Siena University NY: Financially healthy. Check out the new fundraising efficiency ratio, It's low.

It is 2026, and again we're back with the College Financial Health Show with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker. Hi everybody, thanks for making time to watch the show either live or on the recorded version on the College Viability YouTube channel. And before we get to the college that we're going to do today, you know, you'd think Matt Hendricks out in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that there wouldn't be much college news over the holidays, but we had a college in Indiana that paused operations. I guess that's a fancy way of saying closed. And they told— they fired their faculty because they couldn't pay them. They told their students to go find another college. We have a college we're going to do today, Siena College, Siena University in New York. The college president had some interesting comments about debt. And then a college you and I have talked about, Matt, Rider University, was put on probation by their accrediting agency. 2026 promises, Dr. Hendricks, to be an interesting year. What do you have for us today?

Yeah, so we're doing Siena, Siena University. Uh, on my app it says Siena College. They must have recently changed their name, um, so I'll get that fixed. Um, so I'm going to follow a little bit different format. As Gary mentioned, um, there was a news article about Siena and, um, had points about financial health that are easy to check out, and I'll do that with you. And then the— there was a statement on LinkedIn by the president of C&O, Charles Seifert, basically, uh, stating a bunch of financial points as well that are easy to check out. I'll show you how to do that on the app, and we'll go through it basically line by line. Um, so I have, I have my notes here. I went through LinkedIn posts from the president. I'll just say right away, I think president's almost dead on. I don't have any problems with what he has said here, and I think CNN is in decent shape. But let's follow that up with some details here, and I'll go line by line through. Um, all right. Oh, I should know, we were going to cover Hope College today, but I found some data issues in the app that I'll fix before we put them on the show. Um, some minor stuff, but I'll fix it before we we do them next week. All right, so I'm gonna do Siena. And remember the peer set for the school will automatically populate. Where do I get these peers? These are first, there's several iterations. The first iteration is to find schools that both Siena and the other school said they were both peers of each other. So that's the first iteration. If I don't get 10 double verified peers, I go to the next layer, which is that say St. Michael's said Siena was a peer and Siena said St. Michael's was a peer, and then Siena or St. Michael's has also cross peers as well, I'll pull in those, right? So transitivity is the property we're using there.

There we go.

If Siena says St. Michael's is a peer, St. Michael's says Siena is a peer, and St. Michael's and some other school both say they're peers, then Siena must also be a peer. That's the transitivity prop. Property. If I don't get any, and if I don't get this hand after doing that second iteration, uh, what do I do on the third one? I believe I, uh, usually get there on the, on the second iteration, but there was a third one, but I'm not remembering it offhand. I have to look back at my code. But, uh, generally these peers are going to be probably pretty close, but again, you can change them any way you want. And knock some of them off, whatever. Uh, you can do your own benchmarking analysis. Okay, so here's Sienna. Let me make sure I'm zoomed in enough on net income margin. Actually, I've been starting on— let's do net assets first. Uh, total net assets. And yeah, this looks great. Um, net assets are growing, they're up 52% since 2016, no problems there. Let's check unrestricted net assets. I'm just going to do a quick check on this and then I'll go into the president's comments, uh, because he goes some details. Unrestricted net assets percent change also looks great, up 40%, 37% or so on, uh, unrestricted net assets. Notice that really close to the median, really close to the median of all private schools since 2016. So that's great, far better than the peer set. The peer set's struggling quite a bit. Um, and you can double-check. I'm kind of curious which ones are pulling this down. Display each selected comparison school. So we have a few of the peers are struggling St. Michael's, Springfield College, Champlin College. Right. So you can modify this. Some are doing better than Siena, but ultimately interesting. Siena is doing about normal. All right. It looks good. So if you don't see any big red flags there, usually don't have big issues. But I'll show you net income margin again and then go into the president's comments. So I don't see big deficits in the news article I was referencing earlier. They mentioned a $3 million deficit. I don't see that. I'll show you the change in net assets from operating income, operating operations. Their deficit in my book is $500K in 2024. So the $3 million must have— I don't see $3 million anywhere on the audit. Maybe it's from 2025 budget.

And Matt, what's your data source for that?

Again, this is the audit, right? Which is the source. This is verified. So maybe the $3 million comes from their budget, which may— that's a projection, right? May not be even true. So they're doing better than the $3 million. Even their worst year here in the last few years, they only lost $1.7 million on changing net assets from operations. All right, let's go into the president's comments and just double-check these. And like I said, I don't have any issues with this. Financial condition looks strong, looks good to me. From what I see, net assets are growing normally. And they're not running big deficits, just a tiny deficit on the audit in 2024. Maybe '25 was a little bit worse, but, uh, still $3 million is not going to be huge. Um, and the president did mention that their cash flow is positive. I'll get into that in a second, and that is also true. Our debt is low is the second bullet from the president's post on LinkedIn. Um, so let's check that debt. Debt and lease obligations that jumble together. And we can do— we have raw values here, but that's not super useful because, uh, schools are different size, right? So let's do per million of revenue. And I say yes, true statement, this debt is really low, uh, below the 25th percentile, uh, for their revenue. So their debt-to-revenue ratio is super low. That's great. Um, and has been decreasing, and it's way, way lower than their peer set. All right, that's great. Uh, per student, also very low. So anyway, look at it, it looks like a true statement. Debt is low. Our endowment is growing is the third statement here. I'm going to check. I'll zoom this in a little bit. Endowment is growing. Um, the— I guess that, that's one thing to check, right? Like I've showed you net assets. There can be cases where an unrestricted net assets There's some funky things that can happen with the endowment where they're drawing on the endowment or, you know, net income looks positive. There could be some weird things happening with the endowment. So it's always good to check that that's growing normally and actually the draws are normal. End of year endowment value and let's verify that the endowment is indeed growing. Yes, up 57% since 2016. Again, normal, totally normal, slightly smaller growth compared to their competitors. And I can give them a tip here. It really— all of it sort of unraveled for them. Uh, not unraveled, that's really strong. They were higher than their peers in terms of growth and then fell behind their peers in terms of growth in 2023. And I checked that out. I was kind of curious of how that happened. Um, let me just show you what happened. The biggest item here is they had a negative investment return somehow in 2023, which I was curious about because the market was really strong in 2023. Um, you see even the 25th percentile that has a positive return. I checked it out, they have— I think what's happening is that they're really heavily invested in hedge funds and VC and only 40% equities. So that would probably explain it, that VC and hedge funds probably did poorly in 2023 for them. Um, I guess the policy implication is perhaps check your, um, investment portfolio and rebalance towards equities. A lot of schools are heavy, heavy in equities right now, and the ones that are heavy in equities are, uh, getting massive rewards for that. Yeah, plus it's way more liquid, right? The, the VC I saw in their audit is not liquid at all, um, so that can be a problem in the future as well, especially when you got 40% in there, 30% or so. Um, be worth looking at. My new partner at PDS, uh, worked in this business for a long time, so you can speak to a lot better than I can. But, um, that looks good. So endowment's growing. Okay, here's a point that's really important that a lot of places do, uh, confuse. Cash flow from operations remains positive. We can verify that, and that's surely going to be positive. Like I showed you, the net income was, was only slightly negative, but that includes depreciation. So I'll show you cash flow from operating activities, positive $7 million almost. So yeah, they have no problem paying their bills, which meets— and that's what the president says, which is the university has resources to pay its bills and meets obligations without relying on endowment principal. That's, that's 100% accurate. Yes, there is another statement related to that. The Times Union article claims Siena is not bringing in enough cash to cover the cost of running the school. Yeah, I'd say that, that's not right based on what we can see in the audit, um, that operated— so they cited a $3 million operating deficit, and the president says that's misleading, which I think is 100% accurate. Uh, the operating deficit includes depreciation, so there's a couple things to note there. Their operating deficits must be coming from their budget, and their budget includes depreciation. So that's actually huge because a lot of schools don't include depreciation. Yeah, yeah. Which is a huge problem. You have to have— you have to cover depreciation. It is an expense. It's not like some imaginary thing. Um, and that's what I have a little bit of an issue with. It's just an accounting practice. That's not accurate. I mean, it is accounting practice, but it is an expense. Just so you don't have to pay it today. You have to pay it someday, right? So you definitely need to cover depreciation. They're not quite covering it at the moment, but, you know, they can kick the can down the road, and you can have deferred maintenance sort of pile up when you don't cover depreciation in your budget. But again, they don't have a big deficit. But I did want to highlight this because it is really important. If you're a school not budgeting for depreciation, that's not best practice. Best practice is to cover depreciation so that you don't have to beg your donors someday to help you replace the, the parking lot or the, the roofs on all your buildings, right? You have to have money sort of set aside each budget year to cover that loss in capital and also replace computers and stuff like that.

That's what I was gonna say, computer hardware and software.

Yeah, exactly. That's a lot of appreciation. Okay, uh, let me go back. Did I skip anything? Cash flow, net assets increased by more than $12 million. Yeah, I already showed you that their net assets are, are growing normally. Uh, that's great. And okay, they're also making changes. So I, I really like this school because, uh, I like this management team just based on what I've read already because they have a small deficit and they're already on it, right? That's the biggest thing that I've encountered is schools, right, will wait for decades before they finally do something about it. Pretending that depreciation is not a real thing and that they don't need to worry about it. Well, eventually you do need to worry about it, right? So I love that they're getting on it and they've already implemented cost-saving measures. And we'll double-check these and see. I can give them some more hints on what they might look at the expense side if they aren't already. So they've already done early retirements. That's a policy option, uh, really common. And Um, that does have a cost that comes initially, and I think that's, uh, related to voluntary. Yes, there's going to be cost accrued this year because you have to buy people out, probably 2-year buyout. Um, but yeah, as soon as that's off the books, they should be running balanced. They don't have a big deficit, so it's— this is totally, um, a bit overblown. But, um, I can see why the president won't want to respond to this article because it is— it makes it look a lot worse than it really is.

Matt, before you go to expenses, take a look at the draw and take a look at, uh, net tuition revenue and auxiliaries.

Yep, I'm going to do the sort of standard thing now. Um, make sure— so the appropriations as a percent of the beginning of year endowment value actually look great, even a little low, um, which has certainly helped them when they had that really poor investment return in 2023. Again, I'd really look closely at rebalancing that portfolio away from those illiquid VC. This is not— generally hasn't returned what people had hoped, and it's illiquid. It's— you're much better just doing equities, a lot of equities, 80% equities, right? Um, but again, my— I'm not an expert on this, but I have seen a lot of data, and the schools that are doing really well, of course, are the ones that are heavy— heavily in equities. Um, all right, so that looks good. Let me just show you, go back to the beginning and show you operating revenues and expenses. Again, another thing I really like about this school, in the article it made it sound like, you know, higher ed's struggling and a lot of schools are struggling. This school's not struggling. Uh, their revenues are up 23%, 22% since 2016. That's excellent. That's better than the median, far better than their peer set. All right, um, the, the issue they have is that they've just grown their expenses a little bit more. Right, so they got 22% growth in revenue. I'll show you expenses, uh, percent change. Expenses have grown by 23%, so the math there is not ideal. Uh, usually want to grow at the same rate if you already had— if you started in 2016 at an operating surplus. Um, but you know, these are tiny deficits, so we've seen a lot worse. Yeah, here's another thing, um, that the school, unlike many schools, is doing amazing on net student revenues. It appears, uh, so percent change, that student revenues are near the top 25% of schools in terms of growth, up 24%. Uh, it's excellent. I'll just show you the raw values here. There was a massive bump up in 2021, it looks like. Almost $100 million in— this is net tuition revenue and room and board revenue. All right, um, and aux, I believe, as well. So, uh, I think they split it out. They have room and board in its own deal, but it's all lumped together here at $98 million. It looks excellent. All right, uh, one other thing we check is the price. All right, just get a really sort of raw gauge on the price they're charging. The school's fairly expensive. Slightly less expensive on average, it looks like, compared to their peer set. But interesting, that looks great. $27,000 on average. Again, that's full or average room and board and net tuition.

Adjust, adjust that for inflation, Matt.

Yeah, that's a big one. When you adjust for inflation, everybody's going to look pretty poor. Yeah. So Yeah, most schools we can do percent change to. In terms of when you adjust for inflation and look at percent change, nearly every, nearly every school is lower in real terms in terms of student revenues. But that's why it's really important to not run deficits. If you're not running deficits, your endowment's growing, and if you have a decent-sized endowment, will more than compensate for this loss in net tuition revenue. That's student revenue. All right, let's go to expense side, right? I don't have a lot to say on the revenue side. Actually, I do. I just added some stuff. This is really, really, really important. I just added this because I happened to— actually, it was my partner that pointed it out, and I'll show you what I'm going to show you here. I added total private gifts and grants. This is unrestricted gifts plus restricted gifts. I'll see if you guys catch it. Um, so they've got $5 million in total private gifts and grants, right? That looks pretty good. Um, that's fine. But when you show— we also have on the 990s how much it costs to raise that money. So remember that $5 million?

Yeah.

And we have total, uh, we have total fundraising expenses from the 990s, and we have $7 million. All right, so I don't get my calculator out. I at first thought there had to be something wrong, but I double-checked, triple-checked. This is, this is what they report. And so there's a way to put these two together, and I call it fundraising efficiency. Other people might call it fundraising ROI, but I'm just going to take the total private gifts divided by the fundraising expense and benchmark that. And you can see it's terrible. So they're, they're below 1, which is a key metric, right? 1 is terrible, right? If you're at 1, that means basically your advancement department is just paying for itself. Not ideal, right? That's totally abnormal. That's not normal. Obviously, it's not— no school would have a fundraising department if that were normal. What's normal is about 3.5%. Or 3.5 ratio. So your advancement office brings in 3.5 times what it costs, right? So in their case, that would be a lot more than $5 million. It'd be like 4 times more maybe. And they're even doing far worse than their peers, and their peers are not great at it either. Yeah, some of them do okay. Marist, Scranton, I mean, at least they're above 1, right? So yeah, getting below 1 is pretty— and they used to— so Siena must be— used to be much better at it. And for whatever reason, since— looks like since about 2020, their gifts compared to the costs for fundraising are way off the rails. So why do I bring this up? They need to look at this, right? Yeah, they need to look at this today if they haven't already, um, and figure out why they're spending so much. They're spending more— this is really simple— why are we spending more on fundraising than we're actually bringing in on funds? Crazy. First, double-check that this data is correct. This is straight from your report from your 990 and your audit, right? If they're not correct, then of course fix them. But, um, yeah, it's probably correct, and you should be closer at least to the peers of 1.3, but try to get closer to 3.5, which is the norm. Um, all right, so that's on the revenue side. Let's go to the cost side. Employees. So they've been doing, uh, employee buyouts. And let's see if we can see what's happening here. Um, actually don't see any buyouts. So there—

that was last year. That might have just been last year.

So this is fiscal year '24. Yeah, so that maybe they just started, but from what I can see here, they have actually more W-2 employees in '24 than they did in, uh, '23. And 22 and 21. Perhaps that's going to be the issue. Let's benchmark this for their size. So it actually looks normal for their revenue, right? Employee size, and for student body, it's actually a bit low. So it's, uh, interesting. Again, this is all W-2 employees, so there'll be a lot of student employees in here, uh, everybody that's ever worked at the— if there's a lot of of churn. You'll have a lot of W-2s as well. That's a good point. So a lot of different things that can drive this, but we'll dig in more here. Um, W-2 employees paid over $100K per $1 million in operating revenue. Okay, that's a problem. So yeah, this, this definitely suggests the buyout is the right way to go. Or I mean, not everybody needs to be bought out though, right? Um, really only tenured faculty are the ones you need to buy out. I mean, to be honest about it, they don't— only long-term contracts you need to worry about are those. Um, so this, this is high, right? And so yeah, that supports a buyout. It's W-2 employees over $100K. And let's check, uh, we have more, uh, types. We have officers, current officers, and directors. That looks okay. I'm just going to check Full all compensation, non-officer salaries and wages. Sorry if I'm going fast, I do this all the time. So yeah, the payroll spend is, is high. Um, yeah, that needs to come down. And we can also check this on the audit. I've added payroll spend from the audit in here into the expense salary, wages, and benefits per $1 million. Yeah, they're just off the rails in terms of payroll spend.

And New York is conceivably a high, high-cost state, so that might make some sense.

Yeah, and you can see what their peers— their peers are also high. And you've got a New York peer, New York peer, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, they'll all be similar. So yeah, that's why it's important to not just compare to the national norms here but also your peer set. And you can also see some of your peers are probably going to be normal. Here's Susquehanna Normal. Iona, normal. That's in New York. So try to get closer to those two schools, which is really close to the national median. So yeah, that involves faculty buyouts, laying off staff and so on, mostly staff and faculty layoffs. All right. So staffing looks like it's an issue. Let's check also another big part of it tends to be contractor spend. And we'll check per $1 million. That actually looks good. This actually could be an issue though. If you're low on contractors, it could— it's not, it's not always better to be low, right? Like, part of the reason they can be high on staffing is that they just don't have vendors that are providing services typically for less than what it costs to do it in-house. So, uh, we can check some of these vendor contracts. We can check their food service, um, and see what's happening there. I'm going to check a couple other things, then I'll go into the contracts themselves. Uh, let's see, advertising. Yeah, that's odd. Not a lot of advertising going on. Maybe you move some money from advancement into marketing, right? These are the kinds of conversations that we have with our clients, right? You can see the motivation. It's really the same sort of idea in terms of investing. Maybe the investment's better spent Less in advancement, more in marketing. I might check that out, but they are doing well on student revenues, so maybe they just go less on advancement and leave advertising where it is. Um, okay, so here's probably why they have part of their staffing issue. IT spend is very low. Um, they probably are doing all the IT in-house, which is becoming less common. Um, you can see their peers are way different. All right, so I would look into vendor contracts for IT and replace in-house staff with external IT services. Again, usually cheaper and better. Honestly, that's all they do is IT, so they're just really good at it. Uh, insurance— I don't know what's up with these, but sometimes they're off the rails. But these look fine. Yeah, insurance. IT, occupancy, fundraising, I already mentioned travel. Let's check this fees for services. That looks normal. All right, so I don't think, uh, I think mostly we're going to have issues with not having vendor contracts for them, which may be part of the reason they're, they have staffing issues. Um, but again, you can see how the data starts telling the story. I'm going to double-check their contracts themselves. All right, so they do have a food service vendor and it looks high. All right, so here's one way, one way to save money. Again, this is $1,000 higher than normal. Again, this many, many times normal is about $1,700 per FTE. I know there's a lot of variation in there, but it costs virtually nothing to go and shop these prices and renegotiate. All right, even if you have a long-term deal, it doesn't mean you can't change it. Um, usually these vendors, they're in a really competitive environment, they'll work with you. All right, so $10 million is higher than normal. This should be, um, around $1,700 per student is the norm. Uh, let's see what else we have in here. They do have marketing vendors. They're pretty low, but, um It's weird to have two. Okay, so I would look at what's going on here. It's uncommon to have two. Just wonder why that would be. But investment management, everything else looks fairly normal. All right, so I think just the takeaway here is, yeah, I think Sienna's doing fine financially. They have small deficits, they're growing normally. They may have gotten carried away with the staffing and maybe missing a lot of vendor contracts that can help them reduce staff and costs at the same time and provide the same, uh, or even better services. So look into the IT contracts, look into all the contracts, right? You're missing security contracts, you're missing maintenance contracts, missing IT. Check those all out, price shop them, and compare it to what you're spending in-house. And last but not least, very important, check that advancement office. How many staff heard Why is the ROI, uh, upside down? It should never happen, right? Um, so, uh, double-check that. By the way, um, we're spending like $7 million on fundraising, right? So that's a lot. I mean, even if you get—

you get—

they talk about this big gift for this building, that's only a few years just to run the advancement office. So, um, that really needs to be fixed ASAP. All right, so those are the best I can offer on the financial compass, but we do far more detailed work for our clients, obviously, than what I can do here in 30 minutes on just this app. We have a totally different app that goes way into everything deeper on staffing by department and occupation. We do a fine-grained analysis of the vendor contracts, all sorts of stuff, pricing strategy. The ROI advancement would have been flagged immediately. So those are the kinds of things you can get from the data. I'll stop sharing and kick it back to you, Gary.

And Matt, the only thing I wanted to show today, and I'm not going to bring up my screen, is the 4-year graduation rate. And it's solid, 70-plus percent over the last 8 years at, at Siena College, Siena University, whatever their name is now. And that's good. And, and many times we see a college with strong 4-year graduation rates like Siena with financial issues. And as you've said, that's, that's not the case with Siena University at all. A couple things I want to follow up on, um, and I guess the first one is the debt, because that's where this original Times Union story started, was that the college had a pledged gift of something like $30 million, something like that, for a science building, um, and the donor didn't come through right away, and it looks like the donor is now paying in monthly installments. And the college president said, well, we don't have any debt. And maybe not the best choice of words. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I read that. I don't know. I don't know. A lot of this stuff gets taken out of context and run with. I've been, I've been in some interviews too, where I was like, I didn't say, I mean, at least I didn't say it that way. But anyway, I guess the lesson is to, you know, be really careful what you say to a reporter. Yeah. I think he did have, President of CNA did have a follow-up. Where he said he didn't mean that it was going to be debt-free today. Yeah, but the donor pays all of the, the pledge.

So yeah, I guess the follow-up to that is if you're a reporter or you know a reporter or you're a college president and reporter is doing a story on you, send them our way. It's possible that Matt Hendricks and it's possible even Gary Stocker know more about college financial health than reporters. I'm being somewhat sarcastic here for a reason, but reporters reach out to us. We'll be happy to show you what Matt just showed you and what I can show you on a college's financial health so you get data that's better than you can get by digging through iPads, by digging through '90s yourself, by digging through audited financial statements yourself. Reach out to us. We do this regularly and probably not enough. So if you're a reporter on this, lesson learned, there are resources out there. Matt Hendricks is one, Gary Stocker is another, that can step you through this information and provide you, in the case of CFERT, some cautions. But in the case of many other colleges, there are issues that are not good. And Matt and I have talked about many of them over the last couple years. And you'll want to be able to have those proverbial ducks in a row, financial ducks in a row, before you have those interviews. With CFOs or presidents or board chairs or those kind of things. So Matt, we will do Hope College next week. I'll add that to the list. Thanks for starting 2026 with the show for us again. And for those joining us live, thank you very much. We'll have the recorded version available on our College Viability YouTube channel later today. For Matt Hendricks, I'm Gary Stocker. Thanks as always for watching. We'll be back again next week with another College Financial Health Show with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker.