In this episode of the College Financial Health Show, host Gary Stocker and analyst Dr. Matt Hendricks examine Maryville University of St. Louis using their Advanced Financial Compass and related analytics tools. They begin by flagging three consecutive years of negative net income, then compare operating revenue (growth from $119 M in 2020 to $136 M in 2024) against sharply rising operating expenses (from $114 M to $137 M), explaining the recent deficits. Revenue analysis shows solid net tuition and auxiliary revenue growth, but per‑student revenue is low, suggesting a pricing strategy issue. Enrollment has slipped slightly from a 2021 peak of 9,000 to 8,200, while tuition revenue per student has risen, indicating a modest price increase. On the expense side, they drill into functional expenses, noting salaries and wages are roughly in line with revenue, but highlight a lingering concern: a relatively high number of employees earning over $100 K and a sizable contractor base (70 contractors > $100 K, at least $7 M, plus many smaller contracts). They flag a surge in total fees for services from $3 M to $18 M, suggesting possible vendor over‑spending. Specific contracts are examined: a $4.3 M advertising agreement, a $29 M online‑program contract with Embanet, a $3.2 M deal with 2U, and a $2.3 M course‑materials contract. The hosts argue that such large online‑vendor spend, combined with still‑high staffing levels, may be unsustainable, especially for a regional private college without a strong brand. The discussion then shifts to student outcomes using the 2025 College Viability App: graduation rates have risen above 50 %, retention sits at 83 %, admissions yield has dropped 9 points (a sector‑wide trend), and graduate enrollment remains flat around 4,000. Tuition and fee revenue grew from $68 M (2016) to $91 M (2023). They also review internal and external market‑share data for majors, noting Maryville’s modest share in accounting (≈9 %) and competitive positioning within Missouri’s private non‑profit sector. Throughout, the hosts stress the importance of comparative benchmarking—looking beyond internal data to trends across peer institutions—to identify financial risks early. They conclude with recommendations: reassess tuition pricing, scrutinize high‑paid staff and contractor spend, evaluate the profitability of online‑program contracts, and continuously monitor market‑share and outcome metrics. The episode ends with a reminder that “the comparisons that matter” are essential for college leaders, media, students, and families.
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It is Tuesday, June 24th, 2025. Welcome back again to yet another episode of the College Financial Health Show with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker. For those of you joining us live, go ahead and turn off your speaker, go ahead and turn off your camera, and we'll get the show started. Each week we look at usually about 3 private colleges and we look at their financial health. And their financial viability. Dr. Matt Hendricks out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. What do we have starting off with today?
Yeah, I'll be a little rusty. We haven't done a show for like a month, uh, with the travel plans and stuff like that, but we have the same routine. We have 3 colleges. One is Maryville University of St. Louis. I'll start with that one right out of the gate. I'll share the, um, Advanced Financial Compass And get us going. All right, so sort of the same routine. I'll just check all the high-level financials and then start digging deeper and figuring out what are some likely avenues that need to be researched to help these schools out if they do need help financially. So this is Maryville University of St. Louis. And again, as usual, I want to check the net income margins first. I'm going to zoom in here a little bit so you guys have a bigger screen. And so this isn't good. 3 consecutive years of negative net income, although this one is— 2024 is pretty small deficit, still not ideal. So that sort of sets the context for what we're going to want to look at going forward after that. So I'm going to take us straight into revenues and expenses to compare what's happening on both sides. So operating revenue, And I don't have all the years here. I, I, I didn't have a chance to figure out why, but there are various reasons for missing values. And again, this is scraped data out of audited financial statements, so it's a fairly complex process to pull the data out. But on the revenue side, things look pretty good. They were at $119 million in 2020 and $136 million in 2024. My wife just got home, so it's a little loud. $136 million in 2024. So that's significant growth. I don't have the exact percentage change because that actually goes from 2016. But take a look at the expense side as well. Total operating expenses. Again, expenses are up sharply and more than, more than revenue. That's why going from $114 to $137 about. And on revenue, they went from $119 to $136 million. So sharper increase in expenses than revenues, and that's just basic math why we're getting deficits showing up here in the recent years. So let's take a look at, dig deeper on the revenue side and take a look at net tuition revenue. That tuition revenue, again, I don't have the earlier years, but you can see the net tuition revenue looks solid, sort of following what's happening with overall revenue. Going from $109 million to $121 million. By the way, I think, yeah, this is, I think this is also their auxiliary revenue combined. Let me double-check that really quick. So this is, you can think of this as student revenues. Yeah, zero. It's combined in here. That happens with some audits. And I believe some schools actually present them together. I don't know if it was the case on this one, but somehow got aggregated together in the the cleaning scripts. But, um, ultimately what matters here is their net tuition revenue plus auxiliary revenue, which is their student revenues, are up quite a bit. So that's good. Again, um, sort of indicates to me, uh, just based on my experience and what you're seeing there, that's probably going to be an expense side issue. If revenues are growing really well, um, it's usually going to be the case. Let's take a look at Let's take a look at per student enrollment, enrollments, and per student revenues. And here's something that maybe they can look at. You can see their student revenues per student. And again, this is including auxiliary revenues too, I believe, right? Combined. I'm certain about that. And it's low. All right, so the school is extremely priced low. I mean, this is housing and intuition on average. So they might just not have a lot of people living on campus. That's possible. But generally the price is quite low. Yeah. So they could look at bringing that up as a way to balance the budget and just grow the school. I mean, it's tough to grow if you have a really low price like this unless you're going to grow enrollment. Let's take a look at enrollment. Students. Yeah, and enrollment looks solid. I mean, it's not at their peak. They had 9,000 in 2021. They're at 8,200. So slight decline here, but a slight increase in the price per student. So net tuition revenue is actually increasing even though enrollment's down a bit from 2021. So overall looks pretty solid to me on the revenue side. Again, I would just recommend that they look closer at that pricing strategy and focus in on optimizing and bringing that up, really not necessarily optimizing, experimenting with higher prices and see what happens. Yeah. So let's move to the expense side. So remember, I already showed you that total operating expenses increased sharply. And so let's see, let's dig into some of the big line items. Inside of expenses. I wonder if I have their functional expenses. Let me just check that. I don't have it for every school, but I do. So this is from their functional expense, uh, table in their audit, and you can see that $67 million. And let's, uh, rescale it. Actually looks pretty good. Their spending on, um, salaries and wages looks actually about normal for their revenue. And low for their FTE. It's interesting, it was high in '23. They may have corrected this in '24, which is why their, their deficit got smaller. Probably explains part of that. Uh, let's take a look at actual employee counts. The employee counts come from the 990s, and I do have their 2024 990 right now. So let's take a look. Per student, I think it's going to be low. Yeah, they have a lot of students. I think they have a lot of online students. So that's good.
They did a good job many years ago jumping on the online business before everybody else.
Yeah. And so you can see the story is the same here. They used to be high in staff per revenue relative to their revenue, and now they're about normal, even a little bit low on staffing. So it looks like they have done some work to get staffing back in alignment with their revenue. So that's total employees. Let's check other types of employees. So we have employees paid over $100K, and there may be some more work to do here. So although they've adjusted their overall employee count down and got it about normal, this doesn't look normal still. This is the number of employees paid over $100K relative to their revenue. So this is just one indicator that I have And then of course, with the strategic compass, we go a lot deeper to this points to, this is some evidence that perhaps there's still some work to do on the staffing side, particularly for higher paid employees. There's another piece of evidence we can see if this corroborates. We have compensation of current officers and directors per million. So it looks okay. So perhaps it's higher paid employees that are not administrators, basically. But there could be some issues with reporting here too as well. But I would recommend that they focus in on the cost side on the higher-end pay jobs. At least the data is saying that's where there's still potentially some problems. And also those folks wouldn't be listed as directors on the 990s. Yeah, that looks good. So let's check the contractor side. So a little bit to look at on the employees part. Contractors paid over $100K. You can probably see where I'm going to go with this, Gary, right away.
Yeah, look at that.
Yeah, number of contractors really high for how much revenue they have. And of course it can be extremely high for— actually it's about normal for how big they are. But again, they have a lot of value on that.
What's the raw value on that?
The raw value on contracts. 70 contractors over $100K.
That's $7 million, right?
At least. Yeah.
Yeah. It doesn't include the ones under $100K. Yeah, you're right.
Yeah. It's going to be a lot more than that because I have some really big contracts I'm going to flag here in a moment. So again, third item here, piece of evidence that perhaps the contractor usage is kind of spinning out of control. Not guaranteed, but it's something that should be looked at, right? Ideally, you would bring this down to somewhere around here. So you'd have, yeah, about half the number of contracts they have right now, I think, is the math right there. So they have 70 to go through there, and then there's a bunch of other that'll be under $100K. So there's another piece of evidence here that flags the contractor usage. So we have on the 990s, we have fees for services. Total fees for services. And so you have this surge here going from 3 million to 18 million. I don't know if this is a data reporting issue, but certainly something to look at again.
I would hope it's a data issue.
Yeah, I hope it's a data issue, but it's possible that it's not, and I'll show you some evidence that supports that it may not be. In a moment when we look at individual contracts. But again, more evidence that you need to look at the contractor usage, and it will definitely be worth your time to do that. Even if you don't find anything, you need to figure out what's going on with some of these numbers. And I'm guessing you will find some stuff. There's almost always some optimization you can do with the vendor usage. So surge in total fees. All right, I'm going to go into individual contracts now so you can get a sense. There's more evidence that there needs to be some work on the vendor spend. So I'm bringing up Maryville here in the vendor table. All right, okay, so a few things to flag here.
One is, uh, you got Maryville, Tennessee, that you need Maryville, Maryville University.
Okay, so all right, so first thing to look for is any kind of color, all right, that indicates that this is— this advertising contract is higher than normal for their size. In terms of FTE, that's this column, and higher than normal for their revenue. And this is a $4.3 million contract alone here just for advertising. So I would look at that. There may be— there's lots of other vendors you can go with that can probably come in at less than that, that may be equally or more effective. So that's something to look into. And again, you can use this table to see other contracts, other vendors that would compete with this company that Maybe better. All right, so that's one. Check the marketing contracts. And then we have 3 massive online program contracts.
Yeah.
So we have Embanet. I've never actually heard of this one. It may be just that I'm naive to it, but this one is $29 million. All right, then we have 2U, which is $3.2 million. And then we have, this is another one to look at, course materials. I've actually never seen that kind of contract, but again, I just may not be up on this, but course materials, $2.3 million just doesn't sort of jive with my intuition. And then there's another, wait, that's the other year. Okay, so we have 2 online vendors, right? 2U And actually, what is this? So did we have 3 in the previous year?
Yeah, I mean, they've clearly contracted out everything associated with their online work.
Yeah, there's a ton of online stuff. So, so here's the thing. If you're going to have like these vendors take care of everything, then what should we see with the employee side? We should see that they have very few employees, right? And they actually have a lot, right? At least on the high end, right? So These need to be sort of analyzed together. And that other question I would have is like, why do we have multiple online providers? We have 2U and this one. And then you just need to do your work on these. I'll just say my experience with these contracts, a lot of them did not work out very well for the schools at all. They ended up paying a lot more in costs. These direct costs you see right here, 28 and 3, but that's not actually the full cost of these online programs because they're probably also paying in-house staff to manage these as well. So you need to add up all these costs and compare them to the revenues you're getting from these programs. If it's negative, you need to get out of it, right? That's basically the idea. And I think more schools that did that calculation figured out that they were negative there and they wanted to get out of them, which is one reason why 2U, I believe, recently filed for bankruptcy. So I would just say look at these very closely. Right? These contracts tend to not work out very well for schools, particularly schools that don't have huge brands, which I believe is Maryville's case. And include all the costs when you do this analysis. You can't just look at these numbers. The cost of these online programs is also any staff that you had design the courses, any time they're spending working on these courses, and so on. So there's a lot of costs that are probably not embedded here.
Interesting.
Okay. And then there's marketing contracts. I believe to you in these Typically, these online vendors also do marketing. So to have this additional marketing contract for $4.3 million is also a bit curious to me. But again, I don't see everything that's going on here. This tool is just to help you get a sense of where you should start spending your time to figure out what's happening. But I'll, I'll end there, Garrett. I'll pass it back to you for Maryville's—
Fascinating observations about how heavily they are invested in online vendors, Matt. I've, I've never seen that before.
No.
Not for a small regional college like a Maryville, private college even. So let's take just a minute, Matt, to look at Maryville University on the 2025 executive analysis version of the College Viability App. And you know, we're always going to start with graduation rates. And there are dozens and dozens of reports here. And we compare the data from 2016 to 2023, just like you did for Matt's work on the Advanced Financial Compass. You went all the way out to 2024. And we can see that Maryville, to their credit, has done a nice job improving their graduation rates from just below 50% to consistently moving above that. So again, credit where credit is due. The online piece has still got me thinking, Matt. That's fascinating that they have that online investment and still have done a decent job of graduating students. Let's take a look at, I wanna look at the admissions yield. I know most of them are going down. And again, down 9 points. All right, that's something to note, but most colleges are going down on admissions yield. We know why, because it's just as easy to order an extra ingredient mat on your pizza as it is to apply to another college these days. So that's all that's happening, driving everybody's admissions yield down. Let's take a quick look at retention for Maryville University. Oh my, oh, 83%. I thought I said 23%. Okay, 83%, not bad at all. Let's go down and look at something you talked about, but from a different perspective. Before I do that, I'll take a quick look at graduate enrollment. All right, flat for the most part, and a decent number, about 4,000 graduate students. That's what it was, um, 8 years ago. All the way down, I want to take a look at tuition and fees. This is slightly different look that you have. And again, you know, Maryville got to jump on things from $68 million in 2016 to $91 million in 2023, probably higher than that in 2024. They're doing all right, but man, that online investment, that's going to keep me awake tonight, man. Interesting. And let's take a look at the College Majors Completion app. Let's do that for Maryville University. We're looking at their bachelor's degrees, and we can see that Maryville has some strong performances in psychology. Interesting. Business, which most places do, and some of the more common ones they're doing all right in. This is an internal market share. You can see what their data points are in terms of percentage of the 64 common and diverse set of majors that we track in this app. That's internal market share, so about 9% over the last 3 or 4 years for accounting. Then let's take a look at the other version of this. And I did choose Missouri. And I'm gonna take a look at the external market share. And this is, I think, Matt, and tell me if I'm wrong on this, this is the only app out there that compares both internal and external market share across dozens of different majors at both the bachelor's level the master's level, and the associate's level. And so what we're looking at here is all of the private non-for-profit colleges in the state of Missouri with a bachelor's degree in accounting-related services. All right, so we can see the market share. And let's make a little bit bigger here. And so we can see who the strong players are, and there are a few of them. We can hover on top of those to see who they are, and we can see where the small-bit players are— Westminster College and Webster University and Southwest Baptist University. And Matt, like we've talked many times before, in other industries you don't survive with 1% of the market share. What are these colleges doing in that business? And we can even take a look at what the trend has been for these colleges. So I've got accounting and accounting-related services. We can see which ones have grown— really none. We can see which ones have gone down. So this looks like Columbia College is down from about 90 down to about 45. If you're looking at this, you know, as a student and family— and I know that's not what the focus of this show is, Matt— but if you're looking— if you're at a college and you see that your bachelor's level enrollment has gone down for this major over the last 4 reported years, 2020 through 2023, that's something to be concerned about. It's not a 1-year time shot, and it's comparison— it's comparing with others. And again, we can look at all sorts of majors here. Let's look at mathematics. And again, we can see, you know, 66 is, looks like Washington University, they would be strong in mathematics. But these are the kind of tools, Matt, that can be used to compare the financial health of colleges with the app, with the Advanced Financial Compass, and with the college majors completion. And as we always talk about, it's the comparisons that matter. If you're a college leader, no matter what your role looking at this, don't stay in that habit of looking at your own data, Matt. Look at the data from other colleges as well. So we've talked about colleges today. We've talked about your colleges. And as we share at the end of each episode, it's the comparisons that matter. It is the trends that matter. If you're at a college, if you're a college leader in any form or fashion, if you're a media member, if you're a student or family, look at these trends. If you're inside that college, looking at your data alone does not get it done. We talked earlier during one of the colleges that we were reviewed. If they're just looking at their own internal data, they're missing the big picture. You just can't operate in this day and age of the Moneyball era of higher education. And Matt and I are just two of many folks who look at this data, and if we can look at it and share it, others can as well. And soon enough, we will have these kind of products available for students and their families. And as we continue to work to educate students and their families about the financial health or lack thereof or viability or lack thereof of these colleges. There'll be more and more pressure on colleges that don't choose to use comparisons, don't choose to use trends. They'll find themselves in even deeper financial trouble than they are today. So for Matt Hendricks, always a pleasure. I'm Gary Stocker. We'll look forward to doing the show again next week on July 1st, 2025.
