In this July 8 2025 episode of the College Financial Health Show, host Gary Stocker (with occasional input from Matt Hendricks) conducts a data‑driven examination of Siena Heights University’s recent closure announcement, using Adrian College—also located in Adrian, Michigan—as a benchmark. The analysis relies on three proprietary tools: the Private College Advanced Financial Compass (Perspective Data Science), the College Viability app, and the 2025 College Majors Completion app. Throughout the episode, Stocker walks through a series of visualizations that compare Siena Heights (blue line) to Adrian College (green line) against three reference bands: the 75th percentile (solid line), the median (dashed line), and the 25th percentile (long‑dashed line) of roughly 1,300 private colleges, plus a red line representing nine recently closed institutions. Key financial dimensions explored include net income margin (profitability), endowment size and per‑revenue endowment, total operating revenue versus expenses, net tuition revenue, employee headcount, vendor spending per $1 M operating revenue, and transportation vendor cost outliers. The hosts also assess student outcomes via graduation rates (4‑year and 6‑year) using the College Viability app, noting both schools hover around a 40‑50 % completion rate, well below the 50 % viability threshold. The discussion concludes with observations that Siena Heights shows greater volatility and lower performance across most metrics, aligning it more closely with the red‑line pattern of recently closed colleges, while Adrian College remains more stable but still faces sector‑wide challenges. The episode ends with a brief pitch for the Advanced Compass tool and an invitation for private demos.
Chapters
Welcome to the July 8th, 2025 College Financial Health Show with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker. Hi everybody, Matt is in the boonies of Minnesota this week, so I'll be doing the show by myself today. We're going to be looking at a college that announced its closure just last week, Sienna Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. And for comparison, I'm going to add another college in that same city, Adrian College, also of course in Adrian, Michigan. So let's go to the data and take a look. So you can see the two colleges that we are looking at, Sienna Heights University and Adrian College in Michigan, both in Michigan. And we're using the Private College Advanced Financial Compass that is from Perspective Data Science. We'll also be looking at the data from the College Viability app and the 2025 College Majors Completion app as well. Let's talk about the lines first. Throughout our presentation using the Advanced Compass, the blue line will be for Siena Heights University and the green lines will always be for Adrian College. And we'll see a variety of reports. Those report names will be up here. The data will be for the most part 2016 to 2024. On occasion, The 2024 data has not been submitted. The lines represent the 75th percentile, and there's about 1,300 private colleges in the database. The solid line is the median value for all of those about 1,300 colleges, and the longer dashed line is at the 25th percentile. You'll notice a red line on almost all the charts as well. That stands for a set of 9 recently closed private colleges. So you don't want to be anywhere near the pattern of that red line suggests some negative things may happen. And you'll see that a little bit on our, on our show today. So we're going to start with both the colleges again, Siena Heights and Adrian College. And we're looking at the net income margin. Most folks call that profit, although we don't use the word profit in higher education. And we can see that Siena Heights in the blue has been down, up, and down— actually up, down, up, down— the last couple years. Never good to have that much variation, but they were down 9% on profit in 2024. We can see that Adrian College has done a little bit better consistently, um, staying above that line early on, similar patterns as to Siena Heights, but in the last couple years, a little bit more stable pattern. Let's also take a look at the end-of-year endowment value. And again, we can see this is the percent change. Let me change that to raw values. So we can see that Siena Heights' total endowment value at the end of 2023 was not quite $12 million. At, at Adrian, it was about $50 million and change. I got up a couple million dollars in 2024 for Adrian. That data not shown for, for, uh, Siena Heights. Let's look at the percent change. This is interesting because we can see that the Siena endowment has gone up a lot, a lot more than even the 75th percentile for the most part. But still, that $14 million value that we saw here on this blue line is a really low number. And let's look at that per $1 million in operating revenue. And again, we can see that Siena Heights with $263,000 and change per student, per FTE student, and that's just a full-time equivalent measure that we use, was lower than even the 25th percentile and consistently lower than even that recently set, that set of recently closed private colleges. Before we jump on, I want to go to another view of this, and I brought up total operating revenue. And total operating expenses on the two charts. And again, Siena Heights is going to be in the blue. And this, that lets us look at how they balance revenue and expenses. So we can see that in 2023 that Siena Heights had $17 million and change in total operating revenue. Let's go down to 2023 for expenses, and we can see that they had $12 million in expenses. All right, so $12 million expenses and $17 in revenue. So not bad. Look what happened though in 2024. So let's look at the total operating revenue. So we can see for Seattle Heights in the blue, they had $34 million and change in operating revenue in 2024. And in operating expenses, they had $37.8 million. So $37 million, $38 million expenses and $35 million, give or take, in revenues. Adrian was at $55, almost $56 million in revenue in 2024. And their expenses were at 54. That's what we're looking at in terms of comparisons. You can see the trends, pretty consistent for both colleges. I wouldn't worry about the red line for either of these right now because both colleges are significantly above that, but it's the trends that matter. Let's take a look at the graph in terms of operating revenue per 100— per million dollars in operating revenue as a standardized comparison. And we can see that again, we see a lot of variation at Siena College.
I don't know what that means.
Adrian College is very flat across the whole process. Across the whole time period. And total operating expenses, same thing. We'll take a look at that. We can see great variation, really, for both of them, a little bit trying to manage their expenses in the context of a very difficult financial situation across higher education.
Let's take a look now at—
let's take a look at net tuition revenue and the raw value. In 2024, the net tuition revenue at Siena was $16.4 million. In 2016, it was $21 million. So $21 million down to $16 million, down $5 million, give or take, over the course of the last 8 or 9 reported years. At Adrian, it was $23 million in 2024, $23 and change. In 2016, it was essentially the same value, um, not quite $24 million. So flat. And you see that online for that college, not necessarily good but not necessarily bad either, as again, it's a tough operating environment for all private colleges, especially small ones. Let's take a look at employee count and total employees for both colleges. And we can see both have trended down. Look at the percent change for those two colleges. And we can see both down 23% total employees for Adrian and down 28%, give or take, for Siena Heights University. And again, you would expect to see that. Neither has the kind of plummeting we saw for colleges that closed, but both are hovering around that 25th percentile. Suggesting they are in the same group of colleges that have had employee cuts, decreases in the vicinity of 22, 23%, something like that. Let's move on then, and let's take a look at the vendor table. And I've already set this up for Siena Heights University. And what this is, is compares vendors, and I've just got it set up for Siena Heights, but it compares vendor pricing for all 1,300 private colleges in the data set. Database across all sorts of services. And what I've done here is just brought up Santa Heights for the last 9 or, 9 or 10 reported years, and the FTE students, the vendor, a description of the vendor, and we look at the amount that that college spent. So in 2024, with Chartwells Dining, Santa Heights spent $2.4 million. What we really look for is how much that varies from the median. And the color charts up here, dark— the darker the color, the, the less good that value is. And we can see for 2024, Siena Heights University spent $70,000 and change. So we can see that Siena Heights spent $70,000 and change per $1 million in operating revenue, a little bit higher than the median.
All in all, not bad.
There were some issues back in 2024 with transportation when they were way, way, way above the median, outside of 1 plus 1.5 standard deviations. And you can see that data. Here's the value of this. Now for the, for the, for the price of the Advanced Compass, not only do you get comparisons of all sorts of dozens and dozens of financial parameters, but we pulled the data from the IRS Form 990s to see which of the vendors are pricing what services and products at what price. Now, context is always important with vendor pricing.
Many vendors offer more services, so if their price is higher, doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad deal. but it certainly gives colleges a chance to look at that value and go back to the vendor and say, hey, can we do better? Or even look for other vendors as well.
Let's take a look then at the 2025 College Viability app.
And I have both Adrian College and Siena set up.
And of course, we always look at graduation rates.
And neither— really, neither of them doing a particularly good job, both hovering around 40%.
Siena Heights considerably less than that in previous years.
Again, here at College Viability, we have a minimum threshold for a 4-year graduation rate of 50%. Neither of those colleges is even close to that value, although Adrian kind of is getting closer to it over the last couple years. But again, this is an 8-year pattern.
This suggests a trend.
This suggests an average value. Not good for either college.
We can even look at the 6-year rate for both colleges.
And again, in 2023, the last set of reported data from the National Center for Education Statistics, both colleges hover around 50%. After 6 years, both Adrian College and Siena Heights University were only graduating about half the students that started there either 4 or 6 years earlier. I want to take a look at— I want to take a look at something called unfunded institutional grants. You and I know that as merit aid. You and I know that as most scholarships.
And what we do is we take a look at this to see how much colleges are spending— not spending—
how much colleges are discounting their tuition. In the form of merit aid, in the form of most scholarships. And we can see really for both colleges over the last 8 reported years—Siena Heights apparently didn't report that for the first 3 years—both colleges have increased the amount of discounts they give to students. Now that's great for students, not so great for colleges. And we see this across the industry, especially for private colleges, especially for private non-urban colleges. They're increasing those tuition discounts to get students in the door. Again, fine for the students, but that puts financial pressure on the colleges. And we see both of these colleges, in particular Adrian, has increased their amount about 50%, not quite 50%, over the last 8 years. And Siena Heights is up about quite 30%, something like that. Let's also take a look at tuition and fees. And again, over the course of the last 8 years, we saw in the Advanced Compass, you had the net tuition revenue listed. This is the actual tuition fees collected And for both colleges, it has gone down a lot. Almost $8 million for Siena, a little over $1 million for Adrian. Now you can compare the two, but the argument I always make is over the course of 8 years, this is a dangerous trend. Maybe over the course of 1 or 2 or even 3 years, you can fight your way out of that. But I have college after college with this kind of trend for tuition fee revenue and enrollment. Enrollment has gone down year after year after year, and they say, well, we fixed it in a year. Well, you can't do that. Let's take a quick look at total enrollment. For these two colleges. And, you know, Adrian is up a little bit even though the tuition and fee revenue is down. That confirms that they are indeed discounting a lot of tuition. And we see about an 800-student drop, around 25% give or take, at Seattle University over the last 8 reported years. Still a decent number, but the fact that they announced their closure in 2026 earlier this month, late last month, suggests that they have some financial issues, strong financial issues associated with that. And then finally, let's take a look at the 2025 College Majors Completion app. And I've got colleges up, both these colleges set up initially. So let's take a look at Siena Heights. I'm going to show you what we call the internal market share. It's a list of all of the bachelor's degree programs at Siena Heights University and the enrollment, those who graduated with a given major in 2020 through 2023. Again, the last reported data. And we can see if we go down to the bottom here that Business Administration, one we see commonly, is the most dominant major offered, and about 30%, give or take, of the students graduate with that major. I don't have any concerns with 30%. I start to watch it more closely if that number gets above 30%. It suggests too much reliance on a single degree, on a single major. But I always know, for those that follow the show regularly, these low major enrollments. If you're looking at a college, I know Siena Heights is closing. If you're looking at a college with low enrollment graduation numbers, I'll pick on mathematics here. They only had 2 students graduate, actually 5 students graduate total in the last 4 years. Now I understand there are math courses that are not for math majors, I understand that. But it lets you compare those colleges with strong math programs and those without. And then we'll take a look at, since we have Adrian going as well, same thing. Adrian has a little bit better balanced mix of majors, stronger majors than did Siena Heights. But again, even at Adrian, you see some low graduation numbers for these majors. And again, you can ask the question, what are they doing in this business with such small majors? And to look at that as an external market share, what I've done is I've selected bachelor's degrees for the state of Michigan, for private nonprofit colleges. And for right now, we'll look at accounting services. And we can actually see the market share. I'll make that a little bit bigger for you. And what we see here is, for example, as I hover over the top, Baker College has 7% of the market. In 2023, they graduated 27 students. And you can see all across the board, you can even see those colleges, small numbers— Cornerstone, Concordia Ann Arbor. Again, you can see graphically which colleges are not particularly strong in a given major. Let's change that. Let's take a look instead of accounting, let's take a look at journalism. And we see not much offered in accounting in the context of journalism in the state of Michigan. You can see the 3 colleges that offer it. Let's take a look at marketing. It tends to be more common. And again, we can see the market share analysis for— it's the external market share for these colleges. And then one last thing we can look at, we'll leave it with marketing. We can see the trends for these colleges over the last 4 reported years. So we can see that these— you can pick whatever set of colleges that you want. Um, I've got Adrian in this one. Let's take a look at Adrian. And let's take a look at Seattle Heights, that's, that's what we're preparing. And Seattle Heights isn't in the list, so they don't offer marketing as a major. So we just have that one graphic, and we can see, just for example, that Adrian College went from 35 to 15 marketing majors in the last 2 reported years. Draw your own conclusions from that. So how do you use this data? Now again, this is kind of a special episode because we're focusing on a college that closed, Seattle Heights University. And like I shared in the podcast on July 7th, it would have been very difficult for the typical faculty member, student, community member to know that this college was in trouble. There were news stories to that effect, and the data was not as obvious as it is in most cases. It's clear they had financial issues. The rest of the story probably comes out somewhere down the road. Many times we wonder if there were some bond covenant issues Whether that's the case at Siena Heights University, I don't know, but it's always the comparisons that matter. You saw comparisons with Adrian College and Siena Heights University. It's the comparisons that matter, and it's the trends that matter as well for individual colleges. You just can't rely in the 20— in 2025, you just can't rely on looking at your own internal data as a college. It's important to look at the comparisons and how you compare to the market in general, and even to your specific competitors as well. So if you are interested in a private demo of the Advanced Compass or the College Viability app or the College Majors Completion app, I'll have my contact information in the show notes. You can drop me a note and we'll set up a private conversation, private demo of the product for your uses. For the Minnesota-bound Matt Hendricks, I'm Gary Stocker with College Viability. Thanks for watching the show. We'll be back next week to review 2 or 3 more colleges on the College Financial Health Show.
