In this analytical discussion, the speakers examine a college’s financial health after hiring enrollment vendor EAB. They note the sizable EAB contract—ranging from $400,000 to $600,000—and stress the need to verify that such spending delivers results. The core focus is the institution’s drastic reduction in net price for students (e.g., from roughly $22,000 to $6,400 for families earning about $110K) beginning in fiscal year 2019/2020, coinciding with EAB’s involvement. The speakers argue the data is reliable, indicating the college essentially “gave away the farm” to attract students. While freshman enrollment shows a modest uptick, overall full‑time equivalent (FTE) enrollment declines, and net tuition‑and‑fee revenue falls sharply from $5.7 million to $4.1 million—a loss of about $1.6 million in a single year. The conversation concludes that the institution likely received poor advice from the vendor, underscoring the importance of holding vendors accountable for financial outcomes.
Chapters
this EAB contract is rubbing me the wrong way because it's $400,000, $500,000. Um, and let's see, where is it down here? $600,000. And it looks like, yeah, there's their first year with EAB was this year and they paid them $186,000. Okay.
So their Roam-O-Mat has been down for the last 8 years.
Yeah. This is the issue. Make sure you check that your contracts are paying off. All right. I believe they hired EAB to help them grow their enrollment and ultimately grow their net tuition revenue. Right. And so keep this in mind. They first started working with EAB in fiscal year 2019. Perhaps the first year, maybe it was late in the fiscal year, perhaps the first year that they really started working with them is in 2020, where they started implementing their their strategy, right? It's your job to check that it's paying off, right? And hold your vendors accountable. Take a look at what happened shortly after they hired EAB. Let me just show you the one that first blush here, what the issue is, I think. Okay, see what happened here with their net price. So again, this is the price that they're charging to a student with a family income of $110K or so. And this is the price before EAB got involved. It's pretty normal, actually a little bit low. All right. Compared to their peer set. And then look what they did in fiscal year 2019 or 2020. They reduced the price all the way down to $6,400 from $22,000. So either this is a massive problem with the data reporting or they really, really reduced their net price more than I have ever seen. Going from $22,000 down to $6,000.
So if the data is correct, if the data is correct, they were essentially giving away the store to try and get students in the door.
And it's probably correct because here's $75K. They did the same thing.
Yeah.
Here's another family income. Exactly the same thing.
Yeah.
Here's another family income. Same thing. The chances of this being a data problem is almost zero. Okay. So, and it's multiple years where it's low. Yeah. So I believe their problem is really simple to explain here. What they basically did was give away the farm in 2020, coincidentally at the same time that EAB kind of came online. So I suspect they got some bad advice to reduce their net price and they did it, they did it and they did it in a huge way. And the problem is they more than slashed their price in half, right? And their revenue is going to fall because take a look at their their FTE enrollment also decreases at the same time that they did that. And let's take a look at their freshman class, first-time students. So from 2019 to 2020, they get a slight bump in freshman class. You're talking—
but they gave away the store to get those students in the door.
Yeah, they basically gave away all the revenue to get 10 students. And at the end of the day, um, what really matters though is their net tuition revenues. Take a look at that. Net tuition and fee revenue. And you can see, oh my, this is where they did it. Boom. They lose $5.7 to $4.1. They basically lost $1.6 million in one year because of that change in price.
