue and, uh, an explosion really here of expenses up 50%. So some cost containment may be in order. I'll take a look at their student revenues. Student revenues percentage change, kind of growing. The student revenues looks good. Raw values, good. $100 million. So they've grown from like $70 million to almost $100 million. That's great.
They're spending more than that.
Yeah, the issue is the, the growth in the expenses perhaps. Um, all right, so that looks good. Let's check a look at per student. Price looks about right. Oh, this is a sharp drop in 2024. I would— that's worth a check. Uh, why did the per-student net tuition and fee plus auxiliary revenue decline so much in 2024? Let's take a look. We can look at their enrollments, and maybe they had a surge in enrollment there that was paying less or something. Uh, we'll take a look. Students, let's see, each student count, not a real surge. There is a bigger group here though. Yeah, they've got enrollments up a ton. Yeah, this appears to me on its face to be a school that's growing really fast, but has a bit with the costs. The costs are growing even faster.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Perhaps that is something we can address here in the next few months. Little checks. All right, so let's take a look at first the salary and wage spend per $1 million. Okay, we've got a surge here in payroll spend that could be a problem, and they had this big loss in 2024, so that's probably the issue. Uh, a big jump in payroll costs from $61 million to $67 million, so $6 million in one year here. Um, we'll check also the number of W-2 employees, percent change. All right, per 1 million actually looks okay. Uh, I wonder if the— yeah, that may be okay, but the total payroll is high for their revenue and a big jump from 2023 to 2024. Let's check vendors. Uh, fees for services first, a little bit high, doesn't look crazy. Uh, contractors per $100K looks okay, actually off quite a bit. All right, and, uh, then a bunch of these other expense items that we just talked about. So advertising, that looks a bit high. Again, this peer set might not be ideal. So the median here is quite a bit lower than what they're spending per revenue. So advertising and spending looks really high. IT looks okay. Tribal health is fundraising. Check fundraising. For $1 million, looks low actually. And insurance, I'll check that one since that was a weird one at the last school. Okay, we have another— we have another perhaps one to check here with insurance.
I can't remember, Matt, does this include health insurance?
No, that would be— well, no, the employer's contribution to health insurance is included in a different line on that functional expense 990 report. So this would be like liability, property, I believe. Uh, anything else would be bucketed in there. Yeah, it could be hurricane insurance, right? Right. So they may not be able to control this, but it— you wouldn't know unless you go out and get more bids, right? This seems really odd that it's bouncing around like this. So check the quality of the data first, and then if it looks like it's high-quality data, then this suggests perhaps we should get some more estimates and just check the Check the policies themselves. Spending $3 million there. Um, it's not a huge amount of money, but you know, all this stuff sort of adds up. You got high advertising spend too, and this probably is a lot of money. No, it's not too bad. $2.5, $2.3. Um, all right, gifts or fees for services. All right, so it looks like what I— what was the takeaway here, Gary? Mostly staffing, uh, the fees for services.
Well, it's kind of like what we saw with drugstore. It's a lot of expenses adding up to be a significant trend. Nothing jumped out outside of insurance, I think jumped out as being demonstrably a big deal, except a lot of little—
yeah, yeah, this surge in, in payroll expenses is, is one to check out for sure. And then check some of those other big cost items. Uh, I'll go down to the vendors though. We'll check, check the vendor spends. And I was going to say we got lots of color, but this is, this is Jacksonville. Okay, food service, good, $1,700 per student. Yep. Uh, okay, okay, all right. Again, we can only see a small fraction of the vendors here.
Uh, top 5, top 5.
Yeah, 5 of them. But the ones that we can see look fine. Actually, the food service looks excellent, and they just reduced— they went from $15 million to $7 million on food service. This is interesting. I should ask them how— what this is about, or if this is a— yeah, well, they went from $7,000, $15,000, and then back to $7,000.
Maybe there's some capital expenses that one year.
Yeah, yeah, maybe. Yeah, it could be. Okay, but yeah, this oven's great. $1,700 for students, about the sweet spot here for these.
But bigger and better ovens.
Yeah, uh, that looks, looks pretty good. Um, I don't have a massive smoking gun for this one either, sort of like Drexel.
Yeah.
A lot of smaller, a lot of items that are a bit high that sort of in aggregate becomes a problem. I'll kick it back to you, Gary.
You know, it's interesting for these two colleges because as we shared many times on the show, Matt, we don't have to research colleges. Folks drop us notes to look at colleges and we put them in the order that received. And so Jacksonville and Drexel would have been by chance side by side. And Matt, they've got pretty similar profiles and that revenue growth is not bad, but their expense broad-based expenses appear to be a challenge for both of them. That's kind of a unique combination because we don't schedule these. We just kind of first come, first serve. And they both have the same profile. Let's just talk about Drexel for a second. And I'm going to make a statement and assess it for me. They're falling behind. They're falling behind their competitors. Fair or not?
Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, your net assets have to grow at least at inflation rate or higher, and they're not, and their peers are. So, that's your clue to get a sense of urgency and fix the budget as soon as possible.
But if I'm a Jacksonville loyalist or Jacksonville leader, I'm sure I'm a Drexel loyalist or a Drexel leader, I'm going to say, well, I've got an $800 million endowment. I don't need to worry about that stuff. And to some regards, that's correct, isn't it?
Yeah, if you're only worried about not closing, yeah, I mean, they can go for a long time without closing. But if you're wanting Drexel to be, uh, competitive with their peer set, you should be very concerned about your net assets falling behind. You won't be competitive on, on scholarships and so on if you don't have as much, as much in terms of revenue and net assets to allocate.
Let's take a look at my favorite topic, which of course is graduation rates. And I've got both Drexel and Jacksonville up for your graduation rates. And again, some generalizations here: neither doing a particularly good job, um, both decent in revenue, but neither of them is growing anywhere close to graduating 50% of their students in 4 years. And we've seen both types. We have seen colleges in dire financial straits, and that's not the case for either of these although they have expense issues, with poor graduation rates like this. And we've also seen colleges in severe financial trauma with much better 4-year graduation rates. And Matt, that's a strange combination. I don't even have a rationalization of how we can see both of those kinds of colleges, the ones that are poor and graduate students, the ones that are wealthier, not graduating students. That concerns me.
Although Drexel, you said Drexel's 6-year graduation rate.
Yeah, we did talk about that before we started recording. And yeah, this one, yeah, it's a good point. Yeah, so I'll take that back a little bit on Drexel because yeah, whatever programs they have in 6 years, they are doing a really good job. Um, Jacksonville, not so much. But this, whatever programs they have, I'm guessing, like you said before we started recording, um, they probably have some 6-year programs and they do a really good job at 6 years.
Um, yeah, I worked at the University of Tulsa for 12 years, and we had a lot of engineering students that would graduate in 5 years. We also had Division I athletics, which almost every one of them takes a redshirt, so they don't graduate typically in 4 years either. So, um, both of those made our 4-year graduation rate look really low, and then 6-year was decent.
Yeah. And let's just take a look at a couple other just parameters. Admissions yield. This is the 2023, um, the 2024 data is, uh, not in the app yet. And again, you know, admissions yield pretty modest. Drexel has trended down a little bit, um, Jacksonville University a little bit more. And to see how many students stick around, I think I told you when I was looking at this before we started the show— yeah, look at that at Drexel, students stay in, in high numbers, at 90%, averaging around 90%. Retention rate at Drexel, really a strong, strong number. So, that 6-year graduation rate, Matt, you're probably right. There was something going on with that. You don't stick around for 6 years at a rate of 9 and 10 with low numbers. So, Drexel, nowhere near anything close to even financial distress, but they have expense issues like we see them in other places. And I did look at, lastly, unfunded institutional grants. Grants, MAT, and of course these are most merit aid, most scholarships. And, uh, the good folks at Drexel are spending a lot of money or discounting a lot of tuition. Their unfunded discounts are up $100+ million in the last 8 reported years on the app. And even Jacksonville, from $27 million up to $60 million— up to, uh, yeah, up to $60 million, so up some $30 million. So both colleges are in our using that tuition discount, that merit aid, most scholarships, to discount tuition to get students in the door. And that's— we see all sorts of patterns on that. And so again, interesting combination, um, two colleges. You know, I know there's been some news reports out of South Florida, North Florida, where Jacksonville is, that there's some concerns at Jacksonville University. I don't remember the details. I have to go back and look at that. But outside of expense management, which we saw both at Drexel and Jacksonville, we've got two colleges that, that are not going anywhere. And maybe, Matt, maybe these are the kind of colleges, like you and I have talked before, that need to look at mergers. Maybe they need to look at acquisitions to help scale those operations, like we've seen with Vanderbilt in particular. Seems to be the national role model. Vanderbilt's now in Nashville, Manhattan, Florida, and then just last week they acquired a facility in San Francisco that closed the California College of the Arts. Maybe these colleges need to think about that as well.
Yes, perhaps. Um, it kind of surprises me though that Vanderbilt's doing that. Um, but I mean, there's a lot of— that's probably a different show. But, um, yeah, yeah, because you don't see— they've got a brand, right? Vanderbilt's one of the most prestigious schools in the country. Yeah, the only one that's— that I know that's that prestigious, in that sort of prestige bracket, that's aggressively doing this kind of merger expansion kind of strategy. Yeah, Northeastern does, but that— they— they're no— they're, in my opinion, their brand is not anywhere near Vanderbilt, right?
Right. So, well, Dr. Hendricks, I suggest we do this again on whatever the next Tuesday is. We'll bring up two more colleges to take a look at. And as always, thanks for those of you making time to watch the show. We are grateful, and we've had more than 35,000 views over the last couple years, so a lot of folks are watching what we do. We appreciate it. For Dr. Matt Hendricks, I'm Gary Stocker. We'll be back next week with two more colleges on the College Financial Health Show.
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