The College Financial Health Show for November 19, 2024

Welcome to the show. It's the College Financial Health Show with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker for Tuesday, November 19th, 2024. This is the show. This is the show that talks about the financial health and even the viability of private colleges across the country. How do we get our data? Well, we get it from the data the colleges themselves submit from their audited financial statements. We have a special tool we can tell you about that we bring that together. We use IRS Form 990s, we use the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database, and we bring it all together. And I think in a format that nobody else uses. And who should use this? If you're a college president, a board member, a college leader in any form or fashion, faculty or staff, other stakeholders in a community, even students and their families. If they want to learn more about the financial piece, the financial health of colleges, this is the show to take a look at. Hi, my name is Gary Stocker. I'm the founder of College Viability.

Hi, I'm Matt Hendricks, founder of Perspective Data Science. Today we have 3 schools to look at, take a deep dive. We have Bethany College in West Virginia, Columbia College in Missouri, and Wheaton College in Massachusetts. So like usual, I'm going to start with our benchmarking app that displays data we've scraped, some of the data we scraped out of audited financial statements and give you a sense of the financials. All right. So we'll start with Bethany College. I'm going to spend the most time on Bethany College today just because, well, you'll see why they have the most dire situation. So I'll give you the takeaway from the three. Uh, Bethany College is in serious financial trouble. And my opinion, after looking at everything this morning and, and their audits and everything, I'll show you, you can draw your own conclusions. But my, my opinion is this school probably would have closed several years ago had it not been for, uh, government intervention. Basically, the government, the Attorney General has allowed them to borrow over $20 million from their restricted endowment funds. That's the Attorney General in West Virginia. As far as I understand it, that's not legal in some states, maybe legal in some other states. So it's kind of not clear to me if there's sort of a national standard on that. It doesn't seem like that's the case. So they've borrowed a ton of money from their restricted endowments. They have been basically— we'll double-check this again in the audit, but I'll show you different parts in the audit that you need to focus on if you're interested in this school. As far as I understand, they haven't paid much interest at all on that loan yet. They have started, I think, last year or the year before, but these loans have been since like the 2010s. So anyways, you got that. And then there also is all of their debt is held by the national government, by the USDA, nearly all of it. So Yeah, I think without those, without the federal government, USDA loans, and without the Attorney General decision, it's not clear how this school would be still operating today. And even with that intervention, I'm not certain they'll be operating much longer still. So I'll show you, but again, you can draw your own conclusions. I'll show you the data and walk you through it. Net income margin. And let's back this up. Operating cash flow. It helps if I'm on the right variables. So that's what it looks similar though, right, Gary? Here's net income negative. So there's more. So negative 14, negative 27, negative 37, negative 26, and so on. Always worse since 2019. Always been worse than the closed set. What's been different though is that the schools have remarkable support from the government, which I'll, I'll highlight when I show you the audit. And again, negative cash flow in all those years. And so how are they, how are they actually paying the bills? They're just taking out tons of money from their endowments and, uh, basically plugging the hole that way. But I'll show you that after I get to what I believe I was just showing you— operating revenues. So the operating revenue is down 9% since 2016, and I'll show that on the same Expense, operating expenses. So expenses are up, and this is something that, um, I did make the paid version of the app, and I think this is actually the one of their fundamental problems is they have clearly made an effort to cut costs, but they haven't done enough, right? They're actually not even in the bottom percentile, 25% of schools, in terms of cutting costs. Their costs have gone up 6%, which is Better than more than a quarter of schools out there as far as increase. So you can see that this is a serious effort to cut your costs. These schools down here that have closed, and this is not a serious effort in my opinion. So that's really what I saw on the paid app as well. They just haven't done enough to cut costs. I know if you're working there, it may not seem that, but it may not feel that way because they also have potentially more staff than would be normal. right? So if they get their staff right size, then the pay would be normal. And so there's a lot of things that go into that. But anyway, the, their revenue is down 9%, expenses are up 6%. You can do the math on that. It's 15% net income gap increase since 2016. All right, so here's the endowment. Let's, well, first let's do net tuition revenue. I'll just follow my notes here. Net tuition revenue is down significantly, down 41%. But then there's a quick spike here in 2023. I haven't actually been able to— part of the reason I made the paid app is to see what the heck did they do here to get this spike. I don't know if this is actually real. I need, I need more evidence here because it looks like the enrollment's not rebounding really. FAFSA submissions are still as low as they've ever been, but we'll take a look at that again. So I'm not sure where the spike really came from there. It looked like their net price is really, really low. So all those are working against that, but I'm sure the audit is accurate and everything, but I'm just wondering if this is something that potentially could go back up here in the next 5 years, because that's really what they need. That's what needs to happen to help this school survive. So endowment. All right, so up here, Gary, they had big endowment draws, and then all of a sudden they fell off the map. The reason that happened is that basically all their unrestricted endowment is gone. And so they can't make big endowment draws anymore. So what they're doing instead is writing themselves a loan from the endowment, which is quite a bit different in terms of accounting. It's not like they're just taking the money out of the endowment. They're technically using the endowment assets to invest in the school, in the operations of the school. But so it's recorded as an asset in the endowment table. So basically, uh, long story short, the endowment's— on paper, the endowment, their endowment says is worth like $50 million or about that, uh, but over $20 million of that is a loan to the school, which that money is gone, right? As far as I understand, that money was used to pay payroll years ago and other things, operating expenses. So really, the endowment, if the school closes, the endowment's really immediately down $20 million, right? It's like $30 million, $25 million or so in value. So that's what this looks— this looks weird. They are actually taking a ton of money out of the endowment. It's just in the form of a loan rather than actual draws. And you can see this more clearly if you look at unrestricted net assets. Let me show you this.

Okay.

So unrestricted net assets to expenses, they've gone negative on unrestricted net assets. And we've seen a few, Gary, like that, right? Have gone negative. They went negative long ago in 2017 and have continued to go further and further negative. This is a negative $20 million at this point, and that's all because they borrowed all that money from the endowment. And so, yeah, that's the story there. Let's take a look at their CapEx spending. I can't imagine this would be good. It's actually not terrible. They have— looks like they may have built a building here or something, but Mostly below 1 and then above 1 in 2023, which probably that same $20 million. Yeah. So there's— yeah, there's several times in here that they borrowed from their endowments. So let me, let me show you in the audit. So it's really important that you guys understand how to find this stuff in the audit. And I'm going to take you through a few things that are really important here, page by page. I noted 6 things really important. All right. To get a full picture of what's happening at this school. So here's the negative $21 million in unrestricted restricted net assets. They have $54 million in recorded, uh, restricted net assets, but again, $21 million of that is just a loan to itself. It's not the same as a loan to Apple company or something like that, right? Like, the school dies, that loan immediately also defaults, right? So, uh, it's not, not the same as a normal asset. Okay, so you've got that. I'll show you the losses here. They had negative $4.2 million loss in 2023. And an important thing that I noted here is they just started paying interest on this endowment loan, and they're required by law to pay this even though this loan is to itself. They do need to pay the interest and principal on it. And look at the interest. It's just a million-dollar interest to itself. And they have just started now paying that. But one thing that's interesting in the accounting here is this is not included in operating expenses. I think this should be up here. So really the loss is like $5 million. All right. But I'm not an accountant, so— but I'm pretty sure that was a loan for operations. It should be up in operating expenses. All right. And then page 9, we have—

let me jump in there. If you're from Bethany College and you have some, some, some ways to explain how those— that interest payment is being made, reach out to you, the matter. I'll put the contact information in the show notes and we'll be glad to have you on the show to explain what you're doing with that.

Yeah. Okay. Here's a really important part of your audit. Again, if you're considering Bethany, you're at Bethany, you need to read this. This is from your auditor and it's a going concern section of your audit. This is page 9. All right. Following along. So basically just says everything I just said. We got a $5 million loss. 5 million cash deficits. These are serious problems. It's not clear whether we're going to have sufficient liquidity to meet the current and future obligations, but the management team says that everything's fine. And so they call it— so this is actually outdated. This is interesting. Their going concern clause has probably been copied forward from several audits and not updated. But here we go. This is the updated version. They were given a loan. The Attorney General approved the loan from the endowment, and that's how they've basically been surviving. They say that this loan is $15— it's actually $21 million now, um, so it's not quite updated. But yeah, they have some, uh, things in here saying that, you know, enrollment's improving. I didn't see any evidence of that quite yet in my paid app, but I am a bit behind on that. But I can see this FAFSA submissions for fall 2023, which is fiscal year '24. Those should have been higher, and they're not. So I'm not really clear on where the Maybe just some noise in the FAFSA submissions. I'm not sure, but I'd really like to see another year of data on that. Okay, so definitely read that. And then, so I'm going to whip down and just make sure you see that the reason this school has been able to keep things going really has a lot to do with the government. And that was my conclusion at the beginning that I already said. So the reason is, so The school has $38 million, or really $39 million in debt, and almost all of that is to the USDA. So we've seen this again, Gary. The USDA has written these loans to schools that are in serious trouble financially, and it's not, these are really risky loans that probably a private bank wouldn't have written, right? Which is why they're with the USDA instead of a private bank. All right, so interesting questions here about accountability, use of taxpayer money, and that kind of stuff. I'm not gonna go down those roads, but lots of questions people can ask on that. All right, and then page 20 is where we talk about the actual borrowing. Oh no, here's where you can see, here's where you can see. So remember we have restricted net assets of $55 million. But look at what one of the assets is. One of the biggest line items in their restricted assets is this one: due from operating fund. This is the loan to itself. They have to pay themselves back from the operating fund into the restricted fund about $21 million. That's the loan from the endowment.

And unless they turn things around quickly, that's not likely to happen, right?

No, that's the thing. Like, it's ultimately not diversified at all loan, right? If the school closes, that loan also defaults automatically. So, uh, basically doubles up the risk. Um, all right, so that is 21. Okay, then page 24. Again, follow along with the— if you don't— if you work at Bethany or have a kid there, you need to know these things. Um, all right, so here it is. This is really interesting. It's been more than once that the Attorney General in West Virginia has allowed them to borrow from their endowment. They initially He or she initially authorized $10 million in 2017, it looks like. And then, yeah, they give themselves a really low interest rate, of course. And then in 2020, again, yeah, allows more borrowing up to $15 million. And then somehow their outstanding balance is now above that at $21 million. I don't know if I read that right, but maybe the attorney general is allowed $25 million. Or have they gone above what the Attorney General allowed? I'm not sure. Um, so these are all questions to ask, of course. Uh, then they just took out another— see, yeah, um, yeah, and deferred. So they just started paying interest and, and principal on the loan in 2022. So that's where you saw that line item, about $1 million in interest for a $21 million loan. Yeah, to itself. Okay, so why I go through all this, I just want, again, you guys to see, um, big picture what's happening here. This is a school that was given an opportunity to take restricted money. I just talked to a CFO from a, a different school and he told me that he was not allowed to do that. He was at a struggling school and was not allowed to do that legally, or his legal team thought that the— that wouldn't be legal in his state. Um, but here, West Virginia, clearly legal. You just have to go through the Attorney General and get this approved. So Lots of questions about this. Like, is the Attorney General really looking out for the donors' interests here? I'm not sure. You know, there is the opportunity to take the restricted money and put it into a different school in West Virginia that's actually managed well and sustainable, right? That's another option. So just know that that's out there. So bottom line on West Virginia is— or on Bethany in West Virginia, is so they have, they have about $25 million left, right, of that restricted money. And so in theory, I suppose the Attorney General could continue to let them keep borrowing until it's zero, right? And there's nothing left, in which case that would be end of the road. But so suppose that happens, they have $25 million they can still take, they're looking at $5 million deficits. You can do the math, right, Gary? How many years can they continue to do this until they completely run out of both restricted and unrestricted cash? You're looking at 5 years, and that's a big if, if the Attorney General will continue to allow them to take these loans. I mean, there's really a really short runway for this school, um, and it's really like honestly difficult for me to see how it turns around. Like, as you know, The way they can turn it around is to get their net tuition revenue back up, but that's going to take several years, right? Probably 4 years.

That's what I usually say. Yeah, 4 to 5 years minimum.

Yeah. So they are in a race against that. They got to turn that net tuition revenue around enough to pay all this stuff, including the interest on all the loans and all the principal, and maintain their buildings on top of that, which is a big if, and do all that before they run out of cash. So it's a really, really— it's a big challenge. And, um, I just want to make sure everybody understands the risk at this school. The runway is very, very short. All right, so, and I think that's a really fair, uh, way to put it. Um, if you want more information, I would really encourage you to read— I do this a lot— I read employee reviews on Indeed. I challenge you to go there if you're interested in more information about the school. Go to Indeed and read the reviews by the employees that have worked and continue to work at Bethany College, and you get a lot more information about what's happening on the ground there.

I did not know— I did not know that. That's a good idea.

Yeah, uh, actually have an AI that can like aggregate all of this stuff and summarize like the key points that people are bringing up. And I'll just say some of the things they bring up is high turnover of staff, low pay, no benefits, all of the nightmare scenarios, um, that you might expect at a school that's struggling financially. But take, take a look and see what you think. Okay, the next two schools I'm not going to spend as much time on, um, because they— while they both have financial issues, they both have massive runways. So Columbia College in Missouri has, um, losses recently, but they have a huge unrestricted endowment, uh, to draw on. They have almost $200 million in unrestricted net assets to draw on. And of course, that's shrinking right now because of their deficits. So they don't want to do this very long, but in theory they could do this for a lot longer than Bethany can, right? They can go for decades, where Bethany maybe has— like I said, the math looks like 5 years at a max for them. Um, oh, by the way, what do you think HLC says about Bethany College in West Virginia, Gary?

Let me see, uh, Matt. Probably they say they have no issues whatsoever. God bless you and go get them.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. Go to their website, though. You can see they have pretty much a clean bill of health other than they need to submit an interim report to HLC. Again, talked about this many, many times on the show.

Yep.

There's just not much of a—

not good, man.

Right. So I'm not going to go down that road again right now. But yeah, so Columbia College, Wheaton College is similar. They don't have quite as much in unrestricted assets, but still over $100 million. Their cash deficit was only $2.5 million last year. So you can, and you can do the math again, they can go for like 50 years that way and, and, and survive. I mean, it's not like they're— they are not sustainable right now, but they could go a long time like this. So let me show you that, and I'll highlight a few things, a couple things. Uh, wait, both of these schools are using their endowment to basically, uh— well, actually, no, that's not— Columbia College is using their endowment to to float them during all of this. Uh, Wheaton is taking a little bit different approach. They are borrowing more money and relying on some cash reserves that they had from previous, uh, years with a big surplus. So I'll show you that. Columbia College in Missouri. All right, so here's the— where's the point I just mentioned? Their endowment draws are massive right now, and that's not good for their endowment. And I'll show you that result, but Let's go to net income margin, show you the losses first. So again, Columbia College struggling right now, -36%, -23%, and their 2024 number was out and I believe it was the same, about -23% or so. So they're again over here, not good. And the way that they're able to pay the bills then is they're taking these massive endowment draws in '22, '23. And I did double-check this for 2024, and it's 18% draw. So they're again like up here. All right, so massive, massive draws to cover those deficits. And they're big deficits, right? I just showed you those are really big net income losses. Um, and the, the consequence of that, of course, is that your endowment won't grow as fast as it should, which means you're going to fall behind. And that's happening now at Columbia College. So the end of 2023, their endowment value was up by 8.4%. Now it's zero, basically. They took another huge draw in 2024. So just to give you the numbers, in 2016, back here, their endowment value was $146.7 million. In 2024, A point I don't have yet. It was 146.7. Now it's 147.2. So it has barely changed over this period where, and honestly, when I add 24, this is probably going to be up here. Most schools are looking at a 50% gain over that same period.

So, and Matt, look how closely that mimics the closed college trend.

Yeah, a big missed opportunity for them. Of course, I mean, Obviously you need to balance your budget or pay your bills, but yeah, they got to get the budget balanced as soon as possible, otherwise this endowment will continue to shrink and they'll be in a bad, bad place in 5 years because of that. All right, uh, let me show you Wheaton then, and then we'll go on since I spent so much time on Bethany. I think is a fascinating case. Wheaton College in Massachusetts. I'll show you the loss Their loss is not as bad as Columbia, right? In fact, they had a positive— it's probably the COVID relief funds came in a bit late for them, but then they had a loss when those turned off. 11% loss, right? And you can see their endowment has actually grown here pretty normally, although their endowment draws are bigger than normal. I'll show you. I don't think it's related to their finances because they've always been big. They just may not know that they're big. Um, so their endowments grow by 39%, which is not— I mean, they may think that's really good, but that's again below the median by a pretty big margin. And the reason for that is their draws are too big, appropriated. You can see their draws have always been big, Gary. Yeah, um, I don't know, they may, they may not know. All right, again, this is the reason why you need to benchmark, right? Um, that's a significant difference if you do that 8 years in a row, right?

And that's where their draw is among the highest in the country if you look at that 75th percentile mark.

Yeah, yeah, they're in the top 25% of schools in terms of percent drawn.

That's not a good thing, right?

Yeah, I can see being up there once in a while but not every year. Yeah, if you know anything about, uh, like how compounding happens, just small differences can, can mean massive differences in 8 years, right? All right. So I was going to show you the main way it looks like. So it's a little bit different strategy here. Show you their liabilities. So the way that they've been dealing with their budget deficit, it looks like they're, they're borrowing more rather than changing their endowment draws. You saw that big spike for Columbia. Theirs has always been high and it's still high and it's, you know, it's higher than it's ever been for them, but they've always been high. Um, mainly what they're doing is, is borrowing. Uh, so they have a big increase in liabilities relative to their revenues. And I think their— if I show you just their liabilities total— yeah, their liabilities are up almost double what they were in 2016. So then— and by the way, that their liability to revenue was in the top 25%, so they have a really high debt-to-income ratio. That's one way to think about it. I think everybody's familiar with that basically from your own credit score, right? That's income ratio is really important. So that's how they've been dealing with it. Not necessarily drawing more money, which— but they're also trying too much. So lots of things to tweak there at Wheaton, right? Pull that endowment drawdown, balance the budget, pay down the debt. Right. A lot of things to work on. But again, really, really long runways for both of these schools. I'm not concerned about them closing. In the next 10 years, um, they're easily safe at least for the next 10 years. But I'll stop there, Gary, and I'll pass it back to you.

No, just a couple questions, Matt, when you talk about that, and I'll talk about the last point that you made. You frequently reference, not in only today's show but in almost all of our shows, balance the budget. Well, of course, you and I know that's much easier said than done. That really, on almost all cases, relies on the need to increase net tuition revenue. And in the market that we're in, when there's too many colleges And too many college seats and not enough students willing to pay for them. That's a, that's a really difficult challenge. So when we talk about balancing the budget, that's, that may not happen in most of these cases. Do you think?

Yeah. So I, I mean, I'm much more optimistic than most. I mean, I, I've seen schools cut a lot of expenses, right? In fact, too many expenses. It can be done. You just have to do it. And it's not fun. And I see why a lot of schools don't want to do it and boards Schools drag their feet, but you gotta do it. It's your job, right? And yeah, it sucks, but you gotta do it. And particularly with the case of Bethany, like I said, I showed their spending has gone up. That's not normal for a school that's like facing an existential threat, right? Normal for a school that's gonna close is they are very serious about cutting costs. And I don't see that at Bethany right now. You can see it in their numbers. Their expenses are up. 6% since 2016. That's not a normal response. Um, and I think, like I said, I made the paid app. I didn't show you, but I did see some areas, um, that looked like they were very low-hanging fruit to cut expenses that they may not have thought about before, um, which is the, again, the benefit of getting that.

That maybe we're in an era where, where to survive you have to shrink. And that's going to be difficult for lots of reasons, and we won't go into those today. And I'm going to go back to Wheaton. You had mentioned going concern. And I'm guessing that much of our audience is familiar with the concept of going concern. And for Bethany MADD, it looks like it was there for quite a while. Going concern is accountant speak for saying, I don't know that you're going to make it in the next year. That's an important qualification. And if a college has that year after year, That's a really big confirmatory professional opinion of what you said on your own. This college is in really, really deep trouble.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. That's why I wanted to go through, show a few pages in the audit. The audits are really long documents and they can be— when I was first reading them, I can say I was like intimidated and really know what to look for. But it's a skill that anybody can pick up. And I was just showing you some key spots. But yeah, you look at these things, ask questions. Um, you mean really, if you're working at Bethany, you don't have a very long runway. This plan needs to be, you need a balanced budget like now. Right. And, um, not clear that that's going to happen.

Well, you know, what we usually do in the show is that we look at the finances that Matt does, and the data is from 2016 to 2023. And Matt, I understand 2024 is coming out soon. This may be the only source where you can get data so recently. Most, for whatever reason, most higher education data, Matt, is a year or two old. And now you're looking at data that may be, what, 90 days old, Matt? Something like that for the 2024 audited financials that ended on June 30th of this year. So if you're looking for up-to-date information, this is the place to go. And so Matt talks about the finances. Um, we take a look at history also with the College Viability App, and we're looking at the executive analysis version for private colleges. You can see I've got the 3 colleges up here. We look at some different things than Matt talks about, but we really— what we see week in and week out, Matt, is what I talk about really mimics what you've talked about, just in a different context. And you can see on the right-hand side that of these two colleges, Columbia College has suffered significant enrollment losses. Bethany College is a smaller college, not as big either as a gross number or percentage. And Wheaton has been able to essentially stay flat over the course of 8 years. They have brought in about 10 students on average per year. Matt says bad budget balance the budget difficult to do when your enrollment is going down. And right away from that, let's take a look at tuition and fees. And this is not on Matt's app, but look at all 3 colleges here in 8 years. Each of the 3 has had substantial losses in terms of gross dollars and even in percentages. You can see the percentages now. That's not easy to overcome. And Matt, you've heard me make this argument before. If you've got an 8-year trend Matt, if it's a good trend, enrollment grows, enrollment shrinks, or a bad trend, it's tough to turn it around in one year. And again, I'm going to reinforce what you and I always talk about. If the trend is bad, it takes at least— this is a Matt Hendricks concept— takes at least 4 years, probably more than that, to get that done. And I'm riding that horse until it dies because you're right, you just can't turn this stuff around. And you know, I messed up, Matt. I went to tuition and fees first. Where should I have gone next?

Grad rates.

You know, graduation rates, because ladies and gentlemen, when we talk about going to college, it is to graduate. It is not to take courses. And while one of the three colleges does an exceptionally good job— Wheaton does a really, really good job. Our compliments. I'll speak on Matt's behalf and mine. 76 out of 100 graduate. Way, way, way above what we see across almost, almost all colleges. Not all colleges. But then look at Bethany and Columbia. And both— neither can even come even close, Matt, to graduating half of their students in 4 years. Now, you've heard me use the term before— it's a, it's a coin toss college. If you can't graduate at least half your students, it's a coin toss for obvious reasons. If you can't graduate at least 40% of your students— and look at the numbers for the last 8 years for Bethany in West Virginia and Columbia in Missouri, Matt— I really question whether you're a legitimate college in the context of providing graduates, developing graduates. I think you're more of a tuition collection agency than a college, Matt, if you can't graduate your students. And there may be those who take issue with that. You're welcome to join us on the show, drop me a note, say you'd like to refute that. It's going to be tough, but we'll certainly give you time on this show to talk about that. Let's look also at the endowment value, and Matt touched on that briefly. And again, we look at the 3 colleges here And we can see for each of the 3 that over the 8 years it's changed in the, in the IPEDS data reporting. But as Matt showed you for Bethany, this is not an actual reflection because of the, the endowment value of Bethany.

Money that Bethany is reporting there is a loan to itself, which that cash is out of the accounts, right? It's gone. It's just there on paper.

Yeah. And that's why this is important. It doesn't happen every week, but it happens regularly enough that when we look at this number, Matt, we have to qualify it as be careful because this the financial piece that Matt Hendricks always does. It really provides the most recent data. IPEDS stuff is, is submitted by the college but in a different context, in a different format than it does to the audited financial statements. The IPEDS stuff isn't really audited, Matt, in a professional sense. I'm sure the IPEDS folks take a look at it, but that's not really the case in terms of a professional audit. And then we can look at retention for these three. And again, not awful. Wheaton's doing well. Bethany, not bad. Interestingly, that's gone up quite a bit over the last 8 years. 62% at Columbia College, that's quite a bit of turnover. That's quite a few students starting at Columbia and for whatever reason saying no más, no more, and either ending their college education or taking that somewhere else. And of course, each week we always like to look at context, and context in this case is the programs. And the National Center for Education Statistics, NCES, provides data on program completions. And we're looking at the 2025 version of the College Viability Program Completion app for our 3 colleges. We always start with biology. I'm not going to go through all of these, but these are the 13 or 14 programs that are most common that we have in the app. And you can see who's comparatively strong and who's comparatively weak in each of these disciplines over here. We also like to take a look at business because many colleges focus on that. And again, you can see Columbia College, Matt, is a business school. Its prime purpose is clearly business school. Nothing wrong with that. They've made that strategic decision. And as you'll see in a minute when I show the profile for each of the three colleges, um, they've made that decision not only on the undergraduate level but on the graduate level as well. And let's do that. Let's take a look then at Columbia. We'll just start with them on top. I'm going to drill through and show you a profile of all the undergraduate bachelor degrees and graduate degrees. And of course, you can pause the video to look at this more closely. Business— look at business on the undergrad level. Look at liberal arts, Matt. That was fascinating to me. I have not seen that high of a number as a percentage before. And even public admin, that's a big number. So clearly Columbia College has chosen a focus. They've had some issues with that focus, but again, it's their decision. There's nothing wrong with those decisions, but they really are a business school and interestingly focused on liberal arts. And you can see again on the graduate side, they really have only a decent focus on business, a little bit on education. And again, pause this video to get a better, better look at what's going on. Let's take a look at Wheaton in Massachusetts. And of course there's also Wheaton College, I think, in Illinois, is why we differentiate that. And they don't participate in graduate programs. That's a business decision, nothing wrong with that. And you can get a comparative profile. And Matt, I'll tell you that the 2025 version of the college viability Program Completion app— I worked on that late last night— is going to include market share. So we could actually look at a market share comparison of these 3 colleges to see if they were to come together— and we will see more consolidation in the coming years— who's stronger in what in terms of market share. So that'd be part of the 2025 College Viability Program Completion app. And then lastly, Matt, let's look at Bethany College. And they are really, really weak in everything, and that's not going to surprise anybody. I can pause the video, look at the numbers. Psychology— if there's a strength, that's what it is in terms of raw numbers. Clearly don't complete in graduate programs. Again, that's a business decision. Man, in my mind, this kind of reflects what we've been talking about for the last 40 minutes. For Bethany College anyway, they don't bring a lot of consequence to either the academic or the business piece of what's going on. And so, Matt, we've looked at 3 colleges today, and Bethany, of course, we spent a lot of time on. Uh, maybe in another show we do the paid apps, we can go into more depth on Bethany College. But we've got 3 colleges struggling, one probably not going to make it. That's looking at the data. You and I will never say a college is going to close, but you can look at the data and say, hey, be careful. And you do a particularly good job of saying to faculty and staff and the community, take a look at this stuff. And Matt, we do this week in and week out, and we'll continue to do that because it is, it's the Moneyball era. And I talk about this, we close the show every week, Matt, with referencing that this is where data entrepreneurs, higher ed data entrepreneurs like you and I and many others, look at the data just like they started with baseball 20-some-odd years ago and say, "Hey, you're not hitting as many home runs as used to. You're striking out more often than usual than you should be." as a weak comparison to baseball and colleges, but I had to give it a shot. And if you're ignoring this, that's fine. You do that at your own risk, whether you're faculty, college leaders, college boards, or even students and families, because this is a consolidating market. And consolidation, Matt, as you and I both know, includes closures, and there will be many, many more. And consolidation will also include mergers and consolidations and other forms, and that will take place in the coming months and years as well. So we do this one thing.

Yeah, one more thing about— so I think that the main takeaway that— I mean, I'm just like stuck on this idea that if you look on a map, um, Bethany College is really close to Pittsburgh. I mean, um, and didn't— wasn't the College of the Arts in Pittsburgh?

Philadelphia. Philadelphia.

Okay. Anyway, the interesting thing is That college closed, I believe, without ever borrowing any money from its restricted endowment. And they had a lot of restricted endowment funds. And here's a school not very far away in West Virginia that has been surviving for, it looks like, at least 8 years on borrowed money from restricted endowment. So, I mean, if the attorney generals are going to let that happen, definitely use it. I mean, that might have been a lever that they could have pulled. you know, in Philadelphia. Although I'm not sure, maybe we should bring a legal expert on. Maybe there's a serious difference between what the attorney general in Pennsylvania views the borrowing of restricted endowment funds versus what the attorney general in West Virginia thinks. Right. This is a really interesting question because ideally everybody would have similar rules, right?

I mean, yeah, right. Ideally, ideally.

Yeah. So this could be a serious lever if you're— I mean, honestly, I want you to balance the budget first, but you may not have to close, you know, even if all of your unrestricted endowment fund is gone. You can maybe ask the attorney general to borrow money. Yeah. I mean, certainly we've seen that in New Jersey and now West Virginia and probably other states that I didn't really pay attention to, but now we need to. There could be serious differences in how those laws are enforced across states. So if you, if you know something about that, reach out to me. I want to learn more about this.

Good. Well, Matt and I have decided to do best-of shows for the next two Tuesdays, so we'll be back with the live show on Tuesday, December 10th. We'll continue doing 3 colleges per week. We're gonna add some different twists and turns as we go forward with the show. Matt, it's always a pleasure. So speaking for Matt Hendricks, I'm Gary Stocker. Thanks as always for making time to join us and listen to the show. We'll be back with live shows again on Tuesday, December 10th. We'll look forward to talking then.