Matt demonstrates the Private College Advanced Financial Compass, a tool that generates 200 reports from 60 financial variables. It shows a college's metrics in multiple views, compares them against peer averages and closure risk benchmarks, and lets you add custom peer schools to see how your institution stacks up.
So Matt, a couple follow-up questions. Step us through how many reports are available through the Advanced Compass, and then you've talked about raw values per FTE. Step us through what the value of each of those are.
Yeah, this thing explodes really fast. You can see all these variables here. I don't even know how many it is. It's probably like, you know, this is coming from two sources, coming from the audits and 990s, and I have all of these variables. It's Man, I don't know. This is like—
It's 200 last time I counted.
Yeah. So yeah. So it explodes really fast because I think you have like 60 or so here. And then for each, for each variable, you get different views. You get the raw value. You can do per FTE. So you're dividing it by, so you're sort of scaling it by how big your school is. You also get percent change over time. So it's another view of like, what is it? What's a normal growth rate for a particular variable? And then you also get it relative to your revenue, right? It's another important way to look at it. I mean, some schools have, you know, like Harvard, they don't have as many students and a massive revenue, or, you know, got other schools that have a lot of students and not so much revenue. So it's really important to benchmark things versus revenue and FTE. So at the end of the day, yeah, you're probably over, I don't know, 200 or so. Yeah. You're getting 4 times 60 or so is sort of a rough number of reports that you have here.
And, and then if you would, Matt, explain the lines on the graph.
Yeah. And then so each variable, all the views, percent change relative to your FCE, all these, all of these are, you're not just having, so what it would look like if you just did it for your own school is this, right? And you may be tempted to say, oh, this looks normal or this doesn't look right. It's hard to say unless you compare it to the median of all schools. Well, here's the median of all schools, right? Well, the median sometimes can— like, if you're off the median, for example, right here, you might say, well, how far are we off, right? And to get a sense of that, you need to kind of get a sense of what the distribution is off the median for all schools. And so to add that context, you get the 25th percentile, 75th percentile. Shooting in here. Um, and I'll go back, I'll go to the net income margin just because that is the— it's one I give for free because it's so important that people know this. And, uh, yeah, you can— you don't even have to pay me, you've got all this data right here. Um, so if somebody asks what's the normal net income margin, you got it right here, right? Um, again, I'll just show you Cedar Crest. Right. If you only benchmark against yourself, yeah, they're doing worse than they used to do. But is it, is it catastrophic? I don't know. It doesn't really look like it, right? You have the national median now. It's starting to look— yeah, this is pretty bad. We're off the median here quite a bit. The median is about a 1% loss in '24 and we're at 7% loss, right? Whoops, I didn't mean to do that. I think I can go home right here. Okay. So how far off the median are we? Well, you add in the 25th percentile, and you can see they're right at the 25th percentile. So they're worse than 75% of schools on that income margin, right? So this is all really important to build the story of what normal is and how far they're away. All right. And then another thing is I just added in— I'll take some of this other stuff off. You might just get really extreme with it and say, well, what did the schools look like that closed? Right? And that's what the red line is here. Yeah, they've got some room to, to reach the close set. And of course you want to avoid that at all costs, but certainly this trajectory over '21 to '23 is right in that.
Good.
Yeah.
And then, and then finally we do the blue line for the target college, but you've got another comparison field up there too. Can you briefly step us through that?
Yeah, I can add another school here. I'll just randomly pick one, Adrian College in Michigan, and they'll be on here in green and I can put other schools as well. So we have Adler already, right? Oh no, Adler was the other school that we did.
That's what I did earlier. Yeah.
Yeah. So we can put this green line then will be the average of those two schools, Adrian and Adler. You can see, and this is a good way to compare to your peers. If you're not going to do the Strategic Compass analysis, which does all this automatically and really cleanly and rigorously, you can enter any peers that you want in here and get a sense of how you compare, right? So I'll, I'll just put some other school in Pennsylvania. I don't know, um, I can do that by just doing comma PA and find some Pennsylvania schools. Here's Albright. Okay, so Albright's been in the news, right?
And you can see they probably lose a lot of money.
So, uh, it's not funny, but it is pretty catastrophic how out of line their net income is with, uh, just any, any kind of comparison you want to make. Close set, median, 25th percentile, 1 percentile. I mean, if I put like the 1 percentile on here, this might be them. So. Right. Not the best one to compare yourself to, but you're certainly doing better than Albright. I'll just do another one. Yeah. Yeah. Not, not ideal again, but doing better than Cedar Crest on net income margin.
