The College Financial Health Show with Matt Hendricks & Gary Stocker for November 12, 2024

It's time for the show, the College Financial Health Show, with Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker. And hey, it is for Tuesday, November 12th. Election Day, Election Day plus one week. Welcome to the show. Hey, this is the show. This is the only show that takes a look at the financial health and viability of private colleges. We look at it from a variety of sources, including audited financial statements, IPEDS data, and the IRS Form 990s. And we look at it in a way, and I don't think anybody else has done before, and we do it for college leaders. We do it for college boards. We do it for faculty. And for students and families. We do it for bondholders and banks, insurance companies, and consulting firms. And again, it's data that the colleges themselves have submitted. We've just found a way to make it easy to understand and easy to compare. Hi, my name is Gary Stocker. I'm the founder of College Viability.

And I'm Matt Hendricks, founder of Perspective Data Science. Today we're looking at schools all scattered around the Midwest here. We have St. Louis University, Marquette University, and Creighton University. Um, and so I guess my takeaway— I went through these, uh, at least once through my benchmarking app that uses the audited financial statement data. I didn't see any red flags on any of these financially. And, uh, we'll go through the points again. Maybe I missed something, but, um, apparently there are some new stories, uh, recently about budget cuts at at least St. Louis University and Marquette. I can't see that at the moment because my data goes to fiscal year '23. I'll be adding fiscal year '24 here in the next couple weeks. May see something in that, but up to '23, these schools looked fine. And again, they're making these decisions now after seeing fall enrollment for fiscal year '25. So they have a bit more information than I do at the moment. But I'll show you what I— what we have up to fiscal year '23. Sardine. Okay, start with St. Louis University. Again, this app is scraping data from audited financial statements. It's totally free, and you can go here, Perspective Data Science slash research, and, and really get a full picture— almost full picture, I hesitate to say full, but a lot. You get a lot of information about the health of the financial health of a university and see what what's happening. Um, so let's take a look at SLU. All right, so starting with net income margins, again, normal net income margins, you just need them to be positive every year, and that's what the median school does. About 1% buffer is, is normal. SLU has been low for a while, but the interesting thing is the budget cap was announced up here, right? And they just had a massive, uh, windfall. And I took a look at this So I guess the first question is, is my AI extracting the wrong data here? It'd be weird to have this huge net income and then a negative net cash flow. Well, I can show you what happened there. It's kind of a weird, actually perhaps incorrect accounting of what they did. So this is '20, that's '22. Here's 2023. So the, what happened was they have their normal revenues, but then they have healthcare revenues normally, but then they sold their healthcare system. SluCare for $250 million. And for whatever reason, their auditor included that as operating revenue. So their operating revenue is almost $900 million in 2023, and their cost was $640 million. You can see their net income was $254 million then. And you can see if they had done the accounting, which I think the correct way would actually be to put this down in non-operating activities and not be part of operating. And if they did it that way, they would still have a positive net income. You can see the sale, they'd take $249 million out. They would still have like another $4 million or so about positive net income. So that's good. And that's about right where you want to be if you're SLU. So no, no issues there. I'll go back to my app. Cash flow is negative, but again, they're one of the schools— there's about half of the schools that do this. They take out their endowment draw, their spending policy, and report it in a different part of the cash flow statement. So their net operating cash flow looks lower than you would expect. Typically what happens is you basically take this net income number and put depreciation back in. That's really usually what's happening. So this number should usually be higher than the net income margin every year. But this school, along with lots of other schools, not just them, they take out the endowment spend and put that in a different section. So if they did it the first way, the way that I wish every school would do it, they would have positive net cash flow and it would be above these numbers every year. So that's totally good and it would be huge, you know, given the way that they did the accounting on that. All right, so everything looks fine. No balanced budget issues for SLU that I can see. I mean, they had a positive $250 million. But even if you take that out, you still have a +4. Uh, let's take a look at how their endowment is doing. Um, so let's just take a look at first the relative size of the endowment. Their endowment is huge. It's like 2, 2.7 times larger than their annual expenses, and their annual expenses are really big. So it's a big endowment that's way above the 75th percentile. Their endowment has grown sharply. It's up 64% since 2016. That's excellent. They probably, to get that kind of growth, again, either you have like great contributions, good market returns, or you're not drawing a lot on your endowment. And I can see the first, that last one, they're not drawing a lot on their endowment. They have lower than normal, if I remember right. Let's double check this. No, it's like normal. Okay. Or a little, a little bit above normal actually. So I must've been thinking about Marquette or Creighton, one of the two. Coming up, but yeah, these look fine right around 4%, 4.5%. That's perfect. So they must have great contributions.

Yeah, they do. They do.

That's giving them that growth because these are actually slightly higher than normal draws. All right. So the, let's take a look at their net tuition revenue. Not great. I mean, for a school of this prestige, I would expect them to be really close to the 75th percentile here with a net tuition revenue growth of about 18%. And they're seriously underperforming that. And in fact, we're negative in '21. That's the COVID year, but still shouldn't be going negative if you're SLU. So I wouldn't be happy with that. Of course, if I were working at SLU, this is one of the most prestigious schools in the country. They should be doing much better than 5.6% growth on that tuition revenue. So they have some problems there that they can definitely fix. Would be great to look into it and do a deep dive into their analytics on their enrollment funnel, their pricing strategy, all of that is understandable.

So Matt, I understand you have a paid app that we can use for St. Louis University.

Yeah, and this app can find things that you never imagined were there, right? And so you could have a pricing issue. We've highlighted that with, again, Drake University might have a pricing issue and they have something that looks very similar similar to this actually on net tuition revenue. I mean, I've analyzed schools that are top-tier schools and there's still ways they can improve these things that they didn't even know about, right? And so that's the key for using data to understand what you're doing, what your competitors are doing, and really understand where the opportunities lie. The only way to see that stuff is by doing benchmarking.

All right.

Or you just get really lucky and guess correctly, which seems to be the strategy of a lot of schools. All right. So the— or unlucky, right? A lot more unlucky. So the revenues compared to expenses. Gary likes these side by side and so do I. Expenses. Okay. All right. So this looks a little funky there. Let's go to 2022. The revenue is up 22%, costs are up 19%. So this is again a school that's really in line with their expenses. Their revenues are growing faster than their expenses. That's great. What's with this big fall-off here? Remember, they sold their healthcare system. That's why this falls off right here. And yet they still included the revenue. So it's kind of weird accounting. But yeah, I don't think that was correct on their auditor's part. No big deal. Um, all right, let's see. Oh, capital expenditures. Let's take a look at their property and CapEx spending, property values. Okay, so again, um, CapEx spending, you want this to be above 1, and you see the median school is always above 1 except for during COVID which was a weird year, right? Uh, but then there's been some catch-up happening. What if it's above 1? What that means is you're putting more cash into your buildings in terms of maintenance, your computer equipment, all of that. You're putting more money in than is the depreciation rate, which is ideal, right? You don't want your school to sort of fall apart. Okay, if it's below 1, if this is below 1 for many years in a row, it would suggest you have lots of deferred maintenance or you're just falling behind in terms of technological infrastructure and stuff like that.

And Matt, this is something we don't see very often, that CapEx above 1, let alone 2, like we see here on SLU's chart. We don't see very often. I think this is to SLU's credit that over the last 8 or so reported years, they work hard to make sure they're taking care of their buildings and their campus, their campus facilities.

Yeah. And, you know, they may have actually gotten carried away a bit and tapered it back. I mean, they have COVID here. And then sort of a normal investment here at 1.3. That's about right. And you can see their capital, their prop, the value of their property, plant, and equipment. Again, those are the buildings, the computer equipment, all of that has increased by 15%. And that's right at the median. The median's 14%. So they're doing a great job of keeping their infrastructure up. And so that's perfect. Schools that are struggling financially, this is one of the first things they slash, right? They just push maintenance out. They don't replace computers. They make everybody use the their 10-year-old computer and Intel just literally won't boot, that kind of thing. Um, all right, so that's good. Sloop looks great. Um, and in fact, you're going to see the same thing with Marquette and, um, Creighton coming up. I'll start with the top here again, net income margin. I'll go a little faster on some of these, um, just because it's really the same story over and over again. Again, positive net income on purpose.

For the listeners, we did that on purpose. We chose a set of 3 strong Jesuit colleges as an example of colleges doing well. And so we— others can mimic that, that, that approach, man.

Yeah. And, and, you know, we've focused on, on this, the schools, the 1 out of 1,000, right, that are completely disastrous, right? And so, uh, this is what a normal school looks like, just to make it clear to everybody that this isn't just like some phantom thing. Alright, a normal school, again, positive net income margin every year, and Marquette's doing that perfectly. Beautiful. Again, they pull out their cash flow. They're, again, I double-checked that on the audit. They're pulling it out. If you leave it back in, all of their net income from operating activities would be above these numbers on a percentage basis. All of that's great. Their endowment. Let's take a look at endowment growth. I can't remember if this is Yeah, endowment growth is great. We're at +55% and that's good. That's above the median, below the 75th percentile, though. That's good. Their endowment is pretty big. It's again 2 times the size of their annual expenses, which is excellent. Top 75th percentile.

Matt, let me jump in. We don't— we're not really referencing it much this week, but what's that red line for in the graphics?

Yeah, the red line are closed schools. Not all of them, just this set. Here that closed in 2023 and 2024. I didn't really like strategically pick these other than I just wanted to pick some schools that closed in '23 and '24 that were 4-year colleges and that I had my AI extracted almost all of the data perfectly for all of these, so I didn't have to fill in a lot manually, uh, just to get a sense of like what does it look like to be bad, what does it look like to be good, what does it look like to be really bad. And the red line is the really bad. All right, change in endowment value. Appropriations. Yeah, appropriations are perfect. This is a board that knows what they're doing, right? Again, they're making sure these draws are perfect. They're right at the median almost every year. I can't argue with that. Revenues and expenses. Let's take a look at net tuition revenue first. Again, they're underperforming. Only up 1.3%. And again, this is a like flagship school. They shouldn't be suffering. Most of their peers are going to be up close to the 75th percentile. So again, this is a really good candidate to get one of my dashboards, dig into what's happening with their price strategy, the enrollment strategy. I actually know some of what's happened at this school under an NDA as well, but I can't— so I can't say exactly, but I have something in the past and I kind of know what happened here. At least I have some ideas, all driven by the data. I have no other knowledge other than what's in the data, what's happened with their enrollment funnel. But if they would like to know these things, they can reach out to me and I can make it clear or show them the data and they can make their own conclusions. All right, so net tuition revenue underperforming, still positive though. Let's take a look at revenue versus expenses overall. And again, their, their endowment's grown a lot, and a lot of schools with big endowments, it doesn't matter really what their net tuition revenue has done. Their endowment draws are going to be massive and probably more than compensate for that. And let's double-check that. Operating revenues. Yeah, operating revenues are up 17% almost. That's higher than normal expenses. All right, expenses are up 17%. Okay. So a well-run college, I just like to see these things moving together. That means the board is keeping track of, and that means the budget's accurate is basically fundamentally what it means. If they're able to move your spending almost in lockstep with your expenses, that means you're doing a good job at projecting forward what your expenses are going to be, what your revenues are going to be, and making sure that your revenues are a bit above your expenses. Really fundamental stuff. And all of the schools like these seem to do it. It's really rare to see a school with a decent amount of prestige to kind of not do this, but it happens and they end up on our show, right?

Yeah, right. Okay.

Endowment. Let's take a look at the building spend again. Marquette every year above 1 on CapEx relative to depreciation. Only 1 year below 1, and that was the COVID year, and everybody was below 1 almost. Well, it's not everybody, but a lot of schools, most schools were below 1 that year. So that's great. And you can see the results is that their value of their property, plant, and equipment is up 28% since 2016. That puts them probably, you know, it's below the 75th percentile, but certainly above the median. Excellent. And that's a school that probably already has a lot of property, plant, and equipment, right? And that percentage growth is, is excellent. All right, so again, no red flags here for Marquette. Everything looks great. And again, apparently there's some budget cuts happening. I can't see fiscal year 2024 on here quite yet. I'll be adding that soon. Perhaps '24 things change for them. You did see their net tuition revenue is kind of teetering, so that could be a concern that maybe hasn't been fixed. I'm just speculating that could be what's happening now that you're seeing with budget cuts now that they have seen fiscal year '24. Maybe the result wasn't great and the fall '24 class coming in. So you should be able to have a very, very precise estimate of what your net tuition revenue is going to be this year already. And so I'm suspecting maybe those numbers don't look great for them.

And Matt, just a subjective picture. So the president who led Marquette through this period, Michael Lavelle, died unexpectedly this past summer while on a trip to Rome. And so Marquette is now in the process of replacing Dr. Lavelle, but he was regarded as one of the top presidents in the history of that university, in large part because of what you just presented. He had really set up the board and his leadership team to do exactly the financial stuff that you're talking about here.

Yeah, sorry to hear that. But, um, yeah, the, they're going to be in good shape. Um, I would imagine, but it'd be interesting. Again, I'll let everybody know when I add the '24 data. I've already extracted over 200 audits for 2024, but there's over 1,000 schools. There's a bit of a cost for me to run the AI and extract all that data for schools for just 200, but I think I'll do it in batches. So I'll start doing this soon. Uh, last school is Creighton in Nebraska. You can already see the CapEx spend. This school is growing the, their infrastructure like crazy, 72%. But let's— that's a little bit of ahead of where I wanted to be. Uh, start with the budget. Okay, so finally, here's a school that doesn't take out their cash flow out of operating activities, and this is what it would typically look like. All of these numbers will be a bit— so the cash flow numbers here will be always a bit above the net income numbers. That's because of depreciation, which is a non-cash expense. All right. So all those are going to be a little bit higher. All right. So, yeah, excellent budget control. Again, all of these are positive net incomes, positive net cash from operating activities every year. That's excellent. Take a look at the endowment. They have a big endowment again, 1.6 times their expenses. Let's take a look at their spend appropriations and growth. By the way, when you have budget surpluses like that, where do you suppose the cash goes?

Into the endowment, I would guess.

Yeah, it goes into the quasi-endowment or the unrestricted part of your— the endowment typically. All right. And, uh, that's That's one other way you grow your endowment. And you can see that's what's happening here, probably. Again, I can't see contributions, but we can see they have these budget surpluses. All that cash has got to go somewhere. You want to sit it a bit. You don't want it sitting in a checking account, right? They're going to put it in a quasi-endowment, invest it. So endowment's up 66%. And this is a school I was thinking of. You can see why they're— part of the reason their endowment has grown quite a bit higher than the median. Again, median's 45%.

Oh, JAWS.

Their draws are lower than normal. And that's interesting. All right. So their endowment is getting not only a jolt from budget surplus contributions, they're probably getting certainly donor contributions. They're also pulling out less on average. So all of that's giving you this result, 66% growth, which is excellent. Not quite the 75th percentile, but excellent growth in the endowment. All right, let's take a look at net tuition revenue. Yeah, this is a— this school is doing excellent. Net tuition revenue is up 22.1%. That's well above the 75th percentile. Again, this is one of the schools, Gary, I think we need to focus. I might build one of my paid apps for Creighton and double-check what it— what have they done. To grow net tuition revenue because there's stuff we can learn, right? We learned Pace had a strategy to grow with master's programs, right? And some of those programs are growing like crazy. One which I'd never heard about, which was like a multidisciplinary master's program, all of a sudden goes from zero students to hundreds of graduates.

Um, that university had the same profile.

Yeah. Yeah. So again, this is a great one to learn from. And so I'd love to— I'm going to dig in when I have some time on that one. Let's see revenues versus expenses. Expenses.

Okay.

Revenues are up 27%. Expenses are up 24%. Again, they just moved in lockstep. This is the board doing its job. Again, the board needs to ensure that the budget is aligning with reality, is balanced, right? When revenues go up, so should spending, right? Keep those in line and fulfill the mission. It's perfect. Okay, let's see. Let's do the CapEx stuff. And I'll end on this, Gary, but we already saw this flashed up earlier.

Yeah, right.

Yeah. Look at it there in the 75th percentile. 1, 2, above the 75th percentile 3 years in a row here. 4, 4 years in a row, and then another 5th one almost every year in the 75th percentile for investing in their capital stock. Again, that's buildings, technology, equipment, all that.

So it's fair to say that Creighton does not have any leaky roofs. Is that fair?

Yeah, safe to say. And they probably have added a number of buildings since 2016, and I would imagine looks fairly new and well-kept. Um, but I haven't been on this campus, I don't believe. Uh, but yeah, they're up 72%. This, this school's growing and doing very well financially. Uh, excellent choice. Uh, no worries. All three of these, no worries financially for me. All right, I'll pass it back to you, Gary. Stop sharing.

So really, this is, you know, I talked to this before, we talked about this map before we started the show this morning. Three really strong schools. I'm going to show graduation rates here in a second. That's still, you know, 2 of the 3 have recent public media announcements saying we're having to cut stuff. And in my mind, tell me which, if you agree or not, these are colleges like others we've seen, Lindenwood and others, that are getting ahead of the game. Is that fair to say? By doing that?

That's possible. Um, yeah, I think we'll know more once I see the 2024 result. Um, and then I can see also, remember, we can get really early data on FAFSA submissions, so we'll sense of how big their fall 2024 freshman class was or just overall enrollment for fall '24, that might reveal what's happening. They could, they could have had a bad year recruiting-wise. '24 could have been a bad year financially. It's hard for me to say because I'm a bit behind where they're planning their budget right now on the app, and I'll catch up a whole year here in a couple of weeks for most schools. But yeah, it's probably the case. Although they need to be, there's a lot of pessimism about higher ed and most of it, 99% of it is not true, especially if you're a school like one of these 3 schools, they're not going to be affected by the enrollment cliff the same way that the other schools that we've studied on this program are going to be impacted, right? If you're at the top end of the market, a lot of these schools will have just the ability to reduce their admit, their selectivity a little bit, right? Just to deal with a cliff. There's a really minor tweak. Whereas other schools just don't have that, uh, slack, right? That sort of option in their toolkit.

And you see for these 3 colleges, you know, their tuition's probably— I'm sure it's a little bit higher on the list, but you're still looking at colleges that give something in the vicinity— these 3 colleges, something in the city— a 50% discount. So a $50,000 list price tuition nets out for a family at about $25,000 per year, I understand, plus room and board. But it's still a college that, you know, is going to graduate students. It is financially healthy. It's not— they're— none of these three are ever going to close in my lifetime for sure, and probably not your lifetime. They're just too financially solid. And I make the point, if you're a family member or student looking at this, one of the first things on your to-do list should be to check with Matt's app or with the College Viability app to make sure the colleges you're considering are financially strong. And will survive in the coming years. And Creighton University, Saint Louis University, and Marquette University certainly fit that bill. All right, let's go to the College Viability app and let's take a look at our 3 colleges. All right, and let's right away jump, as we always do, go to enrollment. And again, yes, each have been hit with enrollment declines, but if you look at the percentage, Matt, on the far right-hand side, it's a relatively small decline And that's over an 8-year period. And yet each of the 3 universities have strong enrollment, 10,000+ for 2 of the 3, and Creighton is almost— is approaching that 10,000 mark. So they've got lots of students, plenty of students to survive the occasional downtick, the occasional bad freshman year that lasts for 4 years, those kind of things. And even when you look at the pictures on the charts in the College Viability app, you know, Creighton has for the most part stayed flat. Really, they've all stayed flat. St. Louis University has been the one with the biggest jumps up and down. And let's prove what I've talked about. These are 3 really, really, really, Matt, strong colleges. Look at those 4-year graduation rates. Yeah, Matt, wouldn't it be nice if every week when we came to this section I could say, hey, look at how fabulous these graduation rates are? And no, yet those who watch this show on a regular basis know that's not what I do. And Matt has teased me often about always going to the 4-year graduation rates. States, sadly, kind of, because so many are so low. And yet the point I think I want to make here, Matt, is these are 4, 3 really strong colleges, financially well off, and yet look, at least 2 of the 3 are looking to really manage their cash in the form of balancing that budget to expenses, unlike too many, Matt, of the colleges that we look at. And these 3 at least graduate students, God bless them, because the average college, both public and private, in the United States graduates— Matt, you know this— less than half their students. These three, we need to create an award for graduation excellence, Matt, because not enough colleges do that. And in conjunction with that, let's take a look at tuition and fees because that's going to kind of reflect what Matt's talking about. And interestingly, each of the three— and you can see the three colleges on the left and the 8-year change in kind of the green-sided green section on the right Each of the three has been able to substantially— well, two of the three, well, one of the three depending how you look at it. Creighton has grown their tuition fee revenue substantially, Marquette a little less so, and really St. Louis University over the course of 8 years, Matt, is probably just flat. And that's probably one of the reasons they're looking at some cutbacks. They're just not comfortable with that revenue trend over the last 8 years. Marquette to a slightly lesser extent. And let's take a look at that institutional grants. And the funded, you know, even these three have strong— not as strong as I would have thought, but funded grants. You know, I've teased you about the Matt Hendricks Computer Scholarship. They have a lot of funded scholarships where Matt donates a million dollars. But let's look at the unfunded, all right? These are what you and I would commonly call merit aid, what you and I would commonly call most scholarships. These are unfunded, means there's no transfer of money from one fund to another to fund my child's scholarship. It's just a discount. Just like you and I get discounts on cars and clothes and food and houses and those kind of things. And Creighton has gone up from $69 million in unfunded discounts in 2015 to almost double, $110 million. $101 million at Marquette to $161 million. $120 million to $204 million. So each of these colleges has foregone substantial revenue over the last 8 reported years to keep those finances Stable. Now, not as stable as they would have liked, even though they're all three financially quite healthy. But that's in my mind, Matt. I'd be interested in your comments on this. In my mind, they're financially well off enough to do this, yet we see on the same unfunded report many colleges doing this without the financial wherewithal like these three. Is that fair?

Yeah, well, I think it's complicated looking at the discount rates because It's just like the, the sticker price is just totally a phantom thing, right? You can say whatever it is. It doesn't, I mean, I hope most consumers now know that that means zero, basically zero. Um, you got to get the award and see what the actual out-of-pocket price is going to be to go to each of these schools. And, you know, the Common App's made it really easy to do that too. It's really easy to apply to lots of schools, get, get your offers and compare, right? Yeah, I don't, you know, these are highly prestigious schools. There's just this trend. I mean, I would imagine Harvard has a similar growth in unfunded scholarships as well. I mean, it was, it'd be interesting to see Yale, Harvard and see, you know, just totally in my mind meaningless, whatever the sticker is, they can just make some number up, but the real price is somewhere, right? And the real price is around $20K, right? And that's, that's where it is.

Yeah, absolutely. In the last minute or two, let's take a look at program completions. And we do this each week, and I've got the 3 colleges up, and I'll just look at a couple. I've got 16 of the common iPads programs listed over here. This, this app of course is available, uh, commercially. I'll be adding the 2023 program completion numbers sometime by the end of the year and making— and that will be available in the 2025 version of the But again, biology, you know, all have strong numbers in the undergrad side. SLU has strong numbers on the grad side. Yeah, there's not so much. We always, Matt, like to look at business and marketing. And again, compared to many of the colleges that we see, these are monster numbers. Many colleges, too many, have single-digit numbers. And I beg this question almost every time, Matt: how strong can a program be if it only has a handful or two of students completing all the programs in business, marketing, and management compared to a college like Marquette or these other two that have strong growth in both the undergrad— strong completions in both the undergrad and the graduate market. Let's take a look at each college individually. We'll look at Marquette first, and this is a profile. Feel free to pause the video to look at these numbers, but you can see on the undergrad— on the undergrad line, bachelor degrees, where Marquette is strongest: biology, business, health professions, social sciences, being a Jesuit university. You can see the same thing on the graduate side— business. They've got a strong law program. I don't see that referenced here. Health professions. Look at math and science— 13 in the undergrad side, 7 on the grad side. Again, those are marginal numbers at best. You've heard me talk before, you want to look for colleges with the larger numbers and programs to decrease the risk that those programs will be cut while you or your student goes to those colleges. We'll quickly look at Creighton. Again, you can pause the video to look at this more, more closely. Biology strong, and then undergrad health professions. On the grad side, business and education, health professions a little bit. Again, pause the video as appropriate. And then lastly, we'll look at SLU, Saint Louis University, just down the street from me here in Saint Louis. And again, pause the video to look at these numbers. These are where they're strong, and by comparison And just a quick advertisement, when I do the 2025 version of the app, I will— I already set up so it includes market share, so you can see what market share in the business programs that SLU has compared to others in the market. So that will offer mostly advantages to colleges themselves, less, less so to the students and families themselves. So Matt, this is the first time that we've had really 3 strong colleges beyond any doubt. You know, that red line that shows the set of 9 colleges really did not come into play at all. What does that tell us? What generalizations can we make from looking at 3 colleges like this, particularly compared to the many we've looked at that aren't nearly as strong?

Yeah, a couple things come to mind. One is, uh, making generalizations about how higher ed's in trouble and, you know, everybody's struggling. Those are usually incorrect statements. It's a really small minority of schools that we have to dig up that are the ones that are completely off the rails. Another thing that comes to mind is, again, I think one of the most valuable things you can do with data analytics is to find schools like these 3 and study them, figure out what they do. What can we see in the data that they do? What can we learn from what they do outside of that? What does a board meeting look like? How does the board operate? How many board members do they have? Like everything. What are they doing? What, what kind of committees do they have? How do they manage the budget control? Who's involved in making the budget? All of the— how's the projection made? It's obviously accurate. How are they doing it? All of these things can be valuable for schools that just seem to be floundering. With just like basic things, projecting budget outcomes is a problem at some schools, clearly. So there's a lot to learn. Call these people up and say, hey, I saw your data is excellent. I'd like to learn more about what you guys do. Yeah, really simple stuff.

And of course, I'll have the contact information for both Matt and myself in the show notes. And then I guess I'll wrap up this, this show, Matt, with, with kind of a— not redundant this week, but this is— and Matt just did a good job of explaining this— this is the college's data. They submitted it. Anybody has access to it. Now, Matt has some technology tools he uses that others don't, that brings it all easily into play to be able to use— to create and use the visualizations that Matt shows. The data that you saw on the college viability apps are straight from iPads, but they represent history. They will show where a college has been. And Matt, you've heard me make this case many times: if your history is bad, it's really difficult to think your future is going to be much better because the market is so competitive, the financial pressure is so intense. If you need some guidance, that's Matt Hendricks on the left, I'm Gary Stocker on the right. Reach out to us, we'll set something up, we'll show you what goes on behind the scenes and the value we can provide your organization, no matter where you are, whether you're a SLU, Marquette, or Creighton, or someone with less financial strength. We'll show you some things we think can make a difference. So for Matt Hendricks, I'm Gary Stocker for the College Financial Health Show. For Tuesday, November 12th. We'll be back next week with 3 religious colleges that are on heightened cash monitoring. Matt, it's not going to look nearly as good next week as it does this week. And all those that listen, we're grateful for your time and effort. Send us your feedback at the email address that you'll see on the show notes, and we'll look forward to doing the show again next Tuesday.