The College Financial Health Show for December 17, 2024 with Christian Brother U and Jacksonville U

It's Tuesday, December 17th, 2024. And of course, it's time for the show, our weekly college financial health show with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker, where we review the financial health and even the viability of private colleges throughout the United States. Matt, you and I are finishing up just, believe it or not, Matt, just our 5th month doing the weekly show and have reviewed the financial health and viability of more than 50 private colleges. And I guess to open up the show today, Matt, what, what have you learned from the show and what, and the reactions? And there are many, the reactions that we're getting.

So I'll start with, uh, yeah, this time Sloan has been, it's been great. Um, the things that stand out to me is one is obviously we've seen a lot of schools that are in financial trouble. Um, and one thing that's a bit shocking to me and probably some of our viewers is that, you know, some of these schools, it appears they have some easy policy levers that they just may not know about. Again, which is the power of data. It just makes it very clear and obvious what levers you have and what you might try pulling. So yeah, we have schools on the other end as well. We have schools that are doing well and appear to be pulling all of the right policy levers, schools that we want to learn more about what strategies they use, like Haverford College, for example, we talked about a few weeks ago that they were able to grow net tuition revenue and grow their price. And enrollment all at the same time. Really interesting result and another way to learn from data. Another thing we're seeing a lot is, is both inaction from some accrediting agencies in terms of using their policy levers, which is, you know, signaling to the public that there's a potential problem here, putting the school on probation, really minor things they can do to help to both sort of push these schools in the right direction and help protect the public. They're not using it consistently or often enough. And you're going to see that again today. It's really inconsistent. And I think that's a problem. Yeah. And basically, my sense is that the school is having a big impact. We're getting a lot of feedback, people wanting us to look at other schools, their schools, talking about how administrators are responding to our shows. That's all great. And that's really the point of the show. It's not— I'm not in this to get anybody fired or anything like that. I just want people to ask questions, ask smart questions that are based in facts, based on data, and figure out why, you know, why does your school look weird in this particular area? Do we have a problem? Do we have a data reporting issue? All of those are important to figure out.

So, Dr. Hendricks, what are the two colleges we are reviewing today? And what's your quick assessment of each?

Yeah, so we have two schools. My sense, my assessment is both of these schools are, although they're not perfect financially, they're doing better than most that we've looked at on this. Most of the really dire cases, we have Christian Brothers University, which is on financial probation from its accreditor. And this is the first one I believe that we looked at that has accrediting agency SACS COC. We've looked at HLC accreditors quite a bit and Middle States. This one's different. The school's on probation. And frankly, I think the school's in much better financial shape than many of the schools that we've seen that are on probation from HLC and Middle States. So that's an interesting question to ask. Why, why is there inconsistency? Is SACSCOC just more rigorous financially? I agree with their assessment. In fact, but I also think that it's time for them to come off. So I'll show you that. I'll show you the reason why they, they might deserve to come off of probation. Second one is Jacksonville University in Florida. Again, the school is, I think, financially sound. My sense is that the school's grown really fast, right? So they've grown their expenses by over 50% or about 50% since 2016, which is very, very fast. Expense growth. Their revenue has grown, but not quite so fast. In fact, it took like a bit of a pause last year and is causing problems for them now with their bondholders. They have a covenant that they've now violated just out of the blue in 2024 because of the pullback in the revenue. And it's caused some media stir. I saw that there were a few articles on this. I think it was Wall Street Journal even that was covering it, or maybe Forbes.

I got a call from a local reporter to ask about that, too.

Yeah. Okay. So I guess my assessment is I don't think there's really a reason to worry too much about the school. They have massive room to cut costs. They just haven't done it yet. And so I think they'll quite easily get back in compliance with their bond covenant.

So, Matt, show us that.

I'll show you that. Yeah, I'll show you why. Why I believe that. So starting with Christian Brothers. Yes. Okay. So here's Christian Brothers there in Tennessee. And like I said, this school is on financial probation. I didn't look at when they actually went on it, but basically here's the story. They had many years of negative net income margins. So you can see 2018, 2019, negative in 2020, negative in 2021, '22, '23. So 6 straight years of negative net income definitely should be on probation. In fact, that's great that SAC CoC did that. I really like. This accrediting agency for doing that, because I think the reason is it's good for the school to do this, right? It doesn't kill the school, it just gets them to focus, right? And that's exactly what they did. It looks— it appears like, uh, they have focused and got their balanced budget by 2024. Um, so that's good. Their first— their first positive net income margin in 7 years. That's excellent. Um, so let's take a look at what they did, if it was a revenue side or expense side in terms of balancing the budget. So let's show you the operating. By the way, before I move on, look at their cash flow went positive too. Excellent. All right. So it was negative for 3 consecutive years. Again, just automatic to me to be on probation. When you do that, you have to get this positive, of course, adjusting for your endowment draws and stuff like that. All right, let's show operating revenue. Operating revenue versus costs, expenses. Okay, so you can see what they did, uh, in 2024. We have a surge in operating revenue. Their operating revenue goes from up about 15%, which is about the median, right? The revenues actually look quite good. Um, the— you can see the issue that they had was their expenses were growing fast, about as fast as Well, faster than 75% of schools in the country up to 2022, and they tapered that back. So probably SAC CoC said, hey, you guys have a problem, and they've responded by not increasing their expenses, although they haven't really cut them, which is, I think, an issue. They can still cut and they just haven't done it yet. But they have increased their revenue. So they got their revenue to go from 15% positive since 2016 to up to 36%. That's excellent. So I guess there's a question as to, I'll show you the motivation for my next question is whether that revenue growth there, I mean, really, they balance the budget just by a surge in revenue, right, and holding costs constant. And I think, like I said, there's a lot they can do to cut costs. Those costs are still growth. That cost growth is still way above the median of every school since 2016. But here's the interesting thing to look at net tuition revenue. Their net tuition revenue has not surged. In fact, it's down 7%, uh, slightly below the median since 2016. So the thing I worry about is that perhaps the way they surged revenue in '24 is not really sustainable. Uh, could be kind of a one-time shot, and I suspect that may be the case. And let me show you why, uh, on their audits. Let me pull up the right audits here. This is Christian Brothers and Christian Brothers. Okay, so this is Christian Brothers' statement of activities in 2023. I hope that's zoomed in enough for you guys.

I can zoom in.

Okay, I'll zoom it in a little bit. Here's 2024. Here's 2023. So notice their net tuition revenue is $24 million last year, 2024, this year really, and still the same. So no change in net tuition revenue. The big change here you can see across the screen is They have a surge in unrestricted gifts. It went from $6.2 million to $10.3 million. Um, so that's excellent. They're getting a surge in gifts. And not only that, the gifts are unrestricted. And they noticed they had a $4 million restricted gift, uh, contribution back here. Um, this is going to show up, I believe a lot of these gifts that were given in '23 were released in '24. Because what happens here is their net assets released from restriction is $5 million in 2023, and it's $8 million in, $8.5 million in 2024. So basically what happened, long story short, revenues went up $7 million.

Okay.

Yeah. And, and most of it came from increase in unrestricted gifts and then releasing previously restricted gifts. Uh, and you see where I'm going with that, Gary, right? I do.

Yeah.

Those can bounce around a lot. You could have had like a really successful campaign and alumni gave a bunch, but are they going to give a bunch next year? and the year after and the year after. That's what needs to happen. Um, so I wonder if this is sustainable. And if I was that SAC COC, that's the question I'd be asking. Is this revenue growth sustainable? And notice the, the issue that I have here is their expenses really haven't changed. And that's a problem. I think, like I said, their expenses have grown quite a bit. They're at $46.8 million, $46.9 million in '23. They're at $46.8 million in 2023. 24. So really no change. And I did see a press— some news article. I'll just show you another thing you can see on the audit. One of the things they said they were going to do is cut, uh, contractor spend. And so I was curious because you can kind of see that here. There's a line here in the functional expense called contracted services, and they didn't— they didn't really cut it. So it's $5.8 million in 2023. Contracted services actually went up in 2024 to $6 million. So they didn't really do what they said. I think they still need to cut costs, right? Because I suspect these revenue bumps—

So Matt, just to jump in for a second, the strategic compass that we have available would actually let the leadership at Christian Brothers University look at those consulting contracts to see how they compare to their data peers that you put together for them.

Yeah, exactly. And not only that, so one thing that it'll do is it'll identify what your contracts are, at least the top 5. And compare those prices to other— like, one thing that's powerful is that most of the top 5 contractors are shared across schools, right?

The—

usually the top one is the food service contract, right? So you have a lot of data, uh, find other schools that are similar, the peer set, which we do in the Strategic Compass, and then say, okay, all these other schools are similar to us, what are they paying for food service versus what we're paying? And we've seen massive disparities, right? Yes, just last week have the same number of kids, the same percentage of kids living on campus, but the, for whatever reason, food service contracts can vary by like 50% or up to 100%. That's a huge potential cost savings. Again, it's about priorities, right? I mean, maybe that more expensive food service contract is great, your students love it, but are they really coming to your school to get good food? I don't think so. And that shouldn't be what your mission's about. Right. So yeah, I mean, these are easy decisions, especially when you have financial problems.

Yeah.

You can have fancy food if your, your finances are solid. That's cool. But if they're not, I mean, these are easy places to cut that are not mission-centric, right? And it gives you leverage, right? You can just show the data to your vendor and say, hey, why is the school right down the street that has the same setup as us paying way less at this vendor? Either you match this vendor or we're going to go to that vendor. Really easy stuff, right?

And you know, Matt, a shameless plug, the cost of the, of the Strategic Compass is much, much, much less than what you would save by just fixing the pricing on one vendor.

Exactly, exactly. Like we said, we saw last week with Bethany, you know, it may, it may be the case that Bethany has more students living on campus, but again, you can look, there were schools that were double their size with 80% of kids living on campus that had a lower food service contract. I mean, you can't, you can't, I mean, maybe there's, you know, some room there. Maybe it's not exactly $1.7 million that they can save, but it's probably close, right? So let's, let's get real here with these numbers. Okay. So, yeah, so basically my, my, my assessment here, and I think you, you see why I make that assessment, right? You may not agree with me, but you can see why I'm saying that. Their expenses are up a lot, right? And they really haven't, haven't cut them. I think they should cut them at least, you know, down to the median and get a sustainable balanced budget that way because I worry about that revenue jump, whether it's sustainable or not. Let me see what else is interesting here. Oh, their endowment is underperforming. Pretty common for schools that have had— whoops, wrong thing— schools that have financial issues, as we've seen in the past. They'll sort of pillage their endowments. Yeah. You know, they, they pulled almost 12% out of it in 2023. And unfortunately, that just means their endowment's going to grow slower. And you can see the big drop here in '23 because of that. So their endowment's grown by 32% from 2016 to 2024. By the way, this is 2024 data. Both schools we're going to look at today, we have 2024 data. We have a lot of 2024 data now, over 300 schools.

Of course, you know, those shameless plugs will continue. To the best of our knowledge, nobody else has 2024 data in late 2024. So Matt, keep going.

So this is a fiscal year that just ended, right? So most of these schools don't even have this data like in front of their boards quite yet. I mean, maybe they, well, I guess they do, but the faculty probably hasn't seen it. Definitely use this. This is free, right? So, so here's the deal. The, the median endowment has grown by almost 60% since 2017. 16 up to 2024, and they're at 32%, so about half, uh, what the normal growth would have been. And it's mostly because of this big draw right here. Um, okay, so what else was interesting here? I, I make sure that I hit all of the important things. So they, they don't have negative unrestricted net assets like we've seen. So I wanted to make sure that you guys see we've, we've got schools that have negative unrestricted net assets borrowed half of their endowment, massive losses, never getting any gains in net income, positive net income, and they're not on probation, right? HLC, Middle States just letting them go. Here's SAC CoC hitting this school with probation when they don't have any of that, and they now have a positive net income. I think it's time to take them off probation just to be fair to, you know, they're getting a much, in my opinion, much more tough love dealing from SAC CoC, which is great. I think that's good for them in the long run, but I think maybe let them off. Yeah, I don't see— I'll just show you too that they, during the periods that they had financial stress, and again, another reason I put them on probation, and they're just not keeping up with their depreciation on their capital stock. So we see it all the time.

And again, just like you said, many of those colleges are not getting any kind of pushback from their creditors.

Yeah. And honestly, so here's a story. Like, you can look at this if you're HLC or Middle States, say, hey, we put the school on probation. We didn't kill it, right? In fact, we may have helped it. That's the sort of counterintuitive thing. And I think HLC would benefit their members by being more tough. If you just let them continue on this path without any, you know, real repercussions, they'll just continue, right? I mean, that's silly. That's the problem. All right. So that, Gary, I think is Jackson. That is not Jacksonville. That's Christian Brothers.

That was Christian Brothers. Yeah. So, you know, Matt, you might think that our first ad for the College Financial Health Advanced Compass would be for college presidents or CFOs or even boards of trustees, but it's not. Hi, I'm Gary Stark, of course, and today's message is really for political and community leaders. I'm introducing to you the Perspective Data Science Advanced Compass, the essential tool for community leaders. Stay informed when your local colleges face financial distress or are at risk of closing. Protect your community by staying ahead of potential economic, negative economic impacts from college financial challenges in your area. Perspective Data Science provides actionable insights, and we can show them to you, to help you advocate for students, support affected employees, and help your college and your community plan for the future. Be the first to know and to lead your community through the many, many changes taking place in higher education throughout the country with confidence and consistency. Matt, what's our second college for today?

Yeah, now we're looking at Jacksonville, uh, Jacksonville University in Florida. And as I mentioned at the outset, the school just violated a bond covenant, and, uh, the president and other administrators are in damage control. Um, let me, uh, let me start by showing you what bond covenant they broke. Um, I have the background here on all of that. So Jacksonville is this guy and this guy. Okay, so they have several bond covenants, but one of them is related to debt service. Basically, the idea is that they're operating, they're, they're earning means before interest, depreciation, and amortization, needs to be enough to cover their debt payments. That's basically what the covenant is. And so how they calculate it is really simple. You just take the unrestricted revenue, which we always— it's in the compass, as I'll show you in a second. They lost $13.8 million in fiscal year 2024. And then they take that $13.8 million, which is here, and then they add back in interest, depreciation, and amortization to get their EBITDA, which is $4.3 million. Basically, the covenant says that that, that number, which is currently $4.3 million, has to be enough to cover their debt payments, the interest and principal payments on their debt, which is $10.5 million. and you can see it's not enough now. They're at $3.3 million and they need to have $10.5 million. So there's the bond covenant violation, and they did not violate last year. Their EBITDA last year was $22 million. Their debt service was $11.5 million. Okay, really simple. Um, but I think it's a little bit overblown because this school, as I'll show you, they've been doing just fine until this, this year. So I think this bond covenant is actually really restrictive. Because even slight variations in their revenue is going to potentially trigger this covenant. So I suspect they may be able to negotiate this with their bondholders and get this covenant changed, or it may not be much of an issue at the end of the day, but I'll show you why I think this school is doing fine. Well, not perfect, but certainly will weather this storm, I think. So Jacksonville University in Florida. Actually, let me refresh this. So I've got the—

you're looking at the, at the private college version of the free Compass that Matt is showing you right now.

Yeah, everything's free right now, but we're going to make it, you know, we're going to segment it because I have a lot more data to share. Yeah, but I don't want to overwhelm people. Um, so it's going to be a nice niche to have an easier version and a more advanced version. So here's the net income, and notice they did— they have had some years with negative net income, but it hasn't been dire. Their cash flow has been positive, so easily covering their EBITDA. Going to be really close to that cash flow number because you're adding back in depreciation, for example. So they've never had an issue with their bond covenant. In fact, the bond covenant probably didn't start until 2019 anyway. But you can see all of a sudden in 2024, things go pear-shaped for them. And I'll show you, I can show you exactly what happens here. But I think the story will become clear. Basically, what I believe when I looked at the audit, they lost a bunch of grant revenue. But that's not really, you know, super relevant. But basically, I'll show you the expenses and revenues and you'll see that the picture for this school is a lot rosier. Actually, let me show you net tuition first. So here's one of the reasons I think the school will be just fine. They don't have the problem that most schools have. Schools have that their net tuition revenue is falling. Their net tuition revenue is top 25% in the country in terms of growth. They're at plus 33%. If I'm a bondholder, I'm going to say, okay, our covenant is kind of crazy. Maybe not those exact words, but I mean, we'll be lenient with this violation. We're not going to call the debt or anything like that. So here's revenue, total operating revenue. And you can see they just have a hiccup here. The revenue has been growing quite well, up 30% up to 2023, but then all of a sudden it just drops off. And I believe I looked back, it's not super important, but it's not net tuition revenue why this falls off. I think grant income, their auxiliary revenue looks excellent as well. So they just lost some grants that were pretty big, um, and so it may not be a— maybe just sort of a transitory thing. But if it isn't, who cares? Because I'll show you their expenses. They have a lot of room to cut expenses. Their operating expenses are up almost 50% since 2016, and that's— that puts them probably in the top 10% of all schools in the country. They have a lot of room to cut costs.

Yeah, that's not a good thing.

Yeah, I mean, they have a lot of room to cut costs, right? It's just a matter of doing it. And I know nobody wants to cut costs. The school's growing and they probably don't want to, you know, take a pause on the growth. But you've got this option. The bondholders can just say, hey, we'll be more lenient, just cut some costs, get back in the covenant or whatever. It's going to be fine. I think this school will make it through just fine. Um, let's see their endowments. Let's take a look at the endowments. I think the rest was just kind of details if I remember right. Their endowment appropriations look normal. Let's see if they're in— oh, they do have a very— so here's the thing, I think the reason they have, uh, these strict covenants, they don't have a big endowment. They have a tiny endowment compared to their expenses. And also let me show you their liabilities relative to revenue. And this is probably— this is smart on the bondholders' part. You see this, Gary? This is their liabilities relative to their revenue, and it's like off the charts, right? Yeah, 0.6 times higher than their revenue. And that's certainly, I'm sure, a reason for the stricter bond covenants. Uh, they're worried, you know, this school goes off the rails, they don't have a runway, right? They have massive liabilities. They have to keep their revenue high enough to service all of this debt. And so that's probably why that covenant's in there.

Um, so Matt, if Jacksonville University were to invest in the Strategic Compass, would that be a resource to help them get those liabilities under control better?

Yeah, not necessarily the liabilities, but certainly the expenses. Yeah, uh, she probably might mute that one, Gary. Probably comes. Got it. Um, but yeah, so their expenses are up almost 50%, right? So The, what the, what the strategic compass will show probably is the, make it really obvious what areas the expenses are higher than normal, um, and where they've grown quite a bit. And those would probably be the areas you'd want to dig deeper and figure out, you know, okay, can we do without some of these? They may have massive contractor growth too. That's common. Massive staffing growth. The strategic compass will show them, you know, generally which occupation groups, which departments to look at for right size. Yeah. Yeah, but other than that, I don't see huge issues here. So again, my basic takeaway with both of these schools is one's got a bond covenant violation that's been in the media. I think it's a bit overblown. I tend to side with the president and say, you know, the school's going to be just fine. I think that's true. Although they have had issues with deficits in the past, I think it's easy for them to get back to a balanced budget. They just need to do it right, and I think by fiscal year 2025, they'll do that. The other school is on a, a probation with their creditor, and I think it's time for them to come off. They have a positive net income, although there's questions as to whether it's sustainable. They need to cut costs a bit more in my assessment. But I'll pass it back to you, Gary. That's the, my take.

Okay. And so as always, you know, I, I brought up our, our two colleges for today. And again, the data that we look at both in Matt's part of the show and in mine comes from the colleges themselves. The colleges, some colleges for sure, may not like what they see, but they submitted the data. It's data that is from them. We're only providing it in the easy-to-view, easy-to-compare format. And again, let's take a look at our two colleges. I always start off with enrollment, and the enrollment is really not bad. Again, these are both two colleges that stand out from many MAT that we look at. The enrollment over the last 8 years in the 2024 Private College Viability App for Executive Analysis From 2015 to 2022, that's the last reported data, although 2023 data for everything should be out momentarily, and that will be included in the 2025 versions of the app. You know, Jacksonville's up a couple hundred, up 10%, and Christian Brothers, a smaller college, is up a couple, a few dozen, and up about 4%. Again, Matt, day in and day out, we don't see increases in enrollment very much. And while Matt teases me all the time, I'm not going to let him do that today. I am going to bring up for your graduation rates. And this is one of the areas that I focus on with the College Viability App. And for those that follow me regularly, you'll know that I have a minimum 4-year graduation rate threshold of 50%. And if a college can't graduate 50% of its students in 4 years, I call them a coin toss college for obvious reasons. And you really see both of our colleges are struggling to get to that level. Does that make them bad colleges? Well, that's not my decision to make. That's the students', that's the families', that's the community's decision. If you can't graduate half your students, is that good or bad? There are more colleges in the United States that don't— sadly, Matt— don't graduate at least half of their students. But there are some really, really good colleges that graduate a preponderance of their students. And my, in my mind, the Gary Stocker opinion, that's an important distinction. So we saw the enrollment go up. Let's take a look at the tuition and fee revenue. It's a little bit different than what you see from Matt. And we see again, for the two colleges, for the last 8 reported years that both have been able to grow tuition and fees at least a little. Uh, you know, Christian Brothers College, not much more than couch money over the 8 years. Jacksonville University— and Matt referenced that in one of his visualizations— much, much better than Christian Brothers. But I'm going to go then to the next one that really stuck out, Matt, as I looked at this. And don't worry about the funded institutional grants. I'm going to talk about the lower chart here. It's called, you know, inside baseball, inside college term, unfunded institutional grants. You and I and all the watchers, all the viewers of the show, would know that as merit aid. They would know that as most scholarships. It's just discounts. So what we can see for both of our colleges, they have engaged in serious discounting. Well, that, Matt, you and I know, most higher education leaders know, tuition discounting has been endemic for a decade plus. And let's just look at Christian Brothers over the last 8 years. They have increased the amount of tuition discounting $7 million. Now of course that's good for the students. You know, at Jacksonville University it's $60 million, $69 million. I'll talk about that in a second. Of course that's good for the students, but it hasn't— of course it has a negative impact on the colleges because they're foregoing that revenue. Again, this is over 8 years, so it's not every year over 8 years. But look at the percent increase at Jacksonville. They made, Matt, in my mind, some kind of business decision over the last many years to give away the store. Nothing wrong with that, to give away the store in the form of increased discounts, increased merit aid, to get students in the door. You know, we talk about— and the revenue has grown, but their expenses have grown. And maybe, Matt, one of the ways to look at that is to recognize that students are still coming, to start playing with that tuition discount and start lowering that. It's probably about a mid-50% number, I'm guessing now. Try and get that down to 50% over the next couple years. Try and get that down to 48%. Make sure your, your systems and processes are better so that you are giving that aid to students who need it and not giving that aid to students who don't need it. And then I want to take a look at, uh, percent admitted. And again, we see a couple of different things here. And Matt, you've talked about this in previous shows. If colleges are having revenue troubles and they have a low percent admitted rate, well, you've said many times, well, admit more people, right? And you can do that. And we, you know, Jacksonville University, they've been all over the place. If you look at the data for the last 8 years at Jacksonville, they've been all over the place. And their average, the average for both groups is about 73%, which is not bad. And even, you know, jumping up to Christian Brothers, are kind of been all over the place. I tease that when colleges get over 90%, 95%, they become heartbeat admission colleges. That means they might admit anybody with a heartbeat. And when you get to 97%, that's really the case. Now, it's just for one year. There could be a reason for that. And if you're at Christian Brothers University and want to join us on the show, we'd be happy to have you. We can talk about that. But that's the kind of data that we report and that we look at to compare these colleges. And again, Matt, you and I have talked about this many times. It's the comparisons that matter. We do 2 colleges at once. I could change this for every college in the country on this window. I could change it for all the colleges in Tennessee, all the colleges in Florida. For those who've purchased the versions of the apps, you use it to compare colleges and make your own determination. So having said that, let me go ahead and turn off my screen here. Matt, we've been doing the show like we talked about for, for these not quite 5 months yet. Phenomenal reactions, mostly positive, some less than positive reactions that we've gotten. And let's talk about where you and I are headed with ourselves and others in 2025. So you mentioned we're going to have a simpler version of the free Compass app, and that'll be available sometime in the coming weeks. It'll be on the websites. We'll promote that and we'll give you access to it. We'll give you access to it in a heartbeat. But because we're adding more and more value to a higher-end version of that, we're going to call it the Advanced Compass, the College Financial Health Advanced Compass. We're gonna have a fee for that, and it's not going to be a small fee because you're going to have the capacity to compare all the things that Matt just showed you for these two colleges, for, for all of the, um, for all the colleges, for all those colleges, you'll be able to compare every one of them, 1,300, 1,500 colleges. The Advanced Compass will let you compare your competitors and yourselves. So there's going to be a fee attached to that, and we'll release that number sometime soon. And for those colleges that really are looking for a single source resource, it is the College Financial Health Strategic Compass that you want to talk to Matt and I about. If you have some interest, drop me a note. I'll include the email address in the show notes. Drop me a note at gary@collegeviability.com, and I'll put you in touch with either myself or Matt. We'll show you the product and see where we can take you to do what Matt talked about. I think it was for Jacksonville, maybe. I can't remember. But look in depth at your college and compare it to a set of up to 35 statistically data-driven peers, not just geographic peers, that Matt has put together in his app. So, Matt, 2025, what are you looking for?

Yeah, just we'll keep doing this. Uh, like I said, we're having an impact, um, and exactly the kind of impact that I got into this business for. Like, it I don't know if you guys know my background, but I was an econ professor for 12 years. Uh, I was looking to, uh, make a change just because I saw the things that I'm sharing with you guys and I want it to change. I want schools to be smarter. Uh, we now have tools where they can be a lot, a lot smarter and more transparent, build, build stakeholder buy-in, get your board on board with what what you want to do, make it clear to everybody what's happening. There's really, I say this a lot, there's no reason to guess anymore. You don't have to guess at most of these policy decisions you're making. And, you know, that's powerful, right? If you guess wrong, you might kill your school and probably will kill your career. There's no reason to guess anymore. You don't have to do it. We can make, we can drill down quite a bit and understand what the likely outcomes of a policy decision are going to be before you make them, which is really powerful. And, you know, if it doesn't turn out the way you want it, you can check what the assumptions were. We can recalibrate the policy. It's a lot better way of developing policy, more transparent. You're not going to have no-confidence votes, in my opinion, if you use a tool like this and share it with everybody, get everybody on board with what you want to do.

Yeah. And so for those listening live today, thank you very much. For those watching the recorded version, again, we're grateful for your time. So for the next 2 weeks, Matt, you and I are going to present just best of. So every Tuesday I'll post probably a clip of one of the shows that we have done previously, uh, for the viewers to take a look at. So we can keep being aware of every Tuesday we have something out there. And Matt, how about you and I get back together on Tuesday, January 7th? We'll have a list of probably 3 colleges like we do most weeks that we'll talk about. And, uh, let's see where 2025 takes us, sir.

Yes. Happy holidays.

Happy holidays to you from Matt Hendricks. I'm Gary Stocker. Thanks all for joining us. We'll be back again on January 7th with our next live show.