Earlham College faces falling enrollment and shrinking revenue per student, a model its endowment can't sustain forever. A walkthrough shows how to use a comparison tool to filter peer colleges by region and size, then benchmark your tuition against theirs. Franklin College's net tuition revenue closely matches Earlham's, revealing pricing patterns across similar schools.
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They used, they used to have a price that was really close to the median actually at Earlham, about $14,000 per student on average. And you can see the erosion of their net price. Just the fact that this is, again, this is net tuition revenue per student. So not only so I can show you their enrollment is declining, but there's 2 things that's happening to their net tuition revenue. One is they're losing the quantity, right? The number of students is decreasing. And the amount of money each student is paying is less, right? Quite a bit less. They used to pay $14K back long ago, or that in real terms, that was a lot more than $14K today.
Yeah.
And, you know, they have this massive— their price was very, very low. And again, the school is blessed with a major endowment so they can cover that gap. Right. But can't do it forever.
Right.
So it looks like they're trying to bring the price back up.
Trying to recover. Yeah.
Trying to bring the price back up, which is great. In fact, I was at a school that had this very same graph looking just like this, and I said quite simply, we should probably just bring the price back up. We didn't get any more students when we reduced the price. Probably get the same result going back up, right? And that's exactly what it turned out to be. And so this is great that they're moving this back up, but it should actually get way back up here. As soon as possible.
There's a lot, of course, that's the revenue side. There's a lot on the revenue side to look at what's happening with their funnel, why their enrollment's falling off. There's a lot of things that they may not know about. It could be some simple things just with the application.
So, man, let me, let me jump in on just an idea that the folks at Earlham could use. You've got just Valparaiso and Earlham on the comparison set. Earlham could take that functionality of select a set of comparison schools, select colleges in their region and see what their net tuition price was per student to see how they were in their region, because your numbers are national right now.
Yeah, so one way you can do that is just go down to this table. And so right here I have net tuition revenue and just try to find other schools in Indiana. So we can just go in here, only schools in Indiana that are similar in terms of size, and we can look for schools. You can click on this and do really, um, greater than or equal to. And, you know, there are multiple filters you can do. So you can go greater than 1,000 and less than, say, 1,500 or something like that. So they want one peer, you know, it's a master's level school, but maybe Franklin College could be a school they can compare themselves to. Pretty similar in certain terms of size. I'm just kind of curious now. Let's put in Franklin College. We're just going off script today. I do this prep before this, but then, then I just start playing with this. So Franklin College, yes, they're almost priced the same as Franklin College now.
Look at—
they used to be priced way higher than them, right? And so again, I think they probably can be priced higher than them in
