The College Financial Health Show - Student & Family version. Reviewing Loyola U. and Creighton U.

It's the College Financial Health Show with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker. Hi everybody. While Matt is away with his family for a bit, I'm going to do the show solo for the next couple of weeks and with a slightly different focus. I'm going to focus on college financial transparency. On a college financial transparency report that is for students and for their families. And it's going to be a rapid review, get through the points real quickly, and we're only going to cover 5 points of emphasis. Let me talk about what those 5 are. The first one is going to be: is the college making or losing money? The second is: are enrollments and tuition revenue stable or growing? Is the college maintaining its buildings? Number 3, that's kind of a safety question. And number 4, is the endowment being used responsibly? And number 5, does the college graduate its students, and what kind of tuition discounting do they have at that college? The student and family only shows will be presented in more of a conversational tone that will provide the needed information in an easy-to-understand format. Let's get started at looking at today's first 2 colleges, Loyola University and Creighton University. We'll be using the Advanced Private College Financial Compass developed by Perspective Data Science and Matt Hendricks' product as we do the first part of the show. And you can see we have Loyola University in Chicago, which will be the blue line, and Creighton University in Nebraska, which will be the green line. And the first question, of course, is, is this college making or losing money? What we're looking at here is Loyola University and Creighton, like I said, and this is the median. You'll see this line on all the charts I'm gonna show you. In the next couple of minutes. And we can say safely that really both Loyola University and Creighton are doing quite well in driving net income— more in revenue, more income than they have expenses. Uh, Loyola had a small downward turn in 2021, below the median, but nothing to be worried about. Although both have a slightly decreasing trend, Creighton more than Loyola, over the last couple years. Something to watch, but not a big concern. Question number 2: is the college maintaining its buildings? And to do that, we use something called the CapEx to depreciation Maintenance ratio— don't worry about the details. It's how much money— it tracks how much money colleges are spending to maintain their buildings, plant, property, and equipment. And again, the median is here, and we can see that Creighton in particular, for these two, doing a fine job of being able to keeping its buildings and of investing in its buildings, investing in its property, plant, and equipment. Loyola less so. They have been down 6 out of the last 8 years below that median number. You probably want to encourage them if you're looking at Loyola You want to ask them why aren't they maintaining their buildings in a manner that is at least close to the median group of all private colleges. The next question we want to address is, are enrollments and tuition revenue stable, growing, or declining? Again, Loyola's in the blue, Creighton's in the green. Let's start off by looking at the enrollment volume. And again, we can see that the percent change since 2016, when our chart starts, has really been generally up for Loyola University. Down the last couple years and has been up and now down again for Creighton University. Something to be concerned about if you're considering Creighton University. Ask them why has their enrollment been flat and decreasing since about 2019. And then while enrollment is important, the net tuition revenue collected from enrollment is more important. So we're looking at that net tuition revenue here. Let's look at the raw values. And so we can see that Loyola University We can see back in 2016 that Creighton University was charging about $26,000 per year in tuition, and back in— and now in 2024, about $31,400 and change. Loyola University was at $24,300 back in 2016, and it's now not much higher but a little bit at $26,000 almost $800 per student. If we look at that in terms of percent change, we can see that both have shown a general increase in tuition revenue. It's kind of flattened out over the last couple years. Something to note but not necessarily be concerned about at this point in time. And the next question we want to look at: is the endowment being used responsibly? Now, for those that don't know, the endowment— the endowment is kind of the savings account. That's a, a generalization, a simplification. It's essentially what gifts have been given to the college Colleges like to use the earnings of that to support operations, to support the college, to grow the college. And when we look at that, we want to see what— how the colleges compare. So again, the median value for— let's go back up here— the median value for the endowment for Loyola and Creighton has increased nicely since 2016. Let's take a look at how responsibly they've used that with something called the endowment draw or the endowment appropriation. How much of that endowment are the colleges taking to support the college in operations? In future investments, on those kind of things. And the standard threshold is around 4%, a little above that. And we can see that both Loyola and Creighton have stayed below that threshold, which is good— that's a good thing— in the last reported years since 2016. So they're not spending too much of their money. When you see me do this for other colleges, you'll find many instances when colleges are way above this median. That's not a good thing. But that's not the case for either Loyola University or for, or for Creighton University. Moving on to the 2025 College Viability App, we're looking at a couple things. Let's take a look at 4-year graduation rates, and you can see both Creighton University and Loyola University from 2016 to 2023, strong graduation rates. Here at College Viability, we have a minimum 4-year graduation threshold of 50%. Both colleges are well above that. We can take a look at the 6-year graduation rate And again, very strong. You can see a couple other colleges that will be on another show that way below that, not good. And then lastly, I wanna show something called institutional grants unfunded. Again, an inside baseball kind of term. It shows the amount of revenue, the amount of money colleges are foregoing just to get students to enroll. Now, all colleges can do it. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's a reflection of how much discounting colleges do just to get students to enroll. And we can see that at Creighton, they've gone from $73 million in unfunded discount, there's no money behind this, just like a discount you get on clothes and cars and computers, and it's gone up to $112 million and change, up almost $39 million over the last 8 reported years. Loyola, from $153 million to a little bit below $268 million, up $114+ million. It's really more of a reflection of the market and how much colleges have to discount tuition to get students. To enroll. So how do you use this data if you're a student or a family member? We looked at 5 key questions about colleges' financial health, and this show is just simply a part of a project being developed to provide more and better financial transparency to students and families about colleges they are considering. Be careful about choosing a college in comparatively poor financial health, and sadly there are many. During upcoming shows, I will cover both financially strong and financially weak colleges as the show moves forward. If you have requests for colleges to be reviewed, drop me a note to gary@collegeviability.com. For Matt Hendricks, I'm Gary Stocker. Thanks for watching this first episode of a College Transparency Report for students and families.