Sonoran University (AZ) & Rosemont College (PA) : Financial Health & Viability Review

It is Tuesday, September 16th, 2025. Time for another show. The show we call it the College Financial Health Show with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker. Hi everybody. Thanks for making time to watch the show. This is probably the only show that looks in detail at the financial health and even viability of private colleges. Throughout the United States. And Dr. Matt Hendricks always joins us first and, and does such a phenomenal job, of course. Matt, and Matt, what two colleges are we looking at today? Because I know one of them has a special situation.

Yeah, one is Sonoran University in Arizona, and that is a health sciences school, and Rosemont College in Pennsylvania, which, uh, this year, I believe in March of this year, 2025, is announcing— it has announced the merger with Villanova. Um, so, uh, we'll get right into it and look at the financials. Um, the move— you'll see the move for Rosemont was probably out of necessity. Looks a lot like a school that was headed for closure, so that was probably a really smart move on their part. Um, and, um, I think the benefit of this show, again, you'll see what it looks like to be close to, uh, running out of runway and, uh, in their case, good, good that they acted, I think. Um, and if you're in the market looking for, for finding merger partners, you might look for schools that look like Rosemont, right? Um, and see if there's potential for synergy there with your missions. Um, all right, so as, as usual, I'm jumping into the Advanced Financial Compass. Again, this is something you can use. There's a lot of free features here, um, and it's very unique in that it's the only app that I know of, um, outside of maybe— no, that's the only one I know of that, uh, scrapes audited financial statements and 990s and puts all that up here for you to benchmark. Um, so what I'm going to do is, like usual, post both schools on the same graph along with other benchmark metrics like the national median, 75th, 25th percentile, and the set of low schools that I have listed above. Uh, so the blue series will be Sonoran and the green series will be Rosemont. Um, all right, so first we're going to dive into financial health. There's a lot of metrics to look at, and the most important one of course is net income, like the profit of these schools. And you can see some troubling trends for both of them. Ideally, your net income or profit would be positive every year, and really be in a tight band right around +1% is really the ideal range to be in. And you can see in the last few years, both of these schools— and here's, here's the one, here's Rosemont, right, right before they announced the fiscal year before they announced the merger, having a massive loss of 31% net income margin, right? That's much worse than even the last year of some of these closed schools. At like 18% loss.

And you kind of wonder, I'm going to jump in here. I normally don't do this during your presentation, but I want to jump in here. I wonder, we show a lot of colleges when we do this show with net income margins this bad. Clearly, that was a leading reason for Rosemont to say it's time to find a partner. I wonder why we don't see other colleges doing the same with similar or even worse net income margins.

Yeah, I mean, I think we are— we're starting to see this more. But yeah, these are— some of them have longer runways and can sustain losses like this. We've seen cases where Drew, even Albright, can last much longer than— you'll see this school just have zero runway, whereas other— those other schools had like $50, $60 million in unrestricted net assets. So that can sustain you for a while. But unless you turn those into those deficits into surplus, that eventually you'll run out of that runway. All right, so both of these schools are struggling financially, it appears, if you look at just net income. Certainly Rosemont much worse than Sonoran, but that's a 7% loss, that's a 3% loss, that's a 4% loss. But before that, Sonoran was doing better. I should note as well that these are not strictly operating losses for Sonoran. Uh, like I've shown you in the past, this is one of the schools that doesn't break out operating and non-operating revenues in its statement of activities. So to get a better sense of their net income, uh, we got to look at cash flow from operating activities where they definitely do split out. Uh, so we can look at net cash. This do split out the operating versus non-operating, and you can see their net cash from operating. First, let's start with Rosemont. This is what kills your school if you don't have net cash that's positive from operating activities. Again, uh, almost every time, unless you have a weird accounting, uh, that means that you're going to have to sell stuff, borrow, um, or draw down your assets, right? Uh, your cash, your investments— in other words, sell stuff, uh, just to survive. And they, they had been doing that for a long time, um, which is, uh, pretty shocking because you can see this big bump up here for most schools during COVID They got a lot of COVID relief, but even that wasn't enough to bump them higher.

Yeah, that's interesting.

So yeah, this school's been in tough shape financially for a while, it appears, if you look at cash flow. Sonoran, on the other hand, they do have positive cash here. But here's, here's the important part. We look at the raw values. These are really small. That's $100,000 and $190,000. This is $800,000. And I know that that's not enough to cover all of their expenses. So they do have a deficit because if you look at their depreciation expense and just raw values, their depreciation expense is over $1 million. Okay, so those things combined. So basically the only difference between the net income margin and the cash flow from operations generally is that depreciation expenses netted out. It's not a cash expense, but it is an expense that they have cover and they're not able to cover it. Um, so yes, to me that says yes, the school— both schools have deficits. Of course, Rosemont much worse than Sonoran. You're going to see more evidence of financial stress in both of these. Now, uh, let's take a look at the endowments and just lack of runway in general. Um, we take a look at the endowments. This is endowment growth, right? Which is— wow, that's a huge growth in the endowment. And, uh, if you just Flip it over to raw values, you see why that's such a massive number, because neither of these schools really had endowments. Yeah, uh, Sonoran's endowment's $3.4 million at the end of fiscal year '24, and, uh, Rosemont's was $12 million at the end of fiscal year 2024. So those are really just not— yeah, that's not really going to impact your operations much at all.

College couch money.

Yeah. Um, okay, so those endowments are tiny. And yeah, the one was growing, it went from basically zero to $3 million, but it's still not enough to even move the needle on your operations if you're going to just have a normal draw. Um, so endowments, uh, not, not looking great. If you look at unrestricted net assets, again, this is where you get your runways. Um, and again, neither of these schools— and same for the schools that closed, right? You see they had a combination of deficits, which both of these schools had, and not a lot of resources, which both these schools don't have either. Um, so it's a— if you see a school that has very low net assets like these and deficits, you can almost guarantee they would be willing to listen to negotiation in terms of mergers and stuff like that, because they're just— they don't have margin of error, um, and they're already making deficits. It's the combination that generally means they're going to listen to a merger discussion. Okay. So yeah, like $6 million and $10 million for net unrestricted net assets. It's very, very small. You can easily wipe that out in just 2 years of operating deficits. All right. Same for just total net assets. I'll just show you that before I move on. So you don't think I'm like hiding something. Total net assets, same story. These schools just don't have much of anything going on. Again, this is well below the 25th percentile. Okay, let's go into CapEx. Uh, actually, I'm going to show property, plant, and equipment first. Again, they just don't have a lot of assets. They don't even have a lot of property and equipment. Um, and both of their property— so this property and equipment value since 2021 is shrinking. That's Sonoran. Right. Again, not ideal and not healthy generally. Right. It's going to— when we— what do you suppose we're going to see when we look at CapEx, the depreciation? If you have to decrease the number up.

Yeah.

They're just not investing in the capital stock at a normal rate, which would be above 1 on that ratio. They're going to be below 1 for sure. This is interesting to look at. They must have built some buildings back here, maybe some hope of turning things around at Rosemont, but clearly didn't work out.

Build it and hope they will come strategy.

Yeah, their property and equipment went from $22 million to $29 million. So like a $7 million building or so project there. Not— it's not going to move the needle generally. I don't think you should expect that. Yeah, students care a little bit about buildings, but it's much more about the degree. Right. So, okay, so that's property and equipment. And I was going to show you CapEx, and you can see that's going to follow that. This is a good giveaway if there's financial stress. I mean, here's the building going on at Rosemont. But if your CapEx is really close to 0 or below 1 for many, many years, and you can see for both of these schools, I think so. Sonoran was above 1 just once. And, uh, Rosemont just a couple times building a building. That's not healthy, right? Even in years they're not building, they should have a capex number of depreciation just to replace the computers that are wearing out and stuff like that. Um, so yeah, not ideal. That's a giveaway there. Uh, I'm gonna flip over to— so both schools obviously financial stress, not investing in capital stock, they have deficits, very small runways. So this could happen really quick, right? You talk about a quick school that just all of a sudden disappears. These are the kinds that can happen that way because they don't have a very long runway. Unlike, you know, like Albright or Drew or Ryder, they can run for decades with massive deficits. And in at least the case of Drew, they've done that, right? But they're running out of runway now. All right. So let's take a look at revenues, operating revenues. And just keep in mind again that Sonoran's operating revenues are not going to be too helpful. And just because, again, these schools are so tiny, like, look at that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna pull off some stuff here and just show you how I can make this graph more usable. I'm gonna drop off the 75th percentile and the median. All right, and so this is a set of closed schools here, and look at how much higher their revenues are even compared to these two schools that— or one is now gone, of course, but— or will be gone. Um, the other one is, is surviving, uh, for now. But, uh, the nice thing about— so the blue is again Sonoran. Their revenue is going up. That's great. But again, it's really low, so again, not a lot of margin of error. But that is perfect. It's growing, as opposed to Rosemont that basically cratered since 2020. Uh, very interesting. I suppose they would like to blame that on COVID, but Yeah, I mean, really, it's been cratering since 2017. So this isn't something that's probably related. Net tuition revenue.

All right.

This is usually the most important operating revenue line. And so really important to check this and see how you're doing relative to the national median or other peers. And of course, here I'm just doing it with relative to the national median and have these two schools that we're talking about. But look at the different paths here. Sonoran's, um, Sonoran's net tuition revenue has shot up quite a bit, up 41%, whereas again, like I said, the issues at Rosemont started well before COVID started. Looks like started about 2018, um, and they have net tuition revenue down 22%. Sonoran's is up 41%.

So what's the per student on that one, Matt?

What's that?

What's the per student on net tuition?

Yeah, per student. So this is interesting. Students pay quite a bit to go to Sonora. Yeah, they weren't paying much at all to go to— they weren't paying even back in 2018 very much to go to Rosemont. It'd be interesting. So this is one of the things about these mergers. I just wonder how this is going to go. I mean, because they certainly pay a lot to go to Villanova, right? So how do you, how do you sort of integrate the pricing or just basically Rosemont, just basically that brand just go away and it becomes Villanova? It's an interesting question. Certainly don't know the answer to that, but I suspect that would be the case. But yeah, let's take a look. They used to pay $13,000 nominal in 2016 and by the rate at their last year of life here is $11,000. That's nominal. Change, right? In real terms, probably went down by like half, right? So that's, again, another key indicator. Looking for a school that wants to hear what you're proposing for a merger, find one that looks like this, right? Where their price, their average per student net tuition revenue is decreasing in nominal terms. In real terms, down a ton.

And we see that so many times during the show for colleges.

But this looks great for Sonoran, so this is perfect. Again, I think Sonoran's doing okay. They have a small deficit. You just worry like this could flip on a dime, right? They don't have a very long runway. So just 1 or 2 bad years could be catastrophic for a school like this. But that looks good. They certainly look fine right now. Just got to fix a small deficit. Let's move on to the expense side and I'll offer up— I'll focus mostly on Sonoran because they, these, they can take this policy advice and help themselves out. But there's a lot of things that can happen on the expense side, starting with W-2 employees. All right. Let's take a look at number of W-2 employees and we're going to normalize it both by per FTE. So how big, how many number of employees, what's your employee relative to FTE and then also relative to revenue. And so both of these schools appear to have staffing issues. If you look per FTE, both much higher than normal on staff. And then if you look relative to their revenues, they're both incredibly high staffing. Again, Rosemont above the 75th percentile. So I mean, this is something— this is why I do this work. Okay. They would have known this had they had this tool back in 2016. They would have known that they had an issue with staffing. Right. And my guess, just based on my own experience, is that they had no idea that they were overstaffed. All right. And maybe they still didn't know what they decided to merge. But the thing is, if you right-size your staffing, maybe they could get back to sustainable net income. Yeah, the school is going to be smaller, right? They have a lot fewer students, but you could continue your mission and stay independent. But, you know, that's the, that's the reason I built this tool so we can catch these things earlier. But even Sonoran, the staff doesn't look right here. It's a bit high relative to the median and even high relative to where they were, you know, in 2020 for relative to their revenue and then per FTE. Yeah, still same thing. They have a lot of staff per FTE. That might be just a feature. I mean, it's totally possible that that's normal for the type of school they are. This is a bit. Different kind of school, right? Um, but what I'm saying is, doesn't look right, okay? So at least check it. Uh, all right, let's take a look at officer compensation. Total officer compensation for officers per FTE. Again, Sonoran's high here per FTE, um, and also relative to revenue. So take a look at the mix of staffing What are you paying your officers? Do a compensation study. And more importantly, actually, than checking compensation, check the numbers. It's all about the numbers, right? You have too many people in upper admin slots, current officer slots, uh, double-check that. Uh, other employee payroll, non-officer salaries and wages. Again, both these schools are tiny, but when you, uh, normalize relative to how big the school is in terms of enrollment, again, Sonoran is really high on on compensation, and it's probably a factor of just too many people. All right. But it could also be the compensation itself. But I already did show you that they had a lot of W-2 employees. That's just a number of people. So I suspect they just have too many people and it's shot way up recently in terms of the total payroll expense to non-officers. Let's take a look at All right, so clearly remember this: if you're Sonoran, probably have a staffing issue. If you don't know about it already, take this information and run with it. Do some work on this and focus not on the compensation. Make sure that that's of course at the market level, but focus on the number of people. Make sure that that is not too high. And in fact, it should be lower than normal if you could get it there and just be more efficient than than peers. All right, I'm going to move into some other big marketing or big expense line items. So starting with marketing, and I haven't even switched this to account for the fact that these schools are small. So you can probably see what's going to happen here when I do per FTE. Yeah, the Sonoran's marketing spend is very, very high. And so you need to make sure that they're getting a return on this investment. And benchmark this versus some of their competitors and see if this is even making sense. But again, this is well above the 75th percentile for revenue and for FTE. That's not ideal generally. IT spend, I think, was the same way. Actually, no, they look pretty good on IT. Although I doubt this is right. Like there's no way they're spending zero on IT. So I double-check that and correct this and figure it out. This number may have been right back in 2020. Go back and check all of your 990s here and make sure that these are all reported the same way. There's zero chance that these are right, right? Got to put your IT spend in there. Okay, but with Rosemont, take a look at that. Their IT spend was off the charts. Yeah. Remember that, remember that, because we're going to see something really interesting later when I did the prep on this. It was like, aha, there's the IT spend. Take a look at massive IT spend at Rosemont, and you're going to see that come up again in a little bit. All right, insurance. I think this was one that was weird again. Both schools spending a ton on insurance. Remember that as well. I think that actually came up later when I look at vendors. Tone on insurance, both schools. Double-check that. What's going on with those policies? Do we have overinsurance? Are we just not getting a competitive price? That kind of stuff. Fundraising costs, okay, per FTE. Again, high at Sonoran, high at both relative to their revenues. Um, all right, and I think occupancy was another one. Yeah, very high at Sonoran. Incredibly high at Sonoran. Again, what's an occupancy? This could be if they're renting buildings. It's also utilities. Okay. So double-check that. What caused the sharp increase? Are you stuffing your IT in here now? There's a lot of potential explanations here, some of which don't really deal with policy other than, you know, cleaning up your reporting. But double-check, certainly worth your time to check this and figure out. And a big one, a big one. So remember, the two big expense items are staffing and usually vendor contracts. And some of those vendors are sprinkled into the stuff I already talked about, but the rest of the vendors are thrown into this category called total fees for services. And take a look at these for both schools, very high vendor spend at both. So again, my instinct here and just experience is that both of these schools are high on the most expensive expense items. All right, the most expensive items are not in line with norms, so it's probably causing their financial issues on the expense side. At least Rosemont probably could have aligned their budget with this new size of the school if they right-size the vendor contracts and the staffing. All right, let's take a look at these contracts specifically and see what we, we find. So I'm going to start with, start with Rosemont, go down here to the vendor table. And remember what we said about IT spend, Rosemont. Yeah. So lots, lots of stuff I don't like here. You don't want color.

All right.

That means you're high for the amount of students you have or high for the revenue you have. Take a look at these first. 1, 2, 3. 3 IT contracts in 2023. That is bizarre. You know, even 1 is generally not even— it's not— not everybody has an IT vendor, okay? And certainly not everybody has 3. Very uncommon to have to be paying 3 IT vendors in 1 year. And if you add these up, it's $750K, okay? That's a lot to spend on IT. Yeah, they're probably switching in and out of different vendors here, but remember, you don't have to have a vendor. All right, you can do this in-house, which is actually probably the most common. Another thing is the food service vendor contract was $1.3 million for only 600 students. That's higher than normal by quite a bit, higher than normal for the number of students they have and higher than normal for this number of the amount of revenue. Same with maintenance. $1.4 million on maintenance is not normal for a school of this size or this revenue. And, uh, yeah, these are just the contracts I can see. You know, imagine there's a bunch more contracts. Um, we can just look at the number of contracts here. I think I forgot to do this one, but, um, yeah, Rosemont had, uh, 6. Okay, so there's just one contract I can't see. On there, but the ones I can see there, they all look a bit odd, right? But there's a bunch of contracts I can't see that are under $100,000. So they really should check all those. Although now it's going to be Villanova's responsibility to do that, I suppose. But Sonoran is the same, right? They have per student number of vendors is very high relative to their revenue, also very high. So let's take a look at Sonoran's vendors. But isn't that, isn't that interesting how you see, you know, these issues? Remember, we, with Sonoran, we saw that they had a really high insurance and marketing spend, right? Yeah, take a look. You get— this might be thrown into marketing. This is enrollment management, and that's incredibly high. In fact, yeah, that's $10,000 per student for enrollment management. I don't know. I mean, not even EAB charges that. So need to look at this contract closely. This is all— almost all these look suspicious to me. Payroll processor for $750K doesn't sound right either. The marketing spend here, here's part of it, $350K for marketing. Janitorial, that actually looks fine. This is another one. Credit card processing for $176,000. It doesn't look right to me. Very uncommon to have credit card processors showing up in here at all, let alone for $176K. I double-checked that.

That's a big number.

Yeah. I mean, this $1.4 million for enrollment management is pretty bizarre for a school that only has 500 students. Are you getting the ROI you wanted from that contract? I would be shocked if you were, because take a look at the enrollments decreasing, right? A little bit down while you have this vendor contract and check all of these, right? Here's an IT contract that actually looks almost normal, but still a bit high. Genesabar tends to be fairly reasonable. But, you know, this credit card processing, I don't know. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff to check here, and I would do that immediately if I worked at Sonoran. All right, so remember, Sonoran has the issue, and they're independent still, so they still have the potential issue with staffing, potential issue with vendor contracts, specific contracts I can point to here, marketing and credit card services. This enrollment management contract looks completely out of line with norms, but I don't know the details of these, of course, but you should check these out. This really dark red, it means you're you're higher than, you know, when you're 1.5 standard deviations above the mean, you're like higher than 90% of schools on that type of contract, right, for your FTE and for your revenue. I'm going to switch that, right, Gary? You asked me to do that, switch these to percentiles, standard deviations. But in a normal distribution, I think you're about 90% above when you're 1.5 standard deviations. Don't quote me on that. It's been a while since I took a stats class, but you are a stats guy, right? All right, I'll hand it back to you, Gary.

So, so a couple of follow-ups, Matt. And we've talked about the CapEx. We use that, that chart almost every week, and I've shared many places many times that that's kind of a hidden indicator of a college in trouble. And my logic behind that is because they don't have the resources to invest in infrastructure, in buildings, and holes in the parking lot, and mold on the walls, in hardware and software upgrades, that really suggests a college is in trouble. Am I correct on that?

Yeah, I think so. And the banks certainly look at that too. Like, they know that that's a hidden indicator. Not so hidden really, but, but, you know, people that don't understand finances as much won't really look at that. But certainly your banks will, your creditors, your rating agencies will as part of their rating. Um, so yeah, they're paying attention.

And then more so Rosemont than Sonoran, although Sonoran has issues, is as I watch your presentation, that was— Rosemont was a badly managed organization. And I bring that up not just to pick on Rosemont because they're merging with Villanova, they won't exist here in a couple of years, but you and I have done, what, 140-some-odd shows now and met. In my mind, it's scary how many times we see similar patterns that these colleges are missing for long periods of time.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can't say exactly what was happening on the ground there, but, you know, I've done this for hundreds of schools now. Almost every case where there's a deficit at the school, it's almost— you can almost every time point to either staffing or vendors or both, right? And of course it makes sense. Those are the biggest expenses. If you're not getting those right, you're going to be in a really difficult spot, right? And I guess what I'm trying to do with my work is just say, hey, you can, you don't have to guess, right? You can see, see these things, right? And you can see them a long time in advance before it becomes a, you know, catastrophic thing. And they're fixable. They're actually fixing vendor spend is one of the easiest things they can do. I don't know why that is something that's— even get resistance when I do identify a contract that looks weird, right? Then they say things like, oh, well, we love those flowers, right? And like, it's just kind of like so out of touch with reality in some cases. You know, you've probably seen some of the debates we've had, but it's like, yeah, you know, given the choice between fewer cafeteria, like shorter cafeteria hours and $1 million. Like, it seems like a very easy choice for me if I were in the administrator's spots, but some, for some reason, they seem to struggle with these decisions and, and the priorities, uh, what their schools should be prioritizing. That's just bizarre to me.

Yeah, well, let me briefly just, just show what we have in the college viability apps, and let's take a look. Uh, interestingly, Sonoran didn't have any data in iPads. I can't find it either on the College Viability app or the College Majors Completion app, and that's always scary when a college isn't even submitting the data. So we're just going to look at Rosemont today and then we'll wrap things up. And I'm going to start with graduation rates. We'll take a look at graduation rates for Rosemont College again because Sonoran doesn't have any. And as we've seen many times, they're not only financially weak, they're outcome weak. They're graduating less than half of their students in almost every year except one. And you know, my minimum threshold is 50%. If you're not graduating at least 50% of your students in 4 years, in my mind, you're not much more than a coin toss college. I noticed their admissions yield is plummeting, which makes sense. We saw that reflected in enrollment. Now, you know, to be somewhat fair, most colleges have decreasing admissions yield over the last 10 years or so because more students are using the automated apps. And I've teased— I think I've teased UMass before applying to a college is the same thing, or similar to ordering an extra ingredient on your pizza. You just check an extra box and you get that extra college on your, on your application list. And then we take a look at, um, the unfunded institutional grants. You know, and I of course know that as unfunded, unfunded grants, there's no money behind it, mostly in form of merit aid and most scholarships. And interestingly, Rosemont has tried to get under control they're not giving away much of the store anymore, and that was reflected in their enrollment. So we see that both times when colleges both increase this unfunded grant and the enrollment goes down, and when they decrease the unfunded enrollment grant, the enrollment almost certainly goes down. And then lastly, because I got to tease Matt about something, we always look at tuition and fees to reaffirm what he said. And again, Rosemont is down $2 million over the last 8 years. Now, in the overall scheme of things $2 million is not much, but for a college as small as Rosemont, Matt, that's a big, big deal. And just reaffirms, and it always does, and I just like teasing you on that fact because I know, I know when I bring up the tuition and fees, it's going to match exactly what you said without exception. And then briefly, the College Majors Completion app. And again, we make this available because colleges now are in that cutback and layoff period, and Matt and I are neither aware of anybody else who has a tool like this Now let's colleges look at their internal market share, which we're looking at here for Rosemont. We're looking at their bachelor programs, and again, I can see another reason, Matt, why they can't possibly survive. They have only 2 programs with even double-digit graduations, majors completions, and they have 15 programs with less than 10 completions. Just, just awful. Awful numbers. And even if we take this and look at market share, and I'll just do it for, uh, just do it for Pennsylvania, and we'll just do it for Pennsylvania private colleges. There's Pennsylvania. We will do just the sector that is private 4-years. And let's pick a major that is somewhat common. Let's take a look at— how about accounting, Matt? And so these are all the private colleges in Pennsylvania and the number of graduate students in 2023, and a nice little pie graph to show market share. And make it a little big— make that a little bit bigger for you. And there are colleges doing well with accounting. Drexel has 18% of the market, 200+ students. And St. Joseph's doing well. And Villanova, okay, nice, doing well. But look at all the colleges with insignificant numbers of market share. Now I understand 19 and 17 and 21 It's still tuition revenue, but like you heard me say many times before, Matt, and sadly probably many times in the future, I make the analogy to brain surgery. Um, you know, we want somebody doing brain surgery on us that does one a day, one a week, not somebody does one, one a month or one once a year. And the same thing, larger volume majors— this case is accounting— are going to have better programs. Smaller ones are going to have programs that don't have the resources to provide the kind of quality education that students are looking for. And Matt, every other industry assesses market share. In higher education, maybe some colleges look at internal market share. I'm hesitant to believe that, but I'm not aware of any that look at external market share and how they compare across. We have 64 different majors in that app, and we'll add more in 2026, um, because in this period— talk about majors, I start talking about mergers and Rosemont going to Villanova. There will be great utility in having— in colleges having access to what their competitors have in terms of market share. And Matt, you and I are positioned to share that information and to see if colleges actually want to use that to make business-like decisions. It's always comparisons. I'm not going to say it but once, it's always comparisons. But that's what you and I do, Matt. And, and even Villanova, you know, I'm assuming that Villanova likes the land at Rosemont. I think it's, it's a proximate college, as I recall. And that's probably the reason that Rosemont found a merger partner. But what about those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of private colleges that aren't in an urban area, whose chemistry building, whose science building is great, has value as a science building, but has next to no value as a building for anything else? And the value of that college is based on it being a college. And when it's no longer a college, the asset, the value, personal property, the plant property—

remember, Rosemont still had positive unrestricted net assets. So there's still, there's still a benefit, even, you know, even if just a little bit, yeah, our thing, right? And if the accounting's right, they could still come out ahead. Um, whereas some schools wait too long and they go to negative unrestricted or even net.

I've seen that, right?

And yeah, then at that point it's very hard to get a merger done, I'd imagine, because there's just no benefit to taking over a school that has no assets, right? Has no net assets. Um, it's really hard to understand why you would do that. Uh, why not just—

well, Dr. Hendricks, I suggest we get together again next Tuesday and look at a couple more colleges. And of course, I'll promote those over the weekend. If you're watching this video and you want us to take a look at your college, I'll leave some contact information in the show notes. We're happy to do that. And we always take pride in the fact that we are now months in advance of requests for financial reviews, financial and viability reviews of colleges. So, there's concern. There's concern out there in many parts. So, for Dr. Matt Hendricks, I'm Gary Stocker. Thanks as always for making time to watch the College Financial Health Show. We'll be back next week.