Randolph College (VA) & Washington College (MD) : Financial Health & Viability Review

Welcome to the College Financial Health Show for Tuesday, September 23rd, 2025. Hi everybody, Gary Stocker alongside Matt Hendricks with the only show that looks at the actual financial health and even viability of private colleges throughout the country. And today, Dr. Hendricks, we have a couple of colleges. And where are we starting?

Yeah, we have Virginia and Maryland, so close to each other. Uh, Randolph College and Washington College. Randolph's in Virginia, Washington's in Maryland. And I'll get started here on the Financial Compass and walk you through— I guess we'll do this together. Walk you through the financials on Randolph and Washington.

There's a lot of Washingtons.

Yeah, Washington College in Maryland. This, this school, I'm gonna do a little bit different this time. I'm going to start with net income— or not net income, uh, net assets— because a big picture, this is like what the value of the college is, right? Let's start with total net assets. So both of these schools are, are bigger than the median, right, in terms of assets. So that usually means they have a long runway. So net assets at the blue is Randolph. Okay, so their net assets are $261 million. Net assets for green is Washington College, almost $500 million. And sharp increase here. So those look good. Let's take a look at like the trend overall. One thing to not like if you're Randolph, this is really important. These net assets should be increasing at least with the median, right? But notice since 2021 for Randolph, we've decreased quite a bit. I'll give you the exact dollar value for that. And the same thing was happening for Washington until recently. There's this big jump up in 2024. That's great if that can happen all the time because basically they went below the median and then back up. In terms of growth, right? Like right at the median. But certainly, uh, the case with— again, the blue is Randolph. This is not good. You've decreased your net assets while other schools are increasing their net assets. Most schools are increasing their net assets since 2021. Um, that's not good. It just shortens your runway. Your runway is getting shorter if you keep running deficits. Eventually you run out, right? So really, when a school dies is when this goes— so look at what the schools that that did die, right? They died when they went to negative net assets, right? They basically mortgaged everything and ran out of runway. These schools are nowhere near that at the moment. But actually, I didn't have it in raw values. They didn't go negative, but very close to negative for net assets here. But let's take a look at unrestricted net assets. These are really the assets the school can use to survive easily, right? The restricted ones are trickier. You need to get the attorney general on board usually. But again, troubling trends here for both schools on unrestricted net assets. So green is Washington down. So they're at $99 million, say $100 million there. They're down like $30 million since 2020. That's not ideal. Again, the median school's up from $47 to $63. They're up quite a bit. So it's not normal. And the same thing for Randolph, down since 2021. We're at $111 million. They're down like $11 million on unrestricted net assets. Okay, so not ideal. And this tells me, just, just looking at this one number, you can tell they have financial problems because that is not— I mean, it's not sustainable, right? If you just continue with that path, you'll eventually go to negative net assets and close. All right. That's basically what kills these schools.

And they're both post-pandemic kind of trends there.

Yeah, yeah. So you can't blame pandemic really. I mean, unless, you know, it's still lingering, but a lot of schools doing really well post-pandemic. So, and again, the median school is doing quite well on net assets. So if you want to look at one metric, just get a sense of like, where is my college functioning sustainably? Look at net assets, especially unrestricted net assets. And if they're not increasing, at a normal rate, you start asking questions. All right, so let's start asking questions, figure out why these schools are losing net assets, uh, since 2021. So I'll go back into net income margin, and here's where you can see the problems. Big deficits. Again, green is Washington. This is a massive loss in 2021, another 11% loss in 2022, a small positive here in '23, and then another massive net income loss in 2024. And same thing for Washington— or for Randolph. They had a— this must have been the COVID money bump. They got it a little early. They got it in fiscal year 2020. Actually, a lot of schools did. But yeah, since then, it's not been great. And especially this number is really low. 2024 is missing here. Let's check it out. Usually that means their audit has something weird. 'Cause remember my, the way I get all this data is an AI that pulls it and then I do a bunch of cross-checks. So the AI will pull all of these numbers and then I check that everything adds up. I check that all these revenues add up to this, right? Do the same thing here, check that all these expenses add up to this. And then final check here, I check that this minus this is equal to this. But you can see in this case it's not. So if you do the real calculation here, they lost like $4.1 million, right? If you do this operating revenue minus operating expenses, lost $4 million and only a $30 million revenue. That's a massive loss. Again, that's a huge net income loss. So yeah, huge problems here at Randolph still. But I don't know what this is. I don't know if I've ever seen this transfer of prior year non-operating receipts to operations. So they're like taking previous year non-operating revenue. Yeah, and counting it as not revenue but like a net of expense. It's really bizarre. I don't know what the heck this is, but I wouldn't say that. I mean, clearly it's not revenue or it'd be in revenue, but it's not expense either. It's not a negative expense. Really bizarre. So I'm saying they've lost $4 million here from operations unless they can tell me what exactly this is. They may explain in the notes, but At the end of the day, we're just looking big picture here. Randolph, serious financial problems. So both schools again losing net assets and not good. If you look at their endowments, right, remember, usually schools that are struggling will start drawing a lot on their endowment. And you can see evidence of that here for the blue school, which is again Randolph, right? The blue is Randolph. And again, since 2021, since things have gone haywire, their endowment has shrunk.

Right.

On the other hand, look at Washington. They were on this sort of downward trend here, although not nearly as dramatic as, as Randolph. But also, look at this big jump here. Again, we've seen this jump for them a couple of times and we can just do a quick check of their audit. I did check this a little bit right before we came on air and the interesting case here And I'll show you where it shows up. Whoever was in there, put it upside— you see the challenge AI has sometimes, right? Sometimes it's upside down, backwards, whatever else, out of order. But I'm going to focus in on that big jump. So it's showing up in the endowment. So it tells me it's probably a restricted gift, a big gift. And so I was checking that before we came on. And sure enough, here's a $74 million gift in 2024, which is totally not normal for them. They had $5 million the year before. So $74 million gift, it looks like it all went to the endowment, pretty much a lot of it. Yeah, it's excellent. Uh, so very generous gift there, thank you for that. Um, and that certainly gets Washington back on track in terms of their total net assets. Remember, we can check that again. So this, this wouldn't be unrestricted because going the endowments, um, so it's probably perpetually restricted, but, uh, it will go into their net assets. You can see this big jump here, $405 to $477. So That's almost the entire gift right there. That's great. And again, the school has a long runway, almost $500 million in net assets. Both schools really have longer runways. But, you know, you can't go forever. At some point, one of the administrations has to turn it around, right? You can't continue to run deficits forever and then just hand off a school with no net assets to some other administration down the road. It's not responsible management.

Or when you've got those net assets in place, that's when you start looking for merger partners.

Yeah, exactly. That's when you start to act. If you can't get your balance budget which they probably can, right? Let's get real, they can balance the budget. But if you can't, then try to merge with somebody that can make you balance your budget before it's too late, before you are not attractive as a merger partner at all. Washington, uh, what was our other one? Randolph.

Randolph.

Yeah, Randolph College. Okay, so financials, uh, net assets, endowments, nothing looking great here. They do have very long runways, so again, I'm not trying to scare everybody. These schools are not going to close anytime soon. Um, there could be good merger acquisitions, right? Like partners in a merger, they have a lot of assets, just struggle with the budget. You could have some efficiency gains with partnering up with one of these schools and both of you could probably be better off. Like you can share a lot of things, right? Share all the accounting, share all the IT and so on, right? Shut down some buildings that you don't need, maybe all that kind of stuff. Let's take a look at revenue trends for both. Revenue, um, total operating revenues. And yeah, okay, so a couple things to comment on here before I switch it over to percent change. That's a very low operating revenue for Randolph, $30 million, but they have massive assets. Very interesting. This school has a ton of assets but very low revenue. Just wonder if they just like could invest more to grow, right?

You've got all the I wonder what we'll see when we look at the net tuition per student.

Yeah, it's very interesting. It's low revenue. This revenue, you know, is high for, I guess— oh, sorry, I have them flipped now. Okay, backwards. This is Washington with the huge assets. Okay, Washington's blue. Sorry, I switched them. Washington's blue. That's great. Revenue 61. But this is very small. Yeah, this is a tiny school, Randolph. In Virginia. Uh, but let's take a look at the trend here. And yeah, not ideal. Both of them have operating revenues that are shrinking, and that's not normal, right? The normal, normal growth for operating revenue, believe it or not, is actually positive 17%. Not in real terms. In real terms, I'm sure it's negative, right? Because we had more than 17%, um, inflation over this period. But nominal revenue growth at the median school is up 17%. They're down 11% and 3%, both below the 25th percentile. So very, very poor performance on the revenue side for both schools, which is probably a big, big issue, right?

Whether they're in a highly competitive area, way too many colleges in that northeastern area. So they're probably facing tuition pressures.

Yep. Yep. And okay, so the thing is, when your revenues are down, you got to also match your expenses to that as best you can.

Right.

And some schools are really good at that. Others are not. And you see here with Washington that they're, yeah, basically going about their business as if nothing were wrong. Yeah. Making some bets that, you know, this will turn into revenue at some point. But if it doesn't, all it does is keep pulling down their net assets.

Right.

So hopefully these are good bets. Same with, uh, same with Randolph. Expenses are up 7%. Again, revenues were down a ton for them, right? 11%. So you've got a big gap forming here. Um, it's kind of— you kind of wonder, like, how do these boards work, right? Are they just passing budgets that are not balanced? Are they passing budgets that are just fake, like they're just not accurate? Uh, lots of questions. Ideally, because your fiduciary duty as a board member, you wouldn't be passing, approving budgets that are are negative, at least not for several years in a row. So I'd ask a lot of questions if I were on these boards. All right, and if you pass the balanced budget and then what's turned in at the end of the year is not balanced, all right, you have negative net income from operations, then your budget was— either they didn't follow the budget or the budget was wrong, right? So try to fix that. All right, so I'm going to go into some policy stuff. So both these schools struggling with balancing the budget. Not balancing, losing net assets because of that, becoming less competitive because of that. What might they do to fix it? Let's take a look at their net tuition revenues. We can usually see some things to check.

Oh yeah.

When we take a look, let's first just look at the trends. Oh my gosh. Okay. Blue is Randolph, Washington.

Okay.

Huge problem here with enrollments, probably. Well, they're down 53%. On net tuition revenue. All right, so here's the thing, that, that can go— that can be because of quantity or price. Let's double-check the price first since I got it right here. Yeah, both of them are struggling, right? Down 9% and down 53%. Okay, so let's take a look at price. Yeah, Washington's down from $23,000 on average to $17,000. Oh my, not ideal. And again, That's in nominal terms. So really, in real terms, this price is probably less than half of what it used to be just back in 2016 for the average student. That's a massive reduction in the average price that students are paying. Uh, it looks like the same thing's happening here for Randolph— $13,000 in 2016, $12,000 in 2024. And again, remember, there's double-digit inflation over this period. So I mean, in real terms, kids are paying a lot less to go to both these schools today compared to what they were paying in 2016. So both of those are going to pull down the net tuition revenue.

I mean, this is a massive drop, which impacts total operating revenue, all that stuff.

Yep. Yep. And so let's see. It's entirely possible. Remember, it's entirely possible that your enrollment will go up and your revenue will go down, right? How does that happen? Massive drops in price like you just saw right there.

That's not happening.

So here's the enrollments. But yeah, very interesting. Okay, so green. Enrollment's up for Randolph, but their net tuition is way— revenue is way down, right? If you're working at Randolph and you're getting mixed messages about this seemingly contradictory that, hey, our enrollment's up, but our revenues are down and we got to cut, you know what? This is the reason, right? The price went way down. All right. So start asking questions about whether the price is right, right? These schools don't know what their prices should be. It sometimes can be way off of what the market price is, which is a big problem. In this case, so we have a double whammy for Randolph— not Randolph— Washington. Their enrollment's down 37%. The price is down an additional double-digit percent, I'm sure. So at the end of the day, that makes you have net tuition revenue go down way more than the change in enrollment. It's pretty catastrophic here for Washington. But remember, this school has massive assets. So they can use that long runway to turn it around or partner with a school that's really good at operating and have them help you turn it around. Either would probably work. Ideally, they stay independent, right? Use their long runway. Don't use the whole thing, right? Turn this thing around. But don't make bets that aren't likely to work. Just fundamentals, right? Cut costs in areas that are easy to cut that don't mess with any students at all. All right, so those are some suggestions I'm going to give them right now. All right, let's go into— so both of them have issues with enrollments. All right, one's got— they both have issues with price. So look at that really closely, experiment with different prices, try bringing that price back up, might experiment with a slightly larger price. And not see any impact on your enrollment, which would be a win for you. All right, okay, uh, whoops, didn't mean to do that. Keep Randolph in here. All right, let's go into expenses and see if we can find ways that these schools can right-size their spending and balance the budgets. I'm going to start with staffing, which is usually the main pain point for schools that are struggling. Yeah, okay, so per FTE, these schools have massive staffs. Okay, both of these schools— okay, just put it in perspective— both of these schools have more employees than they do students. I've yet to see a school that has been able to manage a balanced budget under that type of employee, uh, student ratio. All right, so double-check if you have more W-2 employees than you do students, and some of them might be students, right? A lot of these might be student workers that have W-2 wages, right? There's also employees, right? You cannot say that they don't count. I mean, if they pay you $17,000 in tuition and then you turn around and pay them that in a wage, pretty much cancels out, right? So if you have more employees than you do students, it's probably not going to work. All right. And it doesn't even— even the big Ivies don't do that. Okay, so they're— this doesn't look good. Both of them are really high for employees compared to their number of students, and they're high relative to revenues. Although the revenue at Washington is pretty good because they do have a big endowment and all that supporting that, but they still— they're still high. Uh, let's take a look at the actual outlays. Um, let's double-check this quick. Or yeah, they're high on employees over $100K as well, although not nearly as dramatic. Total compensation for officers, high at both. Okay, double-check your upper admin numbers and compensation, probably mostly numbers. Here's the big one, per FTE. Yeah, these are just catastrophic.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, again, this is 75th percentile right here. And both schools are well beyond that. Um, my guess, given that we look— I, I need to— they haven't turned in their 2024 990, it looks like. Uh, again, that's Randolph.

Um, yeah, so, so what we're looking at here, man, is a highly competitive area and intense pressure on salaries. That's not a good combination for these colleges.

No, you have to have— you have to have the right number of people, right? You're just not going to be able to make this work. And they're probably going to do lots of stuff like cut— what is going on with these retirement contributions? Yeah, that— I don't know if that's right, but if that's bad to me, completely off, right? Yeah. So I'll just say this. They got to look at their staffing, right? And we can make it do a really deep dive on that. They can hire somebody for hundreds of thousands of dollars to do that. But they do need to do it. They need to do it. We can do it for really cheap. And get them on track, finding exactly which areas of their campus have too many people, right-size that, and things change dramatically when that happens. You're able to pay a market wage, you're able to pay normal benefits, right? And so you get like a double whammy of like a balanced budget and higher morale at the end of the day if you do this right.

And that product we have, Matt, is the strategic compass that you have built.

Yep. But let's take a look at some of these other things. I'll just do these really quick. Advertising spend, that doesn't look right. Again, that's Washington. IT spend, both of them reporting zero. That's incorrect. Insurance spend, those look okay. Yeah, just wonder about who's filling these out. It should be the auditor, but in some cases it's not. Occupancy, they probably have their IT costs in there. Which is incorrect. Office expenses looks fine.

Randolph hasn't completed any of that stuff.

Yeah, let's see fees for services. Okay, so Washington, this is going to be an issue, probably just way, way, way high on fees for services. So Washington, look at staffing, look at contractors, right? Let's do number of contracts really quick. All right. So, okay, Washington, really interesting. They don't have a lot of contractors. They have what, over $100K? They only have 10, but they must be really expensive. So let's see. Let's take a look to see how we get to that result and see if we can see some contracts that they might look at. Washington College. Oops.

I know sometimes your keyboard doesn't work, man.

There it is.

Okay.

IT, $2 million IT contract. Not normal. Double-check that. Okay. Construction. Construction. Okay, so maybe they're putting the construction contracts in there. 2024 on that. It's interesting, though, to be building right now. I forgot to check their CapEx, but remember, they're shrinking really fast. 25%— well, they were down like 20-some percent on enrollment, right? Uh, yeah, it's questionable to be building during that. Um, okay, the— this— yeah, these IT contracts don't look good. Uh, double-check these, right? This is like a standard deviation higher than normal. Um, so you're, you know, in the top 75% probably or so. Of schools in terms of how expensive that IT contract is. Go Randolph College. Okay, same stuff here. Food service contract looks quite high. Only 600 students and you're paying almost $2.3 million. That's higher than normal if they didn't already know that. Um, and they've been that way for a long time. Like, the last time they had like a normal food service contract was 2021. It's gone up quite a bit since then. They may— this could be the jump to jump from $800K to $3 million. They may have rolled in some capital investment into the contract, which is again not ideal because now you're locked into this vendor for a long time. And yeah, chances of getting a decent deal going forward are much lower. IT spend again really high. Oh, here's $600,000 for Noel Levitz. Yeah, it's higher than normal.

It's not working either.

Not either. Not working. Remember their net— so Noel Levitz might say, hey, look, your enrollment's up. Remember their enrollment's up, right? But does it matter if they're paying way less? Their net tuition revenue is down. So they paid $630K to a firm that's actually reduced their net tuition revenue. Not a great result, right? So that was 2022. Maybe they canceled it. They might have canceled it. So I just, I can't stress enough, you got to make sure that you hold these vendors responsible for, you know, the results that they're bringing. Don't, don't be their cheerleaders. You're their boss. Okay, so double-check these. All right. That's enough, enough for me. I'll hand it back to you, Gary.

So we looked at the net income margin for both of these colleges, and it was not good. It was negative for both for way too many years of the past 8 or 9 that we have recorded. And I guess two questions, Matt. Number one, is the Board of Trustees even seeing a measure like net income margin? And if they are, why are they not reacting to that, insisting on honoring that fiduciary responsibility to balance the budget like you say so many times?

Yeah, I don't No, um, I think they just get selective statistics in a lot of cases. I mean, I've, I've met with really, really smart board members that worked at banks and other financial— they know how to analyze the health of an institution. In some cases, that's their career. They— but they may be just taking the administration's data and just saying, yeah, great, and not really asking questions, which is a fatal error because they're probably getting cherry-picked numbers, right? Like, you could totally imagine— and I don't know any of this— but Randolph's board meeting might be, hey, enrollment's up, this is great, right? And then just don't look at net tuition revenue per student, don't look at that, don't look at the anything else on the balance sheet, right? Um, and if nobody's going to ask questions, this will just go on for years until eventually they start having to sell stuff, and then people start asking questions.

And so we looked at the net, um, the total net assets for both. And let's just talk about Washington. Strong net assets. They're not going anywhere anytime soon. And yet you show that their net tuition revenue per student went from $23,000 and change in 2016 down to $17,000 and change in 2024. They can last a long time, but is it reasonable to have it— to have a board mindset that says, hey, We're just going to ride this out because we've got the assets to do so.

I don't think it's reasonable. No, but I mean, it seems, it seems like that happens a lot. I think it mostly happens, like I said, just out of people not knowing what's happening. But you should know it's really easy to check your trend for net assets. All right. I just showed you that first graph. So if it's going down, start asking questions. And no, it's not normal. For a school to be doing that right now. I know there's a lot of negativity in higher ed, but no, the most schools are increasing their net assets. So it's not like, oh, we got to just accept this as the new norm kind of thing. Um, so yeah, I mean, I, I doubt that a board in their right mind would say, yeah, let's just run this thing into the ground, right? Like, I don't know, maybe, maybe they would, but—

all right, or the mindset, we'll outlast everybody else and then our—

yeah, that could— yeah, maybe But at the end of the day, they're still going to come out the other end with not a lot of runway anymore.

Yeah.

And other schools are doing quite well. You know, you're competing against them at the other side of whatever is going to happen here over the next few years.

So, and then, Matt, you talked to, you briefly mentioned the strategic compass and just again for the new users, briefly describe what that strategic compass can do for colleges like Washington and like Randolph.

Yeah, there's a ton of stuff. We benchmark really everything we can measure. And one of those things for their particular case is taking a deep dive on the vendor spend. We have massive other databases we can compare to and find vendors for them to just go price shop. And really, that's the key strategy there. Just get other prices, negotiate a better deal. With the staffing issues that they have, we find stuff all over the place. We can see Before I even talk to you, I can see where the staffing looks weird, right? And what broad areas they would be in. Like we can see, see by SOC code or SOC code. It's a 2-digit code in this case that says sort of what area of occupation it is and how many people you have compared to your peers and your aspirational institutions. I mean, we find here's—

How do you set up peer groups for the strategic compass?

Yeah, peer groups are set up. First, I have this algorithm that selects about 35 for the school based on their characteristics. And then we add in the— we submit cross apps to the student clearinghouse and find all of your similar peer competitors, right? In terms of determined by who's, you know, where your students are applying that you admitted and where they actually end up. And then we supplement it with other schools. The school will all work with the CFO or president or provost, and we add in other sets like aspirational sets that they think they want to be like, other in-state schools they want to look at, like really just be comprehensive with the peer set. And then we have different subsets you can quickly switch in and out of for every analysis. So it's really a deep dive looking at all, you know, here we're just comparing you to the median school of all schools, right? Or just if I have 2 schools up here. When we do the strategic compass where it's like, okay, we're high spend relative to all the peers in our dashboard, then we'll check all the other subsets, throw out any weird ones, and just see how robust the results are before we start making policy decisions or decisions to dig deeper in the data. So it's really a first a first look at the data and then a decision on, okay, what are we going to do to get more information? Or are we going to start with policy changes based on this?

Okay, well, let's take a look at some IPEDS data from the College Viability Apps, 2025 College Viability App. And let's start with, I don't know, Matt, what should we start with?

Graduation rates, maybe?

Should we start with graduation rates? Let me give a little bit of a dichotomy here. Washington College, In addition, as you said, with a long runway, financial runway, they do a really good job graduating students. And again, for those that follow this show regularly, you know I make a big issue for those colleges that don't. And Matt, there are way, way, way, way too many colleges that don't even graduate 50% of their students. And Randolph is kind of in that category. If you look at that 8 years on this, on the chart there, they might be right at 50%. Which is my minimum threshold, but that's being kind of generous because that only means they're graduating half of the students that started at Randolph College 4 years ago. Now I know some went on and graduated, others, and some take 5 years and some take 6 years, but this is a comparison. If you're either an academic leader or a parent or a student or a counselor or alumni, this is a reference that you can see. Is your college getting students out the door with that piece of paper that says I completed those 120 credit requirements. And I want to do a little bit more thorough look at, uh, just today, just to show us some of the functionality in the College Viability App. Admissions yield— and again, this data is from IPEDS 2016 to 2023— Randolph College is down. That makes sense because we saw a decreased enrollment. And interestingly, yield is up a little bit for Washington College. So that—

oh wait, wait, wait, Randolph's enrollment was up. Right, it's really interesting. Like, yeah, they're probably— so remember, they're paired up with Noel Levitz. It looks like—

yeah, so admissions yield is down but the enrollment is up. Let's jump them ahead. Yeah, and let's look at the unfunded institutional grants. And Matt, you and I know— interesting here also, you know that unfunded institutional grants is fancy words for merit aid and for most scholarships. And look at Randolph College. Their unfunded grants, their merit aid, and most scholarships went down from $9 million to $2 million, down $7 million and change, and their enrollment went up.

They, did they do a reset? Check their— can you see their sticker price?

Um, you can, can't you?

Oh wait, maybe that's bizarre because typically that wouldn't matter.

That's a very strange set of numbers. And again, we saw in some of the fields you had from the IRS 990s, Randolph wasn't even reporting some of this data. So my first concern would be, is this data correct?

Uh, most of the time they did a reset in 2021. It looks like a sharp drop right there. But, um, yeah, it's hard to say. It's really weird. But remember, like, net tuition revenue per student was way down.

Yeah. So, so it must, because most time when we see this number makes sense.

Yeah.

If you're giving less in merit aid, enrollment tends to go down. If you're giving more in enrollment, and merit aid and scholarships, enrollment tends to go up but not always. So that one really caught my attention. And even both— and we talk about funded grants, this would be, as I tease, you know, the Matt Hendricks Economic Scholarship, it's just for economic students. And really Washington has— they've grown this nicely, almost doubled in the last 8 years. But really both of them have not much more than college couch money because really it's just the interest from those funded grants that students are using. Figure 5% on $10 million. And even looking at things like long-term debt, and you didn't bring that one up today, and we can see the trend. And Washington College has done a decent job managing theirs, even though it's still $60 million. And Randolph College effectively has, you know, a very small long-term debt, which is to their credit, and one of the reasons probably why their net assets stay high. And then let's take a look at tuition and fees. This kind of mimics what you said, or what you showed with the private college advanced compass. And tuition fees are really down for both, down a lot as we saw for Washington. And then, Matt, you know, I also like to look at majors and the percent— the number and percent of majors that are completed. We've got two ways to look at this. This is the 2025 College Majors Completion App, and I've got Randolph College. And we've got all of the 64 majors that we track, and we're going to add more in 2026. And look at this, only 1, 2, if you're nice, 3 majors have even double-digit completions. Psychology, biology, and maybe if I'm nice, communications and media studies. Look at all of these low enrollment majors. Just, what are they doing in that business? You know, they had 1, they've had 2 students graduate with religion, 2 in music, I understand they offer music and they offer religion courses as gen eds and those kind of things, but how strong can a program be with such low completions? Washington College, a little bit better off, um, a handful of double-digit majors, but again, they've got a lot of low enrollment majors. And we talked about mergers and acquisitions. Be fascinating, Matt, for you and I to map just these two and say where Randolph is weak, is Washington strong? In terms of net majors. And see, that's, that's the kind of scale leverage you can look at when you have colleges that are two— that both with long runways, both not doing a particularly good job managing in real time, but both with really long runways. And then true market share, and I've got a couple examples here, and I picked up— I think I just picked about the state of Maryland and just private colleges, and I have bachelor's degrees, and we can see some strong market share, some weak market share Let's take a look at a couple others. There you go. If you want to go to— where am I— in Maryland, Matt, you want to go to Johns Hopkins to get your second economics PhD. And again, this, this shows lots of different fine arts. Again, dominant player— the dominant player in that market is the Maryland Institute of Art. Duh, you would think so. What are these other colleges doing in that business? Do you think, Matt, that they offer more better programs at the Maryland Institute College of Art than they do at Hood College and Goucher College and Hopkins and Loyola University and McDaniel?

Possible.

It's just a logical assumption. And colleges, you use this to compare market share and to see where you have a chance to grow, or more importantly, where you have a chance to use logic and data to look to cut back on the number of majors you offer. As you and I talked before, Matt, this is probably the year when colleges are increasingly realizing they can't be everything to everybody. And we see that in cutbacks, we see that layoffs, but I don't know that those colleges are looking beyond their own internal data to see where they are in terms of the overall market, whether it's regional, national, state, public, it doesn't matter what they're looking at and that kind of stuff. So takeaways from today, Dr. Hendricks, are what?

I mean, a lot of the same stuff. Take a look at, just check your trends at your school. If they look like what you're, we're talking about here and declining net assets, start asking questions, right? If you're a board member or faculty member, you know, you're the enrollment management leader, you should know about all these things, right? Everything's connected. So just start discussing these in detail and what the plan is going to be to turn it around, right? And I've given you some information about how these schools are getting into those problems, right? With the two most popular reasons are staff is too many, too many people, too many vendor contracts, and some that are just too, too highly priced. Those add up really fast. Those are big expense items as compared to, you know, cut your econ department. How many? Cut like 6 faculty. How much money you're going to save, right? It's $500, $600. $1,000, maybe, if you can even cut them, right? You can't fire a tenured faculty member unless you do some pretty dramatic things with your, your, you have to declare financial exigency, which is a mess, right, for your brand. So yeah, do the easy stuff.

And for those that have watched the show today, any of the shows, you know, we, Matt and I, are happy, one or both, and or both of us, to do private demos for you, not just of the Advanced Compass that Matt used most of today and the two College Viability apps that I shared with you, but the Strategic Compass. And trust me, what Matt showed you on the Advanced Compass, looking at the Strategic Compass, which is created especially for an individual college, the, the magnitude of its impact and knowledge, decision-making knowledge, data-based decision-making knowledge, is phenomenal. So as always, I have my contact information in the show notes. Reach out, we'll schedule a private demo for you and your colleagues, and we'll take it from there. So for Dr. Matt Hendricks, I'm Gary Stocker. Thanks as always for watching the College Financial Health Show. We'll be back next week.