Elmira Collge (NY): Financial Health & Viability Review

In this episode of the College Financial Health Show, hosts Gary Stocker and former economics professor Matt Hendricks examine Elmira College’s financial condition using audited statements, IRS 990s, and NCES/IPEDS data. They trace net assets from a 2016 median of $74 M to $88 M in 2024, noting a modest rise but a $30 M shortfall versus peer median. A 2019 loan forgiveness of $36 M temporarily boosted assets, but operating deficits have since eroded both total and unrestricted net assets (an 8 % drop in unrestricted assets). The endowment fell 42 % (from $44 M to $25 M) and the college has repeatedly sought Attorney General permission to draw unrestricted funds from it, already taking $7 M and planning more. Operating losses average $6–7 M annually, representing roughly 20 % of $24 M revenue, with expenses around $31 M when depreciation is added. Revenue has collapsed 39 % due to a 54 % enrollment decline, while tuition per student remains roughly $16 K. Staffing is mis‑aligned: about 24 employees per $1 M revenue (vs. a healthier 18) and a staff‑to‑student ratio of 0.92, implying a need to cut 133–187 positions to reach sustainable ratios. Expenses are inflated in several areas: non‑officer compensation (48 % of budget vs. 42 % norm), benefits, payroll taxes, insurance ($800 K annually), and especially the food‑service contract with Parkhurst ($5,600 per student versus a $1,800 benchmark). Other high‑cost vendors include EAB ($600 K) and various contractor fees. The hosts argue that revenue growth alone cannot rescue Elmira; aggressive cost‑cutting, staff reductions, and renegotiating contracts are essential. They also note that Elmira’s graduation rate (~60 % four‑year) is relatively strong, but merit‑aid reductions have likely contributed to enrollment loss. The episode concludes with a call for Elmira to consider the Strategic Compass benchmarking tool for deeper analysis and cost‑restructuring, and the hosts remark that Elmira’s plight reflects a broader national crisis among private colleges.
Chapters
It is the College Financial Health Show with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker, where each Tuesday we look at the financial health and even viability of private colleges throughout the United States. And we use data, and we use data that colleges themselves prepare and submit from audited financial statements, from IRS 990s and of course from the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. And Dr. Matt Hendricks, former economics professor at Tulsa University. We've got one college on the show today. What is that college?
Yeah, we have Elmira College in New York, and I will pull up the Advanced Compass and get right to it. All right. So as you know, this is data scraped from audited financial statements and 990s. And some of it's free, so check it out if you haven't already. All right, so I got Almira pulled up and I'm going to go, as I have in the previous few shows, just go straight to net assets.
And while you're bringing that up, for those joining us live today, the chat is open. I will monitor the chat. So if you have questions or comments from anything that Matt and I talk about, throw that in the chat. I'll be glad to interrupt and we'll talk about it right away. Yeah.
Okay. So remember, net assets is I guess the easiest way to think about it is like your net worth. If you're a person, for a university, it's like their net worth as well. And these are really important because whenever there's deficits, usually money comes out of net assets or unrestricted net assets in particular to pay for deficits, cover deficits over long periods. And so you want to look at a couple of things with these. One is the level, and Elmira is about at the median in 2016 in terms of net assets at about $74 million. And at the end of 2024, they're at $88 million, which has grown a little bit, but far slower growth than what's normal for universities. You can see they started out about like median level, and now they're well below the median by about $30 million or so. There's lots of reasons for that, but the main one is it looks like they've been running massive deficits, operating deficits for a very, very long time. And I'm going to show you that. But Before I show you that, I'm going to focus on percent change. So they did have a big jump here in net assets in 2019. And like usual, I check this out. It looks like they had a loan forgiven that was $36 million, just forgiven. I'm not sure why, but very nice, right? It's like getting a donation of $36 million. So that shot that up. But since then, very poor operating results since then. So just give you a sense of where we're at. They were at $108, $109 million in 2019. $18 million after that debt was forgiven, and now they're at $89 million or so. So they've eaten up about 18% of their net assets since 2019, which is of course not ideal. You want these to grow, in fact grow faster than inflation, which would mean double-digit growth over this period percentage-wise. So that's net assets total. As I mentioned, unrestricted net assets are far more important than restricted than just total net assets, what I just showed you. Uh, the reason is, and this school knows that very well, um, unrestricted net assets can be used for operations without any, uh, strings attached. Uh, if you have restricted assets, which the school, um, has had to get unrestricted working the proper channels through the Attorney General's Office, uh, it's just much more complicated to get a hold of that restricted money. Um, and even if you do, you probably have to pay it back at some point. And, um, I'll get more into that in a moment, but it's It's really the same story they had after that loan was forgiven. They're at $66 million in unrestricted net assets and since then have decreased by about $6 million or 8%. Again, not ideal. Decreasing unrestricted net assets is a huge problem, especially given the increasing competitive nature of higher ed, inflation, and so on. Basically means the school is, is running, is eating up its assets and needs to turn around as soon as possible. Okay, so that's an 8% drop. Why are they eating up net assets? Actually, let me show you one thing before I go into that. Where is, where are they eating up the net assets? It appears if you look at this graph, a lot of the net assets that they're eating up were part of the endowment. Their endowment's down by 42% since 2016. Um, just to give you a sense of the raw numbers, they had an endowment of $44 million back in 2016, and now it's $25 million. And on top of that, um, depending on how they did the accounting— I actually, I didn't double-check this— but they've taken— they got approved by the Attorney General's office to take $8 million out of their endowment and unrestricted. And it looks like their plan on the audit— and you can see all this on the audit, by the way— their plan is they've already taken $4 million Their plan was to take another $3 million in fiscal year '25. So if they followed that, they already took another $3 million. So $7 million total and then another million after that, which if that's the— they're going to eat through this very fast. All right. And the reason is that their deficits are quite large. And let me show you that change in net assets from operations. So you can see, obviously, you don't want a negative value here ever. And almost every year they have a negative value. So this is a $4 million loss. This is a $4 million loss, $6 million loss. So you can get a sense just based on history at the school, they'll eat through an $8 million loan from their endowment in just a few years if they were to keep up these losses. Although their losses recently look a little better. It turns out that it was just because my AI got tricked, and I'll show you how it got tricked. On their— yes.
Okay.
Which year did I pull up operating revenues?
You got '24. Okay.
'24. Right. Okay. I was going to show you this number right here. Okay. So their real loss from operations was $6.8 million. The AI that I have pulled $3.3 million. I got it confused thinking that this was total expenses. This is not total expenses, by the way. This accounting is not normal. Total expenses would be this plus depreciation, amortization, and accretion. So a normal presentation of this would not have this line at all, and this would be part of each of these functional expenses. So this is not a standard presentation right here. So really their expenses are like $31 million. All right, so the loss is about $6.8 million. Once again, that is massive, right? Um, and even in cash terms, it's like $3.5 million on just a $24 million revenue. So it's a huge net income deficit they've had every year, uh, except for just a handful, maybe one or two. I'll just pull that up really quick. Net income margin. Yep, so we're at— and again, this is not right— this net income margin is much bigger than this. I think it's like negative 20-some if you do the correct— again, my AI got tricked by that extra line there in the total expense line, which is not accurate. Um, so massive losses here, decreasing net income, uh, net assets, lots of problems borrowing from the endowment. Um, again, they did it the right way, thankfully, which is to go through the Attorney General's office and get permission to do that, where I've seen schools not do that, right? Uh, that just causes more problems. Um, okay, another thing to check for schools that have financial stress is usually you see them neglecting the physical plant, and that's certainly been the case for this school. Uh, a normal CapEx to depreciation ratio should be 1, which just means intuitively, just means you're replacing, at least replacing, yeah, the capital that you're wearing out every year. That's sort of degrading every year. So you ideally would stay above 1 or right at 1. And you can see, let's see, the median school is slightly below 1, which is not ideal. But as you know, the median school in higher ed is not doing so hot. So the, this school is doing far worse than that on the CapEx spend, basically not replacing any losses.
Hey, Matt. Hey, Matt, what's the red line for? What's the red line for?
The red line are schools that have already closed. These, these schools closed in 2023 and 2024. So they did get a 1 in 2024, which is enough to just cover the loss of, you know, loss of capital for that year. So I guess if I was working at the school, just pay attention. Are you seeing really old computers? Outdated Wi-Fi systems, bad servers, leaky roofs, windows that don't work, stuff like that, parking lots with potholes. That's the kind of stuff you'll typically see when you go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 years without replacing your capital stock. And this is what also will look like your property and equipment value. Their property and equipment value, notice how closely it's followed schools that have closed.
Yeah, not good.
Is down 23% since 2016. Again, not normal, not normal at all. What what would be normal is 17% growth in property and equipment. Okay, which is probably— I don't know what the inflation rate's been over this period, so it's not keeping up with inflation but certainly not decreasing nominally. Okay, let's get into what's going on. Why is the school struggling so much to balance its budget? And here's, you know, standard stuff. We have issues on the revenue side and, uh, and also on the expense side. Start with operating revenues. Operating revenues are down 40% almost. And remember, this is not, um, probably accurate because again, the endowment draws are massive. Actually, I don't think I showed you that. Let me show you the endowment draws. Endowment appropriations as a percent of the beginning of your endowment value. So, so it's just like a policy at this school, uh, to draw way more than normal on the endowment, which is difficult for me to understand. Um, I even looked it up in their audit. They said their spending policy is 7%, which is not at all normal. In fact, this might, may be the highest stated spending policy I've ever seen.
And they're still above that many of those years that we're looking at.
Yeah, and they're still above that. Um, and this doesn't even include the $4 million that they just borrowed, right? So that really should be like an endowment draw, right? It was, it was a draw. Um, so lots of things I think going wrong at this school. Um, endowment draw should never be 7%, should be 5% of the previous value over the last 3 years. But that's the normal spending policy, and you should stick to that. You shouldn't be borrowing on top of that. What happened this year? Who knows? Lots of issues with just fiscal management, it appears. And yeah, hence the reason the endowment now is much smaller and they're asking the attorney general to release some of it. They must not have any unrestricted endowment left. Right. That's basically what's happened to them.
Okay.
I was talking about revenue.
All right.
Revenue is down 30%.
You got distracted.
Yeah. Revenue is down 39%. All right, so I'll break that out into net tuition revenue here in a moment. But as I like to do is just get a sense. So we're down 39% on revenue. Hopefully that means we're down 39% on expenses, right? That would be what the board should be really doing, in my opinion, making sure that they pass balanced budgets, right? But that I don't think has been happening here. Their expenses are down 37%.
But this is—
This is actually not right again, because if you go back to my AI pulled this number for expenses, their expenses are actually $31 million because you got to add in depreciation. I don't know why you would pull that out here. This is really rare to present this this way. Depreciation should be allocated to each of these expense categories. So really their expenses are you know, up here somewhere. So they, they are doing decent. I'll give them credit. So they've done some expense cuts, uh, just not enough when you're down 40%.
Uh, again, look where the red line is.
Yeah. Uh, it was really, really, uh, tough spot, of course. Um, all right, so let's take a look at what's happening. Why is the revenue down so much? We'll go right to the, the main operating revenue, which is net tuition revenue, and There you go. It's mostly, it appears mostly explained by decrease in net tuition revenue. This is really catastrophic and looks to me just based on my experience of how these systems work. You see how we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years of pretty much constant decline and then flattens out. That typically means something happened back here, right? 2016, 2017 and was never corrected. Just continues to go until you get to a new steady state, which is about 2022. I've seen this happen dozens of times. Probably whatever is flagging their revenue, their enrollments, it'll turn out it's probably something that happened back here and was never, never fixed. And hey, man, look at the person you would see if that were the case. What's that?
Look at the per student for me.
Yeah. So as we've seen in previous shows, some of it, sometimes it appears to be a price issue. In fact, the school that just announced that they were closing, I went back and looked at them. Yeah, their price is just completely unsustainable. This, this looks okay. I mean, their nominal price is actually a little bit higher than it was in 2016. It bounces around quite a bit, which is a bit odd. But yeah, that, that looks— this is totally doable. $16,000 per student on average on that tuition revenue. That's totally doable. The issue that they're having, though, is, as you probably already know, Student enrollment. If your net tuition revenue is down by 50% and your price is pretty much constant, it's all about students. So yeah, enrollment's down 54%. And again, followed this sort of sharp drop, sharp drop, sharp drop, sharp drop, and then hit new steady state. But then there's another sharp drop here. So I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about that, but I would look very closely at things that happened back here. And that's important, right? You got to look way back because these systems take 5 years to get to a new steady state. So you got to look way back to understand what's happened. Okay, so lots of problems on the revenue side. Honestly, I'll just give you my assessment. I don't see this school digging out of this mess on the revenue side anytime. I mean, remember, it takes— even if they do everything right today, Right. So they just started doing everything right last year. It's going to take a minimum of 5 years to get back to where they need to be. Right. To probably be sustainable.
Yeah.
I don't think they have that much time. They're just looking at this. They've already asked the attorney general for $8 million of their endowments. Are they going to go back to the attorney general again and ask for more? I don't know. Is the attorney general even going to say yes? Who knows? They only have $25 million left in the endowment. At some point the attorney general is just going to say, I would imagine, no, let's give this money to a different nonprofit that will manage it better. That's my guess. I don't know this attorney general, but I know that there's lots of pressure for them to not unrestrict donor funds that were pledged for a specific purpose, and they're not being used for that purpose at the moment.
And Matt, for those watching live or those that will watch the recorded version on the College Viable YouTube channel, Almira is just a local symptom of a national disease. We do this show every week and we see this type of pattern— different numbers, of course— we see this type of pattern way, way, way too many times, Matt.
Yeah. All right. Um, so, so I guess the reason I brought that up is I— the only way I see this school surviving, and I hope I'm wrong, um, but I, I really— I think if you read their narrative on the audit, which is on page 15 if you're interested, I see a lot in there about increasing revenues, but honestly, I just, I think we're way past that. The only way this school survives, in my opinion, just based on my experience of what I've seen schools that actually do survive that look like this, it's because they take massive efforts to cut costs and become sustainable, like, right away. And the only, only way you can become sustainable in, like, 1 or 2 years is to cut massive costs. And I'll give you a sense of how much. They have to cut. All right, so right away you can see the major problem. We have too many employees for how, for how many, uh, students they have, and also for how many, how much revenue they have. And so I did some math to try to bring these numbers to life for you. Um, it just takes a little bit of work, but basically what this means is they have almost 24 employees for every $1 million in revenue that they bring in. And again, that revenue is higher than it should be. It's not— you're taking big draws on the endowment, which shouldn't be happening. Probably also getting big donations because people are worried about the school surviving, right? Which is probably not sustainable either. Uh, okay, so basically they need to have about 18— to be normal, it's about 18 employees per $1 million in revenue, not 24. Okay, so that— so what— how much is the gap here to get from here to here? Does it give you a sense of how many people you're talking about? Um, to get to a normal ratio, they would have to cut about 133 staff. Okay, so you're talking massive. This is, I think, why a lot of schools just close shop, right? This is a difficult thing to do, and you got to be very serious about it. This is 133 staff to get from here to here. All right, on this other graph, it's even more. If you're going to right-size your spend, your staff, for how many students you have, to get from here to here, you would have to cut 187 staff. Okay, they currently have nearly as many staff as they have students, and you can see that right here. The ratio of staff to students is 0.92. Usually not going to work unless you have a big endowment, which the school does not have a big endowment. Okay, um, so you're talking huge cuts, right? And again, I think this is like the Hail Mary for them. The way they survive is by cutting nearly 200 staff. All right, so I'll just say it. Any hopes of getting back to sustainability by just growing enrollment and this and that? I, yeah, that's great. They need to try it, but it's even if you do everything perfectly, it's probably not going to get back to where they need to be, but by at least 4 years. Okay. All right, I'll show you another one. So that's just number of employees. This is called total compensation of non-officers, which is most of, most of the staff. Again, way too high. They're spending nearly $12 million on non-officer salaries and wages to get from here to here. Actually, I think I did it on this graph. Way too high, above the 75th percentile, spending 48% of their— so there's another way to think about it. Rules of thumb might be useful in your conversations. This school is spending 48% of its budget on non-officer salaries and wages, and that's not normal. What's normal is 42%. Okay. It might not sound like a big difference, but it is. It's huge to get from here to here. You would be cutting out over $1.4 million in the payroll. So $1.4 million there just by right-sizing the salaries. And again, I highly doubt that it's related to high salaries. It's all about too many people. All right. So it's all about too many people, in my opinion. And I can help them find that if they're serious about getting back to sustainability here. Um, all right, it'll show up everywhere. When you have too many people, you're gonna have too many expenses all over the place, right? So it's not only salaries and wages, also benefits. Um, and I noticed, uh, let me see, non-officer, uh, other benefits. Okay, they're spending $2.3 million on benefits for non-officers. And just to give you a sense of where that's at, scaled with their revenue. It's completely out of the norm. Yeah. And relative to how many students they have, completely out of the norm. Again, I didn't back out how much they would save here, but pretty easy to see it's probably another million dollars there just on benefits savings. This is health, dental, life, vision, those kinds of things. And keep that in mind, I'm going to show you a vendor that they have that is peculiar, that's related to this, probably. Payroll taxes way too high. Again, all of this is probably a symptom of just having too many people. And by the way, the person filling out the 990 was struggling back then.
We hope they didn't have zero payroll taxes.
They didn't. Yeah. I think they even had like zero payroll costs, but I'm assuming these numbers here are much more accurate. But again, payroll tax is really high for how many students they have and also for how much revenue they have. Okay, here's insurance. This is one to look into. It's not a trivial amount. This is $500,000 in 2019, which was actually high for 2019, but now they're at $800,000. So there could be— I mean, that's just raw value. This is a tiny school, right? They shouldn't be spending more than the median on insurance, right? So if you scale it for how big they are, this is completely out of line. I mean, think about it, each student's paying $1,300 just for their insurance at the school, and this is like property insurance, I think, and liability insurance. Um, not normal to be spending that much. All right, so something's odd there, and it could be related to this vendor that they have on the books as well. So I'm not sure, uh, but definitely worth looking into insurance, fundraising expenses. This may be part of their strategy to get back to sustainability, but may actually be making things worse. Hard to say. I'd need to know exactly what the bump has been so we can see raw values first. They went from— well, they're spending about the same. They had zero and now they're spending $1 million, which could make sense if that meant you getting more than $1 million in additional fundraising, but it's a little tricky to pull that out. But I will just say this is high for how big this school is, so it's clearly part of their strategy to get back to balancing their budget. But far easier to do if you just cut expenses, in my opinion. But this may be worth leaving alone, I'm not sure. Travel— so these are kind of inexplicable. Like, travel expenses should fall when a school is struggling or at $540,000 here. Hard to say. It's a little bit high. Maybe it's not a big one, big deal. I flagged it when I was prepping for the show, but this doesn't look absolutely terrible to me. It's maybe lower priority item. Here's a big item. Fees for services. This is your vendor spends. Most, a lot of it higher than normal. $80,000 per $1 million in revenue. It's higher than normal. And $3,000 per student again. All right. Remember, this was not bringing in a lot of revenue.
$16,000 a year.
Yeah. I mean, and then they're allocating so much of it to payroll and then a bunch to vendors, a bunch to insurance, of all things. It's very high. And then here's one that's completely out of line. And this is something that needs to be looked at immediately. Their food service contract is one of the worst I've ever seen. Spending $5,600 per student. Again, per student. So they bring in what, like $16,000 on net tuition revenue? I'm not sure, maybe another $8,000 for room and board, right? And but you can see all this money going out to all these different things, right, that are probably low priority in terms of advancing the mission. And this is incredibly low priority in my opinion. Spending $5,600 per student on food service is incredibly high. Here's the normal amount. It's $1,800. Okay, this is a really rough thing, but to be that far off, that's not— it's hard to explain that away. All right, so the number of contractors looks okay, but as you see here, the overall spend on contractors is just out of the realm of normal. So the number of contractors looks about right for their size and revenue, and they have 7 contractors over $100K. The issue that they have here though is that these contracts look bizarre, and I'm going to show you that right now.
Amira, and this is in the Advanced Compass also, right, Matt?
Yep, yep. So as I already flagged, this dining service contract with Parkhurst is completely, um, weird. All right, this is $5,600 per student. Uh, I guess that puts it at you know, standard deviation or so, half standard deviation or so above the median. But as I showed you, sort of normal spend is about $1,700. So they only have 600 students. I think I backed that number out as about $1 million would be like a normal food service contract for them, but they're spending $3.5 million. So there could be like $2.5 million here if they get a normal food service contract. It may not be possible, but I would definitely look into it, at least do everything they can to bring that down. And in fact, when they were twice the size they are right now, they had 1,400 students, right, in 2016. And lo and behold, there's their food service contract. It wasn't $1 million. Now it went from $1 million to $3.5 million, and their size of their student body is half. It doesn't work.
That's not a good look.
The math doesn't work. Just go to Parkhurst, tell them this math is terrible, and try to work with them to get this at least down to $2 million, if not down to $1.5 million or less. All right. There's probably things they can do to work with you to get this down. I mean, really, you got a lot of leverage, right? If this doesn't get down, there's a decent— I mean, this school is in serious trouble financially. So you're going to have a lot of leverage in this conversation because they're going to lose the contract if you guys close, right? Here's another one, EAB for $600K. Clearly that's not helping, at least on the surface here. Hard to justify $600,000 spend and continue to lose students and you don't have many students to begin with. I just don't like it. The transportation number looks high. Parkers. Oh, here's the insurance one I was talking about. $700,000 going to insurance here. And remember, I flagged the insurance as being completely out of norm. So I would go back to this person and ask this firm and figure out what's going on. Why is the insurance spend so high? Is this contract being rolled up into it? So maybe they're saving. Money on, on insurance contracts, but then they had to pay them $700K, which ate it all up. I'm not sure. Okay, so lots of stuff to work at here, but I can't stress it enough. The school, if you look at on page 15, let me just do this again. So this is their narrative. Okay. In accordance— okay. The board, a 5-year plan, revised enrollment. Revenue, fundraising, revenue, academic programs. I suppose that's talking about revenue, diversifying revenue streams. Okay. I don't see anything here about cutting costs, which is probably the number one thing they have to do to survive at this point. And very aggressively. I already told you that they probably have to cut like 200 staff. All right. I can help them do that. But there's, there's probably no chance they're going to survive just by doing this. Okay, so I'm being very honest, but I'll kick it back to you, Gary.
You know, to follow up on that, Matt, again, Elmira is a local symptom, regional symptom of a national disease. We see this pattern way too often when colleges in financial trouble, both as bad as we see with Elmira and even those not as bad as we see, too many, Matt, say we're going to grow our way out of it. And you and I, and I'm guessing all the folks that watch this show recognize this is a declining market. How do you grow out as a small college? How do you grow out of a declining market? It's just not a realistic scenario.
Yeah.
Let's take a quick look. Go ahead. Yeah.
I mean, it's the easier thing to do. It's hard to, to fire a lot of people. I can't, I haven't had to do it, but I can imagine it's terrible. Um, but needs to be done here.
So Michael Shipman just noted one of the folks participating live. He says the reason for the high cost of dining is that Parkhurst pay to renovate the dining hall facility and those costs.
Yeah, that's the best—
we've seen that before. Yeah, yeah, we've seen that before.
The problem with that is you're— the reason they're giving you a loan is not because they're trying to be nice, right? They're locking you into a long-term deal with them. So now you're at the mercy of this contract, which is completely not normal and which is odd. I've actually just talked to somebody that there's no reason to do this anyway. You have access to the same salespeople to buy and renovate as they do. So it's just bizarre that schools are doing this and locking themselves into like decades-long contracts that may be hard to get out of now. Yeah.
So just a couple of things on the College Viability App and look at the grad— look at the 4-year graduation rates. They have actually increased from a decent number to a much better number. And the point behind this, Matt, again, I know you've heard me say this before, a college in financial trouble is still graduating students at a decent rate. They're doing something right on the graduation side. Don't know what that is, but it's a sad commentary because both colleges who aren't graduating students— and Matt, you've heard me jump up and down and scream about that before— colleges graduating 30, 40% of their students after 4 years. Elmira is graduating in the vicinity of 60% over 4 years. So they're doing something right, but still the finances are good. We talked about their enrollment. I can actually break it out by graduate enrollment. Hold still. And the graduate enrollment, even though not a big number, is down by half. And so that's incremental revenue as well. And then, Matt, you and I also like to look at the unfunded institutional grants. And of course, we know that commonly as most merit aid and most scholarships. And again, to Elmira's credit, we saw their expenses down Not enough, but down. And they have quit giving away the store because you can see in 2016 they were giving away almost $24 million, $25 million in merit aid and scholarships, unfunded discounts. And they've knocked that way down, way below half, to $10 million and change, down $14 million over those 8 years. So they recognize the need, but we saw what happened with the enrollment, right? You quit giving merit aid, you quit giving discounts, where do students go? Somewhere else, somewhere else. And then finally, just a quick look at tuition and fee revenue. And again, you have this in your app. Again, not a good number at all. And so, Matt, um, you know, best wishes to the folks at Elmira, but they have a tough situation, don't they?
Yeah, I just wish they would, uh, go all in and, and, uh, fix it. Um, but it's going to require I mean, I think part of the reason, like, if without a dashboard like this, you're gonna sound like a crazy person going into one of these schools and saying, hey, I've gotta fire 180 people, right? Like, this sounds crazy.
But really that, I think that's, you know, and if the folks at Elmira want to pursue that, talk about the briefly talk about the strategic compass and how you could help them cut those costs and get to that number.
So when I engage with a client, they get a strategic compass, which will do quite a bit. Actually, there's a lot of benchmarking that can be done at the occupation code level. And gives a really good sense of where to dig deeper in terms of which departments, which occupation groups are way out of line. And it's in weird spots. I'll tell you, it's not— usually it's not faculty. Honestly, it's easier for schools to monitor that. right? And keep that right-sized because you can see it every day. There's 2 people in the classroom versus 10 versus 20. It's really easy to see. But if you have 25 police officers, it's not as obvious, right?
Right.
Or if everybody has an assistant or 2, right? It's not quite so obvious unless you're really looking. And that's what the strategic compass is looking at everything, right? And it's very obvious when you are out of line on certain occupation groups. And we can make a good guess as to which departments, which titles those folks are. And then we dig deeper in institutional data, confirm that, and then start making policy decisions from there.
And if, if you're from Elmira College and you want to take us up on that offer, I'll leave my contact information in the show notes. And Matt, either Matt and I will reach out and show you, you can do a demo, private demo for you on that Strategic Compass. It's different than the dashboard Matt spent most of the show talking about today, and it drills down deeply. So again, reach out if you'd like to do that. We'll do a private demo for you on that. So Matt, let's call that a day. I suggest we get back together next Tuesday and do 2 more colleges. And so for Matt Hendricks in Oklahoma, I'm Gary Stocker out of St. Louis. Thanks for watching the College Financial Health Show. We'll be back next week.
More from Gary

What does it look like when a college increases both total revenue and total expenses?

College Financial Crisis? We look at the financial health of Bay Path U. (MA) and Coe College (IA)

Private College Financial Crisis? We look at the financial health of Hobart William Smith College

Financial Compass tutorial (Private college version.) Financial statements compiled 2016-2025.






