The College Financial Health Show for March 11, 2025. College financial health and viability review.

It's Tuesday. It's time for the show. And no, it's not a major league baseball show. It's the financial health show, the College Financial Health Show with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker. Hi everybody. Thanks for joining us, whether you're joining us live on Zoom or whether you're watching the recorded version each week. For those of you that follow us know, we look at the financial health and even some cases of financial viability of up to 3 colleges, 3 private colleges across the country. We look at the prospective data science advanced compass and the college viability app and the college viability college major completion app to give an assessment of what colleges look like. And as Matt and I always talk about, It's always the comparisons that matter. And don't tell anybody, but the data we use comes from the colleges themselves. We just do the comparisons. We just make it easy to use. Hi everybody. I'm Gary Stocker, founder of College Viability.

And I'm Matt Hendricks, founder of Perspective Data Science. I'm, I'm excited about today's show cuz I'm gonna show you guys a, a lot of new features that I've added to the Advanced Compass. That allow us to dig deeper, much deeper than we have in previous shows, and sort of diagnose how, what the problems might be at these schools and show how these benchmarking tools can help you sort of get started in finding a path to sustainability. So today we're looking at Antioch, Antioch College. There's an Antioch University. Don't confuse the two. We're looking at Antioch College in Ohio. I believe they're actually in the same town, so I don't know how the folks that live there keep them straight. So we're looking at Antioch College and two Dominican universities. One's in New York, one's in Illinois. So keep all those straight. Basically, we have the whole spectrum. I think we have one sustainable college, one that is not sustainable, but may have a longer runway. And we have one that is not sustainable and has a tiny runway, almost nearly out of cash at the end of 2023. So that one that has a tiny runway is Antioch College, and I'll start with them. Let me share my screen and show the advanced compass. There's a lot of new stuff I'll be showing you today, and I'm excited to show this because it allows you to do more than just, you know, identifying whether a school is in trouble. It helps now much, much more so than before to identify what actually are those problems and how might we start working on a solution. So here's Antioch College, Antioch. Um, and you can see the reason I think that they're in big trouble, and it's not just me thinking this. Apparently their creditor is agreeing with me now. Uh, and they've been in trouble for a very long time. This is a 36% net income loss here, and things have really never gotten much better since then. In 2016, they got a negative net income every year. Um, and in fact, they have negative cash flow as well from operations. Let me show you the net cash.

And their, their, their tracking line is below that, Matt, of closed colleges.

Yeah, well below the closed college set already. They must have a lot of grit, right? Just hanging in there much longer than other schools have. But you can see this is a pretty difficult situation financially. Those net income losses or net cash losses are extremely difficult to deal with because again, you have to sell assets or borrow to just make payroll, right? I would imagine the school has probably had many years of struggling to make payroll. Just have to sell— what they've been doing is selling investments, and I can show you that. Let me show you their investments here, which their investments are tiny, so it shows up really low here, but I'll show you one capability that you may not be aware of. I can, I can just take, I just focus in on Antioch. If I just double-click on the Antioch in the graph, in the legend, you can see they used to have $12.5 million in investments and they're down to $2 million. And coincidentally, $2 million is their net cash loss. So you can get a sense of the runway there. They really only have one year left of this and it's now past that one year. We're in 2025. So I suspect if they've continued on this path that they're probably about out of cash right now. So we may be witnessing a school really close to the end of its life just based on, you know, assuming that continued trajectory and how they've been sort of meeting their cash flow requirements by selling investments. By the way, this is happening while the stock market has been booming, as you know, right? Like 70% up over this period and their investments are down. You can see in a percentage basis. Yeah, not necessarily. You can see they went from 12 to 2.2. It's really a big drop-off. Okay, so here's what I really want to show you, how you can use this tool now. And again, it's super low cost, high benefit. I want to show you the high benefit here potentially for Antioch, although it may be way late for them. I'll show you how they can diagnose what their problems are and start making adjustments and fixing it. So one thing we can do now is look at enrollments. So I can show you FTE enrollments. And again, they're really, they're just like off the scale here. But again, I'll double-click on Antioch and you can see they used to have 266 FTE enrollments and they're now at 123. So they lost about half of their students and have been really just holding steady pretty much at a 50% loss this whole time. Of course, that's going to impact enrollments or sorry, revenues, their net tuition revenue. I'll show you that here. Tuition revenue. And again, zoom in on Antioch. This is the thing that's actually really shocking about them. Their, their net tuition revenue is increasing, but it's still tiny. It's only $1.2 million. And one, one new feature I've added is you can do this per FTE. And you can see one of the issues that they have right out of the gate, and they've had it for a long time. Net tuition revenue divided by FTE enrollment is a pretty good proxy of what the price of the school is, right? What are the kids actually paying in terms of tuition to attend the school on average? And so it's a great proxy for the price. It's not perfect though, because you can have changes in the demographics of the students, like higher income students tend to pay more. You've got international students you can mess with this a little bit, but in general, if the demographics are pretty constant over time, it will give you a really good sense of the price. And you see here, Gary, right there, what would you say?

You see that below the closed college number line?

Yeah, just so one of the issues they've had is that their price is really low. And so one of the questions I would have if I was working at this school is, is the price, is that actually the equilibrium price for the school? Or have they tried with a higher price? So here you can see in 2019 that they have an exam at one sort of natural experiment here. How did things go in 2019? Right? Their net price was actually, it looks to be almost normal in 2019, but then sharply fell again. And now they're trying it again. These, you got to take advantage of these, you know, maybe somebody just decided I'm not going to give as much aid this year, whatever. Look very closely at what happened to your enrollment in that year. If I remember right, their enrollment doesn't start falling until 2021. So perhaps the right strategy here is actually to bring this up. Back to at least the median of $15,000 or so. So I'd try that. You can try experiments, right? And that's actually one of the things I would do if I were in charge, right? Lots of different experiments with prices. And we're doing this right now, Gary, right? Trying to figure out what the optimal price is for different products that we have. But yeah, that's definitely an option. So one issue on the revenue side, losing students, looks like the price is too low. I don't have it here, but they need to dig very deeply on their funnel and figure out why they're losing students. It could be at all different levels, right? It could be low apps, could be something wrong with the application, you know, low yields. Although I bet their yield is, you know, I don't want to say usually when you have a low price, your yield rate tends to be pretty good, right? So I would wonder if maybe they have an issue with the early part of the funnel. I can't see that for sure, but these are all questions that are motivated by the data, right? On the expense side, things are much more dramatic. And let me just show you a new feature here. We have total employees. So I'll just show you raw first. They have 241 employees. It looks like there's, there's a tiny school, right? They only have 100 students. But when you switch this to per FTE students, you can see a major, major problem for them that they probably aren't even aware of. They have 2, they have for every 100 students, they have 227 employees. That is way, way, way high. You can see the 75th percentile is 86. Only schools like Harvard are probably going to be able to make that financially sustainable, right? So they have, to me, an obvious case of a staffing problem here. They need to get down to about 61 staff per 100 students and they're at 227. Now a lot of people will always argue, oh, they can't, they're so small, they have to have all these staff. Well, let me just show you that that's actually not true. Showing you a new feature. So let's take a look at some schools that are their size. So BA school that have, uh, fewer than, so they have 100 students, right? We'll look at schools that have fewer than 120 students. Okay. Well, it looks like I've got Uh, 106. So in 2023.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So all— anyway, it doesn't matter. Let me— I'm just— what I'm going to do is use this table to try to find some schools that might be decent peers. Uh, so less than 120 or so. All right, BA, and let's do 2023. So I just want to like look at— so here's a— here's one good example, Magnolia. Magdalen College in New Hampshire, Sterling College, Thomas More College. These might be decent comparison schools. Let's start with Magdalen. Um, and I'm going to put them in so we can see what their staffing looks like. So Magdalen.

And setting peers is a relatively new feature as well, right, Matt?

Yeah. What'd you say?

Adding peers is a new feature also.

Oh yes. Yes. Sorry. Um, I'm going to take out some stuff here just to show you the gap here. So you see Magdalen, they're a tiny school just like, uh, Antioch, but they have a normal staffing, right? And let me put, uh, Antioch back in. You can see the gap here. They're at 123, uh, they were at 60, which is normal. I, I wonder if Magdalen is having some problems now that the same issues popping up that, uh, you know, Antioch been struggling with for years. Um, so here's the thing. This shows you that you can do this, right? Um, and I can give you more examples. We can put in Sterling as well. I double-checked this before the show. Whoops. Sterling College in Vermont. Again, they're higher, higher end on staffing, but again, uh, they're at 120 staff per 100 students versus 227 per 100 students. Okay. So right away, this tells me that there's probably a very, very serious staffing problem at Antioch that is just not— never— that's never going to be sustainable to have 2.5 times the number of staff than you have students unless you have a massive endowment, right? Which is probably what Harvard looks like. Let's just double-check that. Harvard— even Harvard is more normal. So really shocking there. But this is what I love about this. So we've diagnosed one big problem. And another thing you can see is, is it really like, what staff is it? I can't tell you exactly, but I can in the strategic compass, right? So that's a different tool. This is one that's just sort of cheaper, quicker, less complicated, but we can look at higher-end employees, employees paid over $100K. And you can see they have the same issue, really, really high on not only overall employees, but the number that are paid more than $100K.

They're monstrously higher than the 75th percentile on that.

Yeah. Yeah. They're just out here by themselves. And that's typically what you see with schools that have financial problems is they are very odd in some particular area, either on the revenue side or cost side or both. Right. And you can see them both here. So they are low price. It looks like they have tons of staff that shouldn't be, you know, that's not normal, right, to have 2.5 times the number of staff. Than you do students. And it's totally possible to make it normal. Right. I just showed you that.

Yeah, I'm jumping in because this is a good time to talk about the creditors. So HLC just in the last few weeks put Antioch again on financial awareness. But these are not strong results. These are weak results. And why are creditors not taking more aggressive action? I understand due process and those kind of things, but But these are numbers that are scary.

Yeah. I mean, I think I've been thinking more and more about this, Gary. I think fundamentally, I think accreditors don't understand what their job is, right? Like the market is totally capable of providing people that can help and firms that help schools. The market is excellent at that, right? Their job is not necessarily to help schools, but I think that they think that's their number one job, right? They think they're like, um, I don't know what happened at the evolution of all of this, but basically the government shouldn't be creating a consulting firm. The market can do that just fine. And I think what basically is the creditors have morphed into consulting firms rather than, than being, you know, a creditor or like a regulator, which is what a very different job. It'd be really curious to me to go back and look at when this all happened. Where did they initially start out as more regulators and become now more like advocates and helpers or consultants. There's no need for the government to be sort of giving powers to a consulting firm that other consulting firms don't have, which is, you know, this ability to pull Title IV money. I don't understand where this all sort of went off the rails. And to me, it looks like they're acting a lot more like consultants than they are like a regulator. But that's my, my sort of general thought on what I'm seeing here. I'm going to, I'm going to move on. Antioch. So again, the key takeaway here, I think I'll check out the net price, look at bringing that up. And then of course, they got to— I mean, it looks to me that they need to fire most of their staff, right? Which is really sad. But I'm not sure how they ended up with 2.5 times the number of staff relative to students. Part of it is the school is shrinking. But even when they were much bigger, they had way too many staff. Okay. It looks like, right? I can't say 100% sure. You need a strategic compass and then go deeper into the institutional data to show that. I'm going to show you now the two Dominican schools. The one in New York is struggling a bit and I'll show you that. And then Dominican in Illinois looks to be fine. So I'll start with net income margin. This is a glitch I need to fix. I needed to switch back here because you can't do per student on that. It's not— it doesn't make any sense. So I need to have that automatically switch back. I'll fix that after we get off here. All right. So here's the blue— the blue line is New York. All right. And the green line is Illinois. And you can see the conclusion I already said. The green line is above zero the last 3 years. That's excellent. Totally sustainable. Blue line is below zero the last 2 years, which means they have net income losses. But again, some of those losses you can sustain for many, many years, right? If it's just like maintenance issues that are not getting addressed and stuff like that. You're not covering your depreciation. Maybe the depreciation is not really accurate in terms of what your replacement costs are. That's totally possible as well. So we can look at cash flow and get a sense of, you know, where they're at in terms of sustainability. So let's do net cash margin, operating cash flow margin, and you can see both of them still have positive cash flow. Which is really the key, the minimum requirement for being sustainable is keeping that above zero. And they're both above zero. So it means that they don't— they're not having to borrow to cover their operations. But it does, given a previous result, it probably means that the one in New York, Dominican in New York, is not doing a good job of covering its depreciation expenses and probably has deferred maintenance. So let's see it. Let's take a look at the CapEx and see what we find there. Yeah, you can see the blue CapEx spend relative depreciation is really low and almost always below 1. And looks like they built a building here probably in 2017, and then they didn't invest much in any kind of property, plant and equipment for a long time. Looks like 5 years. And then finally a bigger investment here in 2023. So yeah, they might have some deferred maintenance, but again, they're, they're not having to borrow essentially and sell assets just to cover payroll. Right. They're instead borrowing in this case, it looks like, to cover some deferred maintenance, which is less of a problem. But I mean, it's not ideal. Again, I want net income positive every year. I want cash flow much more positive every year. You're building up like savings to cover replacement costs and stuff like that. Let's take a look at the net price for these 2 schools, or net tuition revenue per student. Again, that's a new metric. So we can do net tuition revenue in millions and then flip it over to per FTE. You can see both of these schools seem to be good here in terms of net price, right? Again, not a perfect metric for price, but this is pretty darn close. Usually you find these when I do, when you do get a good metric for net price, it's almost always in agreement with this net tuition revenue per student. So both of them charging up more than, you know, the average school and looks like students are paying that. Let me double check enrollment here. I mean, the one that's struggling most is the blue school, right? And this is kind of interesting. Their net price is higher. So let's take a look at, maybe we can diagnose what's happening here, why their financials are in more stress even though their price is higher. Let's take a look at FTE enrollment. So again, blue school, New York struggling, but their price is quite a bit higher than the green school. FTE students, again, raw values. That's a glitch I need to fix. So take a look here. The blue school is struggling because their enrollment is starting to fall and you can see that relative to the green school's flat. Right? So they have a high price, enrollment's constant. The blue school has a higher price, but their enrollment is shrinking. And notice the sort of inflection point here where they start shrinking most. Double-click that. You can see this sort of sharp decline here after 2021. I want to go back to the next one.

Kind of pandemic-related, maybe.

Yeah, so one thing I worry about here, remember their price is high, looks high. And one thing that can cause this sharp, sharp decline here in enrollment is if they get— just got carried away with the price. If the price is too high, you're going to see a sharp decline in enrollment. And I wonder if there was a price increase right around 2021 that could explain this, you know. And so this, again, this is how this tool can help diagnose what's happening. So let's double-check what happens to the price right around, right around 2021. Yeah, I don't see a, like, a sharp change here, but, you know, it's possible. This is the highest price they've ever had here. That— so again, I would look into that. You might consider reducing your net price a little bit, which means discounting a little bit more, right? That could be the optimal strategy here. It's not always better to discount less, right? Discount more, bring your net price down, bring up your yield rate, and that will actually potentially increase your overall revenue. Yeah, per student FTE revenue will go down, but your overall revenue will go up is the idea.

Yep.

Okay, let's check the cost side again. Let's diagnose what's going on on the cost side, just like we did with Antioch. See, first with employees like we did before, employees per FTE. See, both of these schools are right in line here, about 50. Normal is about 60 employees per 100 students. They're both below that. They don't appear to have any staffing issues. In fact, looks like the New York school was actually understaffed for quite a while. So that looks fine. Let's take a look at like higher paying employees. Looks fine in New York, a bit high for Illinois. They might check how many upper admin slots they have. They might be a bit top heavy on the upper admin. That's what that looks like with a bit higher here. But again, it's well below the 75th percentile. So I doubt that's a huge problem. But they could optimize a bit, right? And so here's the other big category, contractor spend. And here's where I think—

and this is new, right, Matt?

Yeah, this is new, right? So these are— this is the number of contractors that are paid more than $100K. And both of them are very high. One of them has a financial problem, the other one doesn't. So let's just focus on the one that does have the financial problem. And you can see what's happening here. They went from 9 contractors over $100K back in 2016, and now they're at 23. That is pretty high. And at the same time, that's, so that's a pretty big jump and their enrollment's fallen. So a lot of these contractors should be about proportional to how big your school is.

Dominican, Illinois.

Yeah, they're way up there. So again, there's probably some optimization to do here, like upper admin slots, check those, check your contractors, right? You're at 50. That's quite high. And on a per student basis, That's still very high. Should be at about 1 contract per 100 students, and they're at 2.

That's the median, right? Is 1 per 100?

Yep. Yep. So again, these, these rules of thumb are really good to sort of build your strategy in terms of where you're going to start looking. So when I work with clients, this is exactly what I do. I just show them where they look weird and then offer suggestions on you know, where we should dig deeper into their data. We should go— I would argue in both of these cases, we should just put all the contracts on the table and go through all of them and see which ones are not necessary, get rid of those, and renegotiate the ones that are necessary, right? They're very competitive markets for most of these vendors, and you can probably negotiate better deals with most of them, and we've been successful at that with various clients they've been doing that. Um, and so you should take advantage of that.

And this is, this is for contractors paid over $100,000. We have to assume there are many paid less than that for these guys.

Yeah, there are probably just as many, if not more, that are paid under $100K, right? So you got to look closely at all of those. They add up very fast. Right. Uh, I think that's all I have for, for today, Gary. Again, the, the tool I'm showing you examples of how you can use this to motivate policy changes at your school and understand why you're struggling financially and it becomes really clear, right? I mean, in the case of Antioch, it's very obvious that that staffing situation is never going to be sustainable. It doesn't matter what you pay them, uh, unless it's zero, and it's never going to be sustainable. All right, I'll shift it back to you.

And again, you know, we, we sadly, we don't have a soapbox we could actually jump on and, and start talking, but week after week, Matt, we— if we did, we had one, we'd talk about comparison And then how it's, it's the comparisons that matter. And I'm going to show some comparisons in some different functions here in a second. You just can't rely on your budget, which is not much more than a dartboard guess. And you can't write— even though the audited financial statement is better, it doesn't offer you the comparison with other colleges. And Matt, you and I hardly both believe that that comparison is what's important.

Yeah.

And let's take a look at the 2025 College Viability App for the 3 colleges. And what's the— what's the function I usually start with, Matt?

Graduation rates.

And why is that, Matt?

It is a very important metric for these schools, for sure.

Yeah, and we pay colleges to graduate students, not just to take courses. And again, you know, Antioch is not only in bad financial situation— look at, look at the data since 2019. They didn't even report those the 3 years prior. It has gone from decent to low decent to miserable. And I, I don't know the reason for this, but in conjunction with all the financial troubles, they're not— in 2023, they graduated less than 1 in 5 students that started 4 years previously. And even the other two, you know, Dominican in Illinois, still below the minimum threshold on average, although close to it for the last 8 reported years. And Dominican New York, again, there, look at the numbers, you can average that, that's below 40% easily hovering around 30%. And if you can't graduate over 8 years, Matt, over 8 years, at least 30% of your students— you've heard me say before and I'm going to say it again— I don't view that as a college. I view that as a tuition collection agency. You showed enrollment. I can show the same thing here. I can even show pictures, you know. So Matt's pictures are line graphs and mine are bar graphs. But again, quick comparison, you can look at these. We can select just Dominican. Select one of those just to quickly look at what's going on. And you saw that in some of Matt's graphics as well. I always like to look at admissions yield, and Matt talked about that a couple times. Again, these are our 3 colleges. Look at Antioch. This is— turn on Antioch. And Matt, do you see a pattern there?

Yeah, that's a sharp decline.

Yeah, yeah, you draw that arrow, it's a sharp decline. And again, you talk about the market a minute ago. Antioch can do whatever they want. HLC, which I think is their accrediting agency, can do whatever they want. But the market is telling Antioch, we don't need you. And so you talked about the market for consultants. The market for consumers, students and their families are saying, hey, you may accept us 50% of the time, may accept us, but we don't accept it. We don't accept that offer 50% of the time now. Back in 2016, it's down to 17% 8 years later. Just not a good trend at all. For lots of reasons. Let's take a look at retention. Go back to the data charts, a bit easier to read. We can look at retention for those colleges for the last 8 years, 2016 through 2023. MAT's data is mostly from audited financial statements. This one is mostly exclusively from IPEDS data. We can see the change, percent change over the 4 years. And again, you know, those aren't strong numbers. Dominican Illinois is a little bit better than the others, but again, It's the trend that matters. And Dominican, pretty consistent. Um, flat for those two, flat for those two. And that just says that, you know, they're not doing anything better to keep more students staying at the college. Let's take a look at unfunded institutional grants. Matt, what are those also known as?

Discounts.

Discounts, yeah.

Merit aid scholarships.

You can call it the Matt Hendricks Scholarship if you want, but it's a discount. And, and, and another indicator is Antioch isn't even reporting that function. In iPads for the last 8 years. And we can see that Dominican Illinois is up $10 million, so a million plus per year just to get students in the door. Nothing wrong with that, but that's $10 million in change in revenue they had to forego just to get students to show up. It's the market pressures, that's not going away. And you can see some colleges, it goes up every year. And Dominican New York, recognizing they had financial issues, has effectively been flat. Over the last 8 years. That's just a couple thousand, couple ten thousands per year up, not a big deal. And even on the funded side, you know, where the actual Matt Hendricks Scholarship has money behind it, you know, in all 3 cases, not much more than college couch money. Um, Dominican New York, no, that's 5% of that is $7,500. That's all they have available from funded scholarships for their students. And then take a quick look at— you look at long-term debt, the current portion Um, you know, Antioch, all right, we'll leave that one alone. That's kind of high for the debt for the next 12 months, which is what the current long-term debt is. That's kind of high for those, Matt, you think?

Yeah, yeah, they, they don't have a lot of assets. So yeah, that's—

and then if selectivity is still an issue, and it shouldn't be, but if it is, we can look at how selective these colleges are, and they aren't. My threshold for a college that has heartbeat admissions is 85% or higher. None of these actually quite hit there. But that's a high percent admitted. And you've, you've said before, Matt, on the show and other places, if you have financial issues, admit more students. And I think I saw even some pushback on social media on that. But hey, you admit more students, they pay tuition and fees, and you're generating more revenue from that. And then lastly, I don't know that you brought up, um, tuition and fees, but I want to bring that one up. And again, a quick look. Matt's is much more detailed with the Advanced Compass. Look at tuition fees, down $7 million over the last 8 reported years at New York, the Dominican New York. Dominican Illinois up a little bit and effectively flat at Antioch College. And you showed that a little bit in your charts as well. And we always look at college majors. This is new in 2025. And what I've got is I've got our 3 colleges and I brought all the bachelor's degrees they've had for the last 3 years, last 4 reported years. And what we do is we look at these to see where a college is strong. Well, Antioch has no students, so their numbers are small everywhere. Dominican New York, we can look at the majors over here. These are bachelor's degrees, and these are the majors, the bachelor's degree majors they offer. And we look down toward the bottom because that's how I've got it sorted, and we can see what the volumes have been for the last reported years, last 4 reported years. And we can see what percentage of that is on the inside This is internal market share. So in 2023, biology was 17% of the internal market share of all the bachelor courses that Dominican offered. Let's look at the same thing. Do we have biology? Yeah, here we have biology at Dominican Illinois, and it was 15%. And what you want to look at here is for a college that has too heavy of a focus on a given major. And I don't really see that for these colleges. If somebody had 30 or 40% of their majors were in psychology, That's not the case here. That would be something to be concerned about because you're relying on maybe a professor or two. What happens if they leave? What happens if another college wants to take a shot at getting psychology majors by offering them more discounts? That's just one of the ways to use the Major Completion app. And then I went in and used the other side. There's a by major and by college. And I just brought up, we've got a set of colleges in, I think I just picked Illinois, didn't I? Check here. So the state is Illinois. So we have Dominican Illinois, because market share is better looked at in a more proximate environment, and then some colleges in the general Chicago metropolitan area, which is where Dominican is. And we can see in accounting and related services, that's a pretty even match based on the data. We can even look at the pie chart and see pretty even across the board. I want to grab a couple of other batch— a couple other majors here. I'm going to look at biology. We just saw that. Let's get rid of accounting here. So biology, again, pretty evenly spread. We can put the pointer on top of this and see Aurora has 11, only 4%, not quite 5% of the entire market share. I make the argument that why are you in the biology business if you have such a small market share? Let's look at a couple others to show the functionality here. And I want to look at— because Matt likes economics, you know, if you want to do economics in the greater Chicago area, just for these 5 or 6 colleges, 4 of them, you can see the 4 here. Which one do you think is best, Matt, in terms of offering economics?

Like, Lake Forest is—

yeah, it's not even close. And again, if I'm, if I'm a high school junior, senior, and I'm a parent of a high school junior, senior, I want to look at this because I want to know where a college is strong. I also might want to know where a college is weak. So Bradley, which is in my set, have had one economics major. So Matt, if you need a teaching gig, you can probably run up to Bradley and you'll start to start an economics program up And let's just look at one more. I'm gonna go to the bottom here. I want to look at sports kinesiology, exercise science. And again, these are 3 colleges in the set I selected. You can see that Aurora has majority of that, Benedictine is a small percentage. But this is just a way to look at majors and completion data to decide if you're a college whether you want to add a major or more likely subtract a major based on low volume. And if you're a student, or a parent, be careful about going to a college with a small percent of the market share. And you can use this example, this chart, this app. There's a parent and student version and a full version for college leaders as well. So Matt, we've got 3 colleges today. Let's take a look at what we have for our college financial health rating. And Matt, for Antioch, we have them as unsustainable with a short runway of less than 5 years.

Yeah, yeah. Um, I really would like to see their 2024 audit. I wonder, I mean, it looked like they were almost out of cash at the end of 2023. So the way that they paid their bills in 2023 was to sell $1 million of, of investments, getting only $2 million left, and they needed another million of cash drawdown. Um, so they didn't have much cash left and $2 million left in investments. It was difficult for me to see how they get past 2024, let alone '25 if they keep that up. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. And then Dominican University in Illinois, we have them as sustainable.

Yeah. They have, they have a positive net income last 3 years, positive cash flow. Obviously they look fine to me. Looks good.

And then Dominican University in New York, kind of problematic. We have them rated as unsustainable, but a longer runway. 5%.

Yeah, again, it's unsustainable to run net income losses, right? Unless you got something quirky with your— maybe the depreciation number's wrong or something like that. But depreciation is a real cost, right? They're just not covering it right now. So if you do that over 100 years, eventually your whole campus will crumble, right? So you'll run out of cash eventually. It just takes a lot longer though. So perhaps they're The unsustainable long-run way case, I think, makes sense for them.

So if you're a college leader in any form or fashion— president, board member, provost, dean— what Matt used, what I showed you as well, these are relatively inexpensive tools to make your own diagnosis. If you want to hire a consultant, feel free to do that, but you're going to pay tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. And Matt You and I both know the pricing for all our products is considerably less than that. Reach out to me. I'll have an email address in the, in the end of the show run, um, and we can do private demos. You want to look at this stuff for your college? I'll show it to you. I'll show it to you. We'll share the price. We have a promo going for some, for folks, uh, with the.edu domain just to make it more affordable and get this tool in the hands of more folks. It is, Dr. Hendricks, the Moneyball era. You and I aren't creating the data. We're taking the data that colleges themselves have provided, either through their audited financial statements or their IRS Form 990s or their IPEDS data, and we're just making it easy to use, easy to compare, easy to read, easy to analyze. Use the data, don't use the data, but be advised, if your competitors, Matt, if they're using the data and you're not, I can make a logical argument that you're putting yourself at a disadvantage. And before I wrap up, Matt, you want to comment on that?

Yeah, I mean, I know for a fact your competitors are using the data. So, and there's a decent chance the stakeholders at your university are using the data too. So it'd be very foolish if you're an upper admin or a board member to have not as much information or worse information than the stakeholders at your school or your competitors. It's just really inexcusable. It's cheap. Like I said, the benefits potentially massive.

So, well, Dr. Hendricks, let's call that a wrap for Matt Hendricks. I'm Gary Stocker. Thanks for making time to watch the live version or the recorded version of the College Financial Health Show. We'll be back next Tuesday with 3 more colleges. Until then, best wishes always.