Goucher College (MD) and Wesleyan University (CT): Financial Health & Viability Review Dec. 2025

It is the College Financial Health Show with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker on Tuesday, December 2nd, I guess it is, 2025. We're back from a long Thanksgiving vacation. And as usual, this is the show that looks at the financial health and viability of private colleges throughout the country. We have updated versions of the app. We have some new pricing. And Dr. Hendricks, Matt Hendricks, what are the colleges we're looking at today, sir?

Hey, we got Wesleyan University in Connecticut and Goucher College in Maryland. I'm going to flip the order. I'm going to do Goucher first. Uh, they're going to be most of the focus of the show. Wesleyan's in great shape and I'll show you that. And it's actually a nice way to end the show. We're going to have a good story at the end of the show, uh, and one that's facing some financial issues early on. Okay, so I'm going to start with Goucher. Uh, let's go share that screen. Okay, let's get into it. And I'm going to show you a new quick table here that was developed over the last few months to give you a really quick view of what's happening at Goucher, aiding you with these little visuals too. So what this— this is just a snapshot of some of the more important, uh, financial metrics both averages by year, fiscal year. So we have 5 years and the mean and the percentage change over those 5 years. And I've also flagged built-in commands to flag in red values that should be concerning potentially. And so here's the first one. So there's, there's an interesting thing happening with their net assets. So this is where we've been starting the show the last I don't know, a few months. Really, the most important metric to focus on is this unrestricted net assets for just an overall sense of how healthy the school is. And you really want to focus on the trend and how, how big the value is. And in this case, I'm concerned with both the trend and the value. So you can see here it started at $82 million in 2020, and they've lost 17% of their unrestricted net assets in 5 years. and ended at $68 million, which sounds like a lot, but this school is shedding money really fast, about $8 million a year clip right now in terms of deficits. Um, so we're going to get into all of that, but first of all, I got to deal with one thing. The total net assets are increasing, so they're up 36%. Unrestricted net assets are down 17%. Okay, so what's happening here and what, what do we make of this? So long story short, it appears they've gotten some massive donations for restricted for their endowment, which is great. But keep in mind that a restricted donation like that is not nearly as valuable to the school as an unrestricted donation. And there's a million reasons for that. The main reason is when it's restricted to the endowment, there are lots of laws in other potential rules that were put on the, the donation that restrict the school from using those funds to support operations. Um, one of the biggest restrictions is that they can only draw a certain percentage of that money each year to support operations. So yes, it's valuable, but, uh, in a pickle— and you're going to see the pickle that they're in in a moment— uh, they can't use that money unless they somehow convince the Attorney General to release a bunch of it or convince the donor to release some, it's not available to— it's not their money, essentially. It's not available to support operations. Really, it's supposed to be held in perpetuity. And if, say, Goucher were to go down, it should go to a different nonprofit. So really, the money that they have available to use to support operations is depleting fast. Okay. And I'll explain, it has a lot to do with their deficit, and they're trying to fill the gaps in their deficit by drawing a ton of money off their unrestricted endowment fund, which is now almost gone. So keep in mind, so $68 million sounds like a lot, but there are schools that closed that 5 years ago had more than $68 million in unrestricted net assets. College of St. Rose had more, had like 77, and University of the Arts also had more in unrestricted net assets. Those are both closed right now. So 5 years ago they were looking better than this in terms of unrestricted net assets. Okay, so not to panic anybody, but things are not, not good at Goucher at the moment. So here's the, here's Here's the next thing. They've had deficits in operations, and that's what's causing their problem. Looks like the deficits flared up in 2022 and have since been quite large. $8 million loss, $8 million loss, an average over the last 5 years of $4 million loss per year. In terms of how big that is, that's pretty big. That's 12% of their revenue that they're losing every year. So that's the net income margin. Again, that should never be negative. Or at least on average should be positive. And they're averaging -6% over the last 5 years.

Hey, hey, Matt. Yeah, those losses are in the presence of federal funds, post-pandemic federal funds also.

Yeah. So, yeah, actually, the one year that they did have a positive number, it was almost surely because of the COVID relief funds here and the rest of the year is negative, negative, negative. Okay. So why are they running deficits? You can see all of this stuff in this one table. I hope it's really clear and quick for you to see. So they used to have $40 million per year roughly in student revenues. And in 2024, that's $8 million lower. They've lost 20% of their net student revenues. That's their tuition, room and board, mostly revenue. So your auxiliary revenue plus net tuition revenue. So we'll investigate why they're— I'll just give you the answer. They're losing a ton of students. Enrollment's way, way down, and I'll show you that in a moment. Other things to be worried about here, um, CapEx to depreciation. You want this? Yeah, this is one of the lowest I've ever seen, actually. Yeah, uh, I would love to go to this campus and see what it looks like in terms of deferred maintenance potentially, or just old buildings, really old technology, um, because usually this is what what that means, right? You go for 5 years in a row with a CapEx to depreciation ratio below 1, and they're way below 1. Yeah, that means basically you're not replacing anything that's wearing out for the most part, right? So it could mean that. I don't know that for sure, but I have a strong feeling that the computers are old, Wi-Fi is probably old, buildings are old, and perhaps not maintained properly. And you'll see what— how this compares to one that looks good, Wesleyan University, here in a minute. But anything below 1 is really bad here, especially over a 5-year period. You should average above 1. Okay, so the other one that is— I'm going to flag. So there's some other stuff here, but I want to speed it up a little bit. Take a look at these draws, Gary. 8% draw, 6%. 4.6%. That's the closest to normal they've had. That's still high. 8%, 7.9%. These are way, way too big to be drawn on your endowment every year. And almost surely the reason they're doing this is because they're running deficits. So really, so what's happening is if I were to correct these, these endowment draws to be 4.5%, which is normal, these deficits would be much, much larger because what happens is this money is pulled out of the endowment and it shows up in operating revenues up here, which is holding their operating revenues higher than they should be, right, with a normal draw. So what do we do is called adjusted revenue. If I adjusted this revenue, it would surely be far lower today than it, than it was in 2020 in nominal terms. In real terms, it's way, way lower.

So their endowment value is shrinking in relationship to their competitors.

Yeah. So interestingly, so there's a, there's a lot of nuance here. Their endowment's actually up 53%, but it's really just because, right, there was a huge couple of huge donations. It looks like there was one here from '91 to '59, and then there was another one, it looks like right here between '23 and '24. That was $50 million, I think I read. These are restricted down donations for the endowment. Which sounds great, but everybody needs to be very clear that this endowment is not healthy. And I'll show you why in a moment. Almost all of it is restricted at this point. And the amount of money that they're using every year to sort of fill the gap is almost gone. And I'll show you that when we get there. But just to make sure everything is clear here, let me show you unrestricted net assets percent change. Okay. Unrestricted net assets should not be decreasing. They're down 22%. And in real terms, if we adjust for inflation, really quick adjustment tool now, they're down 40%. So this school is heading to zero really fast. And this can go very fast. Like I said, some schools that were closed, have closed already 5 years ago, had more unrestricted net assets than Goucher does right now. So reasons to be concerned here, this is really a nosedive on unrestricted net assets. Let's take a look at the revenue side. Let me show you why, what's happening to their student revenues, and then dig into what's causing that again. So do student revenues. Alright, percent change. Again, this is not normal for student revenues. This should not be down 34%. All right. They should be up at least 5% in nominal terms. In real terms, they're down 50%. Okay.

You've got percentile markings there for the 25th, 50th, and 75th, right?

Yeah. This is way— this is, you know, among the worst in the country. All right. This is the top— the bottom 25% of schools will be in this range right here. And you can see they're well, well off the cut, right?

Yeah. Right.

Yeah. Most of the schools are hovering right around this median.

All right.

In this area, half the schools are in this range and then 25% are up here and 25% are down here. So serious problems on the student revenue front. And we like to investigate what's going on. I'll go back to nominal terms, but it can be a price impact that's causing this, or, and/or change in enrollments. Remember, revenue is price times quantity, right? So you got to look at both, not just quantity, which a lot of people in higher ed just want to focus on the quantity part, right? I've said that before.

Yeah, it's always, yeah.

Okay, so the price looks fine to me. They did have a shrinking net price per student. Again, this is total— this would be room and board as well, um, embedded in here. But they've since brought it back up, and that looks about maybe right potentially for where they've been historically. But I suspect that price is too high because wait until you look at quantity. Now I'll show you students. If your price is too high, this is what's going to happen, right? Just basic supply and demand. And you can see what's happened to their enrollments as they brought that price back up, right? Enrollment has done this. Okay, let me reset that. So lots of problems here. So obviously you have a dip with COVID but for most schools that meant a short dip and then back up. Um, actually, you can, uh, let's see, percent change. Yeah, you can see, uh, sort of leveling off again for most of these schools, but they just continue to lose students. So we're down 33% on students since 2016. Almost all of those losses have happened since 2020, um, which coincidentally was like the same time they launched an initiative with EAB. So I'll have more to say about that in a second. It's hard to do worse than this, to be honest. Just think about this. If you didn't enroll any, if you enrolled zero freshmen, right, and maintain the same retention and everything, what would happen to your enrollment year over year? All right, think about that. The worst possible scenario, you don't enroll any freshmen, your enrollment will fall about 20%, right? Okay, so this is a pretty catastrophic loss. And just so— and for every year you lose about 20%, certainly they've done better than that here. But just to give you a sense of like the worst case, the worst you can possibly do is lose 20% in a year, really. And they're— they've lost a ton. So just to give you a sense of these things don't move very fast, right? They don't move fast up. They don't move fast down either. Okay, so where do I want to go with this? All right, how can we fix this school? How can we help this school dig out of this financial mess? Actually, let me back up one second. I got to show you about the endowment, what's happening with the endowment. And for that, I'm going to switch into their audit really quick. It's really important that the folks at this school understand what's been happening with the endowments. Because it's about to impact them quite a lot by my calculations here. So they used to have over $50 million in unrestricted endowment assets, and now they're down to $28 million. And so why, why am I concerned about this? Look at how much they're drawing from their unrestricted endowment every year to plug the gap. So I'm assuming to plug the gap with their budget. They drew $9 million on a $37 million unrestricted endowment balance.

That's 45%.

That's a lot. Yes, that's a lot. And they did it again in 2024, $7 million on a $33 million value. We'll see the 2025 audit soon. But if they do this again, they're down to about $20 million in unrestricted endowment. So how many years is this going to go on? Maybe 3 more, right? 20 million, 7 million-ish, 3 to 4. Yeah, 3 or 4 years and this is gone. When this is gone, they can't just start pulling that same— see how they have $200 million in restricted endowment assets? You might be wondering, why don't they pull the same proportion? I don't think they can, right? There's restrictions on this, usually saying you can't draw more than 5% or 6% or whatever, uh, the restriction is on the restricted endowment assets. So If they continue on this pace, they'll run out of this money and they can't just switch in the polling $19 million off of their restricted endowment. Okay. You can't just do that. So they'll be in this catastrophic tailspin then, potentially asking donors to unrestrict some of this endowment money or borrowing or selling stuff just to make payroll. All right. It's not an ideal spot to be. That's why it's very important to keep an eye on the unrestricted net assets, which are money you can use to run the place, right? This is much more difficult to use. And it depends a lot on what the attorney general's office is going to say when you ask them, you know, can you unrestrict some of our endowment money that was pledged for a scholarship and had all these restrictions? Can we just take those restrictions off, please?

And Matt, we've seen attorney general— attorneys general across the country do that. But that's still not a good thing because once those even restricted assets are gone, how do you recover from that? You don't.

Yeah. And, you know, just it's just like a, what do they call it, a feedback loop, right? Like, what are you going to do? You're going to go ask more donors to donate more money when you're taking 8-9% off of that every year? You're, you're killing the endowment funds that you're asking people to donate to. Uh, and it all just goes back to they have to have a balanced budget. They don't have a balanced budget, and that's what's causing all this problem. I just want to make sure that's really clear, that this, this runway is getting very small for the school to right the ship. Um, not that they don't have more options after that unrestricted runs out. Like I said, like places like Drew and Ryder have been pulling restricted money for years, uh, but they're in different states, right? I don't know what the Maryland, uh, Attorney General is going to say. And I know the Michigan one was not on board with that either. Right. So it kind of depends on who you get. All right. Okay. So how can they, how can they get back to a balanced budget? All right. Let's take a look at the expense side. Starting there, that's where they're going to have most bang for their buck right away. So we're going to start on the big expense items. Go up. To employees first. What do you suppose I'm gonna see here? It's almost every show, right?

I mean, growing too much in relation to revenue.

Yeah, I mean, I email CFOs, it's like, hey, you guys, do you realize you have more employees than you do students? And they like don't even know. Um, this is something that you should know, right? It's— you're generally not going to be sustainable to do that. Um, okay, so the number of W-2 employees at this school, and I'm going to look at everything relative to their inflated operating revenue. So keep in mind that this is looking better than it should because this operating revenue needs to be lower. They can't be supplementing with an 8% endowment draw. It has to be 4.5%. So really, all of these numbers will be worse than what I'm showing. So, but anyway, even with their inflated operating revenue, this is too high. All right, that's too many employees per million in revenue. So they have 21 employees per $1 million in revenue. They need to get closer to 18. All right, which doesn't sound like a lot, but believe me, it's a lot. All right, to go from here to here is probably hundreds of employees to cut back. All right, so that's your first clue, and there's a whole bunch of them. Uh, non-officer salaries and wages, way too high. Okay, again, it's probably after I adjusted the revenue, it'd be in the top 25% in the country. And again, they don't have a massive endowment to support that. So they need to pull this back down. Again, too much in payroll, probably caused by too many people. Payroll taxes. The reason payroll taxes is too high is because they're paying too much in payroll. That's simple math there. But so they also have the other catch here. So simultaneously having a lot of staff and a lot of contractors is almost never going to work. Again, unless you're Harvard or Yale or Princeton, and they are certainly not, this is way too high. This is number of contractors per $1 million in revenue. A normal school has a third of a contractor per $1 million in revenue. They have almost 0.6, almost double that.

All right. Matt, I want to jump in here because we see this regularly. You and I do this show every Tuesday. And it's fair to say, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, that higher education as an industry has a chronic inability to manage its expenses, period. Not everywhere, but in too many places.

Yeah, um, yeah, you just have to— like, how many people are going into these meetings and saying, hey, we got a problem, and you know, this doesn't look right, let's dig into it? Um, doesn't happen apparently very much. Um, but I'm having these meetings with folks, with presidents and CFOs, and they're like, whoa, okay. And we start digging into numbers and find, wow, yeah, there are a lot of extra people here, a lot of people there. What were we thinking? Right? Like a lot of them are student workers too. So we're digging into that issue. So it's really all over the place. You need to start looking, right? There's, there's not a lot of incentives in a nonprofit to right-size the staff, right, until it becomes a catastrophic event. Right.

right?

Whereas in like a private business that's really looking at their profits every year, they're going to just naturally make sure that they have the right number of staff, right? Whereas a university, there isn't a huge incentive for them to do that every year unless the board demands it. And most boards are not demanding that. Okay. So that's why, that's why I think that's happening. Um, okay, so let's take a look at officer spending per $1 million. That looks okay. Yeah, but I think they have the number of, uh, W-2 staff making over $100K is high. Yeah, it's high. All right, so all of these, all the staff numbers need to be looked at. The contractors need to be looked at. And it's probably, uh, I'm actually— I remember I did look at this earlier. Here's our total fees for services. This is not even all the contractor spends. Which will be embedded in different categories in the 990. But let's take a look at how they're just way off the norm here in terms of how much money they're spending on vendors, on contractors. So I'm going to go right down and show you probably one of their biggest pain points here. Color is not good, Goucher. And almost every line item is—

Look at that.

Whoa.

Okay.

So they have 1,200 students. Okay. So I'm just going to go one by one down these contracts. And this is what they need to do, right? In much more detail than I can. They have over probably 50 contracts. What did I— I can't remember what the number was, 40-something. Those are just over $100K. They probably have hundreds of contracts, right? And they need to just go through each of them, ask questions, right? Do we need this contract? If yes, is there a better deal on this contract? Those are the 2 questions I ask for everyone, right? And go through the list and start chucking contracts and renegotiating the bad ones. And here's a bad one. Bon appétit food service, $3,700 per student for food service is very, very high. I'm going to show you a school that's rich in a moment and they spend less than half of that per student. Um, and they've been doing this for a while. So Bon Appetit, $3,000, that's too high. Bon Appetit, $2,600, still high. Again, $1,700 is about normal, and that's actually where Wesleyan's at. EAB is another one. Uh, this— so they must have just started the contract here. Yeah, yeah, it looks like— well, maybe not. I don't know what the deal is with that. 2021, 2021. Oh, they were, uh, 2021 was Everybody's remote, right? So hey, at least they got a deal then. So I don't know how you spend $800 for when everybody's remote, but anyway, um, so the food service contract does not look good. This is an extremely expensive food service contract. Look at it, try to, try to get a new one, right? Bon Appetit's one of the most expensive food service vendors there is, if not the most. So there's a lot of other options that are far cheaper. Okay, construction. Yeah, hard to know what's going on there unless they're doing deferred maintenance stuff. That may be okay. Workday, this seems high. I don't know. $1 million for Workday seems high. $500K for Workday. I would shop that. That seems high. I don't know exactly what's going on. This contract is problematic. They had a big press release in 2020 talking about how they joined up with EAB and EAB is going to help them expand their market share and so on. But I just showed you their market share.

That's not happening.

And that's why I brought it up. Like, it's pretty catastrophic what's happened to their enrollment. It's hard to do worse than that, to be honest, unless you really tried. And, and so on top of it, you don't— I'm pretty pretty, uh, confident that this contract is not paying off, right? You're paying them $800,000 a year and, uh, certainly has not, uh, brought any gains that I can see. It's hard to imagine them doing worse without EAB. All right, so you might just drop that one, or try— honestly, just drop it. Okay, um, you can probably do the same or better without.

Yeah.

Alright, security, this is high, check that. Okay, I don't know what this is, but that's $1.7 million. It's pretty high. Incline Alchemy, management information system consultant. Is that IT then?

I'm guessing.

That would be really high for IT for them. So I would double-check that. There's other vendors that do IT for less than a million for a school this size.

And again, for those just listening, you can see the color schemes across the top. The darker the color, the worse your college compares.

And for that Incline Alchemy, that's what, top, um, yeah, this color is, looks like this one, half standard deviation above. I'm going to switch these to percentiles so people know what that means more. A half standard deviation above kind of depends on the definition, so they're about 38%. I'll switch it up. Yeah, my advice here is just start going through and like I said, ask those 2 questions about every single contract in this list with a bias towards change, right? Not bias towards, oh, we're going to keep it because we've always had it. That's not what we're going to do. Okay. The school has a massive deficit, needs to fix it fast. All right. So keep all of that in context when you're going through these. And then same for the staffing, need to go through all the staffing. If we're going to pay $1.7 million for this, potentially if this is an IT contractor, that better be for everything, right? We shouldn't have on-site staff in addition to that. So there's a lot of stuff to look at here. And, you know, these are the things that come up when we work with clients all the time, which we have to figure out, like, what all this means after doing this sort of high-level analysis. But some of these are really easy. Like, this one is an easy one. This one's an easy one.

All right.

But there are others that are going to be harder to go through. Um, the Workday, that's the first time I've seen that one though. Million, a million for Workday. Have to keep that in mind. Um, not sure if that's—

it doubled over the course of those years from $500,000 to a million.

Yeah. Okay, so anyway, if you're at Goucher, uh, I hope you see that you have a path forward here. Oh, and good thing about Goucher is look like the— in 2020 they signed a 4-year deal with EAB So that's hopefully they can get out of that now. Right. And they haven't renewed that. Like I said, it's hard to— I think it's safe to say that it didn't work out. Okay. So it probably means don't renew this, but check into it. All right.

Yeah. Well, with my tongue in cheek, I'm going to have an advertising slogan. EAB helps your enrollment shrink.

Yeah. I mean, you got to hold them responsible. Right. Just don't. Sign a 4-year deal, watch 30% of your enrollment go away, and then re-sign with them. I hope that's not what's happening. And if, if that did happen, I'd be really, um, asking a lot of questions if I worked there, to be honest. Um, a little bit of runway to get this stuff done, but it really needs to be done this, this fiscal year, probably, or next one. Um, or you're going to run out and you're going to be asking the Attorney General to release money and stuff like that, or selling stuff, which you don't want to start doing. All right, let's go to a good case, right? It's been a lot of negative cases, so I'm going to bring up Wesleyan.

Too many of them. Too many negative cases.

Yeah, Wesleyan University.

And while Matt brings, while Matt brings up Wesleyan University, that's, you know, we've done almost 160, 170 colleges now, Matt, and a preponderance of them, a preponderance of them have similar challenges to Goucher, and handfuls for sure, like we're going to see with Wesleyan, do very well. But as an industry, what you just showed at Goucher is symptomatic— different symptoms for colleges across this country, period. And that's not good.

Obviously, people watch the show and I think they assume that I'm really negative, um, in most cases, but that's not the case. Most schools are doing really well. And, uh, I mean, even Goucher, they can pull out of this problem fast, right? You just have to have the right leadership to do it and the right data, right? You need data to do this stuff too. You just can't say, oh, I'm going to get rid of EAB and all these other things just because I feel like it. You have data supporting all of these decisions.

And to talk about the data, this app that Matt's using, the Financial Compass, is available for the price of a subscription to the New York Times, $219 per year to get access to this. We have tutorials, we have training. We want this in the hands of college leaders, of trustees, of faculty, staff, community leaders, and everybody. And we priced it, Matt, you priced it, Matt, to be that available.

Yeah, I want, I just want a ton of people using it and to really just change the way higher ed is operating, right? And I think the timing is perfect, right?

Yeah.

10 years ago, enrollments growing for the most part, budgets are stable. Totally different now, right?

Amen.

All right, this is why Westlian looks really great. Okay, 40% growth in total net assets, 52% growth in unrestricted net assets, and they're massive. $1.7 billion, $500 million in unrestricted net assets. That's a massive runway. Operating revenues are up 25%. It's excellent. Expenses are up 29%, but I'm not worried because they have massive net income. And in fact, that might be too high. The only thing I'm going to complain about this school is that they could probably spend more money. All right, they're putting away a lot of money, which is supposed— I, I would imagine is going into the endowment. Um, probably, yeah, it must be. They're only taking 4% draws on their endowments. On the high side, small draws, right? Yeah. Which means they're using this surplus to cover and then probably also putting extra money in the endowment as well. Excellent. I'm not going to— I'm not going to complain. Just saying they could spend more if they wanted to strategically because this is a 9% net income or so, not $9 million extra after they pay all their bills. Um, which is, uh, I guess that's about right, 3% net income margin. You don't want to go much lower than that, so that's fine. All right, uh, net income— well, and that student revenue is up 25%. Excellent. CapEx to depreciation, remember the last one we looked at, everything was below 0.5 to 1.9, 3.75, 6. Perfect. I mean, they're investing a lot in their, their physical plant, obviously.

And man, when I show my stuff in a minute, we're going to see that Westin graduates a preponderously high percentage of their students, and their retention rate rate is one of the highest in the country.

Yeah, and they grew their $1.1 billion endowment to $1.5 billion in just 5 years. Um, there's a lot going on here. This is an excellent example of what it would look like if you were running your school well. All right, and just because they're rich— you might say just because they're rich, that's easy for them. That's not the case, right? We've got schools that that are richer than this school that are running massive deficits and having lots of problems. And I can name a bunch of them. Some of them are in the Ivy League, right? It does not guarantee, in fact, maybe harder to run these schools well, like Wesleyan's being run when they're bigger like this, right? You got more people, more to satisfy, you know, other things to worry about. You've got the federal government making you pay fines for random stuff. A lot of stuff going on, right? I'll kick it back over to you, Gary.

So one of the things that's interesting, and I've seen this a lot recently, is we've got colleges— and Goucher is not one of them— but Albright University, this week it was Rider University, Webster University, they have had bad numbers. We've had them each on the show, Matt, and they come out and say, and after a year or less than a year, they have fixed things. They are on the right track after 1 year. And you and I kind of smirk at that, Matt, and share the reason why you can't recover in just 1 year.

I mean, you can, you can do all the cost cutting, that's for sure, but to grow your revenue and enrollment, it usually takes a 4-year cycle to get to where you need to be on that. So, um, unless for some reason you enrolled a freshman class that's 4 times the normal size of your freshman class, uh, which I don't think has ever happened, um, it's not going to happen in one year.

Let's take a— briefly take a look then at these colleges. And let's take a look at Goucher. That's Wesleyan University. And of course, graduation rates, both are strong. Goucher has strong numbers. Um, you know, 50% is my minimum threshold. They're above that. Yet, as we see week in and week out, colleges that are at least graduating students still, Matt, have financial challenges. And like I said, Wesleyan, you know, as I listened to your presentation, I knew what I was coming up with mine. I think I'm going to have more children and send them to Wesleyan. What do you think?

Oh yeah.

And then even things like admissions yield, again, this reinforces what we talked about. Look at the difference. Wesleyan, the folks who get a letter of acceptance to Wesleyan go there. The folks that get a letter of acceptance from Goucher, not so much. And we see that reflected, you know, and that's to me, Matt, that's the market speaking because, you know, 10 out of every 100 folks that Goucher says will admit you 10 show up. Out of every 100 at Wesleyan, 32 show up.

It's another indicator that perhaps the price is too high at Goucher too.

Yeah, it could be. And those, though, you know, the, the IVs and some of the Power Fours are higher than that than Wesleyan, but really good numbers. And even when we look at unfunded institutional grants and we look at that, um, you know, look at Goucher, they've gone from 20— they've been flat from $25 million to $25 million over the last 8 years. And Matt, that's probably reflecting one of the reasons why the enrollment is down because they have not been discounting tuition. And even though West Virginia has gone from $53 million to $75 million, giving away a lot more in tuition discounts, you saw how financially healthy they are. And then very briefly, we want to take a look at the College Majors Completion app. And Matt, while I bring those up, I'm working on the 2026 version as you and I do the show today, and we are going to have 3 times as many— 3 times as many colleges— I'm sorry, 3 times as many majors across 5 years instead of 4. And this is the tool that lets us look at how— what college majors completions are. So let's take a look at bachelor's. Of course, I had this all set up before my computer crashed, before he jumped on. So here we go, Goucher. And we look at small enrollment numbers, and we can see Goucher, like almost every college you look at, has really small enrollment numbers for a number of majors: religious study, math, music, physics, Drama, Chemistry, and we look at those numbers and say, hey, why are you trying to do that? We see the same numbers for Wesleyan, but Matt, for many of the same reasons you share, it doesn't matter. They can, they can offer small enrollment majors. But this kind of ties in, Matt, to that, to that conversation I, you and I have had on a regular basis, is colleges cannot continue to be everything for everybody, and they cannot continue to offer majors that have low enrollment numbers And yet we continue to see that. And when we see, you know, when I do my, my weekly podcast This Week in College Viability, I lead off with layoffs, cutbacks, and closures. And every week there's somebody cutting back something. And here's why they continue— these colleges, both public and private, continue to try and be everything to everybody. And so, Dr. Andrix, I like it when we have a nice winner like Wesleyan and University of Mary in South Dakota, Chapman out in California. Grinnell in Iowa, and there are many, many others doing well, and that's fine and that's great. But there are way too many, Matt, that just cannot reasonably expect to survive. I know I take a stronger position on that than you do, but looking at the numbers on my own, looking at the numbers as you do the show, those aren't good. Those aren't good, Dr. Hendricks. And I have concern for many, many, many other colleges. And I'll let you have the final word.

Yeah, I mean, um I like the challenge to try to fix these schools. And honestly, I think it's all about just having the right leadership that is really good at understanding what's happening and then sharing that message with the stakeholders, selling it to the stakeholders, which requires transparency and great data and analytics. Getting everybody on the same page is like the number one thing. Once that happens, I think fixing these things is pretty straightforward. Yeah, there's going to be some unhappy people, but at the end of the day, they're going to know that, you know, we don't have a choice, right? We got to do this or the place is done in 5 years. Like, it's an easy decision, right?

Yeah. And to wrap this up, for the tens of thousands— yes, tens of thousands of folks have viewed our show, Matt— for those folks who have viewed that either live as we have today or look at the recorded version on the College Viability YouTube channel, 3 digits, 219, $219 to get you access to what Matt just showed you. We have training tutorials. Matt, I bet both of us or one of us would jump on a Zoom with you if you wanted to buy that and have us show you some tips and tricks. It's time that that transparency goes not just to college presidents, not just to CFOs, but to trustees, to college faculty, college faculty leaders, community leaders, students and families. Might be a little bit pricey for that, but it's probably worth it just to know that a college you're looking at isn't in financial distress. So for Dr. Matt Hendricks out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, I'm Gary Stocker in St. Louis. As always, thanks for making time to watch the College Financial Health Show with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker. We'll be back next Tuesday with another show.