Gary Stocker demonstrates Financial Compass, a tool for private colleges that tracks 70+ financial metrics from 2016-2025 audited statements. The app costs $219 per user yearly and benchmarks metrics like net-income margin and revenue per student against peer groups using percentile lines. Color-coded alerts flag underperformance across roughly 1,300 private colleges.
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Hi, Gary Stocker with College Viability doing a tutorial on the updated 2026 Financial Compass from Perspective Data Science. I wanted to do an update on the new version that is now priced at only $219 for a 12-month period of time. You can see I have the Financial Compass in front of you. This is the one for private higher education. The public college version will be out sometime later this year. I selected a college. We automatically provide a set of peers, either selected by the college itself or by other colleges. You can see the definitions down here. There's double confirmed, self-reported, and some other combinations as well. We could talk about the depths of that at another time. Let's also take a look then at the 3 basic components of the app. What I'm looking at now is the net income margin, and there are 70-some-odd reports for the app, and they come from audited financial statements from 2016 through as late as 2025. They come from the IRS 990s and in some cases some IPEDS statistics. We always have the 25th percentile mark at the long dashed line, the 50th percentile or median for all private colleges, and we have the small dashed line for the 75th percentile as shown here. The target college, in this case Webster University, is in the blue line, and the peer group of colleges is in the orangish kind of line. If we wanted to, we could display each selected school in the comparison set, in the peer set, but that gets a little ugly, so I'm going to turn that off. On occasion, we can also adjust for inflation. So we're looking at here net income margin. You select that from the dropdown up here. We can see that our target college not doing particularly well, well below the 25th percentile for for the last 9 or 10 years. The peer group doing better, of course, hovering around the 50th percentile, the median in that time period. Let's take a look at something like the student enrollment, student revenues, and looking again at our target college, the revenue now in 2024, they were down to $129 million. We can look at that per student and we can see they were charging a proxy for the average amount in 2016 was $17,000 and change. And in 2024, $18,000 and change. Let's adjust that for inflation right here, and we can see that effectively that college is charging less in 2024, allowing for inflation, than it was in 2016. You can apply that many other places. You can also look at a different view for percent change, and again, this college is not doing particularly well. You can see that percent change has plummeted. And then for a nice standard measure the per $1 million in operating revenue. So we're looking at a college that has, again, negative trends. We can see they had $671,000 and change in net student revenues per $1 million in operating revenue. You can compare that across others. That's the basic layup, that's the basic layout, the key measures for this university. These are the last 5 reported years, 2020 through fiscal year 2025, the mean for that, the mean for that 5-year period and the percent change. If you see color, that's not good. That's an indication it is way below what you would expect and want for a college. And you can see and not be surprised that this college has a lot of color. That suggests that they're not doing particularly well. You can see the measures that we have on the left-hand side and the values. Of course, we can eyeball them. We can see the net income margin has been negative, remarkably so, for the last 5 years. And on and on those measures go. The— like I mentioned earlier, this version of the app is available for $219 for 12 months per user. There is an upgrade you can do if you want that you can actually download the data. If you want access to all of the data in the app, I can show you how to do that. Drop me a note to gary@collegeviability— that's gary@collegeviability, one long word—.com. And I'll send you information on how to get access to the download data for an additional fee. And then even more important, this is a standard set of data up here. We can actually customize the data in the database right here. And I've got net income margin posted, I've got advertising expenses, and I can grab any one of those other 70+ reports from the audited financial statements. I've grabbed total assets. We can see that for whatever set of colleges we want. We can filter this, um, just to show you quickly. Let's go everything that contains in Missouri. So these are all the colleges in Missouri. We can change that to Illinois if we want to, and now we get those colleges. We can look at just a single year. There's all sorts of filters that you can download this data. Again, drop me a note, gary@collegeviability. I'll show you how to get access and give you guidance on how to get access to that data. and we can see all the Illinois private colleges and their data points for the selected fields you've chosen and for the standard ones that are part of the, the table in general. And then finally, vendor payments. We pull data from the IRS 990s for the top 5 expenses for each of the 1,300 private colleges in the database. We can see which— we can look at by vendor, we can sort by number of students, by state, by college. Let's bring up, uh, how about Albright College? In Pennsylvania. And we can get to take a quick look at their spending comparison, their vendor payment comparisons from 2016 to 2025. And again, color not a good thing. And again, this is the college that's struggling, and we can see based on the color scheme across the top how much they vary from the median for colleges, from, for private colleges across the country. And again, color is not a good indicator. As I shared earlier, the annual subscription fee to the Financial Compass is $219. That's $219. It's available for single users throughout your organization. You can get that through a link I'll have in the show notes. If you want a more substantial version, include all the data for your own reports, for your own institutional research, drop me a note to gary@collegeviability.com and I'll be glad to get you going. In the right direction.
