Gary Stocker shows how private colleges can use IRS Form 990 data to compare what they pay vendors against peer schools. The tool benchmarks spending per student and per million dollars in revenue, color-coding how far each college deviates from the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile. Bluffton University paid Sodexo $1.7 million for food services.
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This is Gary Stocker with College Viability. As colleges work to manage vendor costs, I'm going to show you a new app tool you can use. I will show viewers how to use data to compare pricing they are getting from vendor products and services. The data comes from the IRS Form 990s that colleges themselves submit to the government. We're gonna spend a few minutes looking at a part of the Advanced Private College Financial Compass, and what it's gonna do is let us take a look at how to compare your vendor pricing, vendor pricing at your private college, to that of other colleges across different areas. And for those of you who have followed these demos before, this app is part of this Advanced Private College Financial Compass that we're looking at. And the first part, for those that follow, You can select a private college, you can select comparisons, peer group comparisons, and you can look at dozens and dozens of data points across balance sheets, statement of activities, and much, much more. There are, of course, graphic representations of all those combinations for you to compare yourself to other colleges. And you can see a set of closed colleges are part of the comparisons, and those are the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile. But that's not what I'm going to talk about today. I want to talk about the vendor prices. This is a relatively new table, and this is from Perspective Data Science. And what it's going to allow us to do is compare prices for vendors across different areas. And what you see I have brought up here is the vendor prices table from the Private College Advanced Financial Compass. And I brought up a series of private colleges in Ohio for the fiscal year 2022-2023. This is set up to be greater than 2021. And then I've looked at a description that includes food services. You can see vendors that are part of this table, the Harmonize, which is just a database tool, and then the amount this college paid. So Bluffton University in 2023 paid $1.7 million to Sodexo and affiliates for food services. Now, before I go into this any further, context is always important, and I'll explain why here in a second. But when you look at what these vendors are offering across every imaginable service that you can think of, service and product, you can think of, they offer different combinations of services. So that's an important consideration. But what I'm about to show you will give you, will put you in a position to ask your vendors, what am I getting for this fee in comparison to other colleges, other private colleges, in this case of the app? And I'll share, when you look on the right-hand side, color is not good. Dark colors are really not good. And you can see the variation, no variation from the median. Slight standard deviation, and of course it gets higher variation from the median, the darker the color. And this simply gives us a tool to look at who is paying above what their peer group is by statistics for food service. Now again, context is important. It's very possible that Sodexo is providing a lot more service to this university than they are to others, but this is a tool that lets you ask, lets you make an informed question to your vendors about these products. It's amount per student to make it standardized, and then amount per $1 million in revenue, again, to make it standardized per student. The second example that I want to give you, I've gone and selected private colleges in Illinois. I've actually entered a vendor name. Now I'm focusing on food services because I know most colleges have those. So I've entered a vendor's name, and you can see different versions of how it's listed. And again, this comes from the IRS Form 990s. And all I'm going to do is scroll through on the right-hand side so you can see those areas where, in this case, Aurora University is right on. Description, the vendor, and, and the fiscal year. The FTE students is just a filter you can use to look at colleges your size. I didn't do that here, but for example, I could have looked at all Illinois private colleges with between 1,000 and 3,000 students. So again, something to look at in context. As I scroll down on the right-hand side, you're going to see different combinations, some colleges who are right on the the median, right in the median, no color. And you can see other colleges that are not. Now, if you're scrolling through this, of course you can pause the video to see if your college is up here. You're looking for the color change, and you're looking to say, hey, does this really apply to me? If you want to know more, I'll leave some contact information in the show notes, and you can reach out to me. I'll be happy to set up a private demo to show you how this would work, not just the food, the vendor prices, but other tools inside of this Advanced Financial Compass as well. In this final example, I've just brought up two colleges, and I've used the filters to bring up Lyon College in Arkansas, Webster University in Missouri, because they both have unique names, and I knew that would work. And I looked at data from 2022-2023. You can see the student numbers— one is much larger. And you can see this time I searched by description of food, and it brought up two different vendors. You can see that in the context of median, Webster University is right where it needs to be, but Lyon College is considerably above those numbers. Now, does this mean that Lyon College Is not getting a good deal? I have no idea. But it does give Lion College, in this case, a chance to look at the numbers and say, "Hey," to their vendors, or to reach out to other vendors and say, "Hey, here's what I'm paying now. Do you have some flexibility to help me get a better value for my organization and my students?" How can you use this data? I always say it's the comparisons that matter. More specifically, it is the external comparisons that really matter. Looking at data outside of your organization provides perspective you cannot get from data just inside your private college. My contact information follows. Reach out to schedule a private demo of this and other higher education data products.
