The State of College Finances: What You Need to Know - College Financial Health Show April 8, 2025.

It is Tuesday, April 8th, 2025. Welcome back, everybody, to the Weekly College Financial Health Show, where each week we look at financial data, we look at enrollment data, graduation rates, majors completion, and much, much more in the College Financial Health Show. Hi, my name is Gary Stocker, founder of College Viability.

I'm Matt Hendricks, founder of Perspective Data Science. And I hope I have the pronunciation right. We're looking at 3 colleges again, and it's not just looking at whether your school is financially viable. We're going to offer every show some data-driven insights that allow the schools to focus in on things that might be some pain points to check in on. But today's schools are 3 schools. Azusa— did I say that right, Gary? Azusa Pacific?

I think so.

Yeah. Yeah. Milliken University in Illinois. In Illinois, Wesleyan University, obviously also in Illinois. And as we always do, I'm going to share my screen and show you the audit data combined with some 990 data and show you some insights you're probably not going to see anywhere else for these schools. I'm going to combine the discussion of Azusa. All right. So as we usually do, we start with the— there's a lot of lines going on here. Let me just show you. Let me take some of these lines off. Show you what's going on. Okay, so the dark line is the median of all schools, and this is where you're seeing net income margin. And let me make sure it's zoomed in. Yeah, net income margin, which basically is the profit margin for the school in lay terms. And ideally, this would always be positive, right? You can see the median's always positive, positive, positive, positive, big positive with COVID positive again, and then negative, negative. Part of that probably has to do with the spending some of this money back here, uh, and also maybe increased financial stress happening in the last couple years. Um, but yeah, a healthy school is going to be positive every year, almost every year, with an average of about +1%. Um, so you can see the two schools that we have here, Azusa and the comparison mean school here, the green line is Illinois Wesleyan. So Illinois Wesleyan, uh, neither school is good in terms of net income margin, and the reason is we've got a big negative number here negative, negative, negative. There the COVID boost is, but then right back to negative, negative, negative. That's unsustainable. As we've mentioned many times on the show, eventually you'll run out of money, your buildings will crumble if your net income margin is not positive, unless there's something wrong with your accounting, which is, I guess, a possibility as well. But really need these to be positive. And there's just differences in runways though. Some of these schools can last for hundreds of years going negative like this, others a couple years, uh, or even one. Uh, but Azusa, same thing. We have negative, one slight positive there, negative, positive, negative, negative, negative, negative, negative. All right, so both schools have 7 out of 9 years here since 2016 as negative net income margin. That's not good. And as I mentioned, not sustainable. But I believe they both have fairly long runways. But the focus really is going to be on what can they do to fix it. And one, one thing, one problem that I see here too is, is if you look at their endowments, the common thing that schools do that are financially struggling is just draw a lot of extra money off of their endowment more than normal, which will make their endowments not grow very fast. All right, so you can see both of these schools have that problem. So this is Illinois Wesleyan. Their endowment's up only 27% since 2016. You might say that's really good, but it's actually not. The median school is up 57% since 2016. Same thing for Azusa, only up 40%. Of course, much better than Illinois Wesleyan, but still, that's not great. What it means basically in simple terms is that other schools are going to be able to outcompete you on price. Going forward, if their endowments keep growing faster than yours, they'll be less tuition reliant relative to you going forward, which is a problem. It'll be a problem for these schools going forward in that they're going to be more tuition dependent than their— a lot of their competitors are because their endowments grew. Um, so one question is, why do these endowments grow slowly? We can see that what I was talking about, I believe, with both of these cases Yes. What you're seeing here is an endowment, the percentage of the endowment appropriated for expense. So every— like a retired person, right? Schools take money out of their endowment to pay for expenses, same as a retired person would do, or a very rich, rich person would do. The key to that, though, is that you don't take too much, right? Otherwise your endowment can shrink, your retirement savings can shrink, which neither of these are having that case, although that that does happen. But there, what's happening with these cases, their endowment is still growing, but it's just growing at a slow pace. And you can see the main reason here, at least one of the reasons, is these are huge endowment draws, 6.5%, 7.3%, 8%, 6.2%. And Illinois Wesleyan had some very large draws back here in the early, late 2018, '19, '20. Yeah, so that's explaining a good chunk of the slow endowment growth, and really common for schools that are struggling financially. You can see the close-set schools here, they right towards the end of their lives usually started drawing a lot of money from their endowments above the median, but even far less than what these schools are drawing. One of the things that brought this down though, I think, is some of these schools were just borrowing from their endowments, or they just didn't have a very big endowment that they could draw draw from what these two schools do. Okay, so another thing you'll see with financially stressed schools, and then I'll go into some solution here, is the CapEx spend can be particularly low relative to depreciation. There's just not a lot of money going around. They'll tend to put off maintenance or even replacing old machines and stuff like that on campus. And you'll typically see that for long periods of time where the capital expenditure the amount spent on property, plant, and equipment is less than depreciation for many years in a row. That would make this ratio less than 1. And that's not normal. The median school usually has a ratio about at 1 or above. And you can see this is true of these, both of these schools, many years of CapEx below 1. And then all of a sudden, a surge in Illinois Wesleyan. They must be building something here. But again, still for Azusa, always below 1 every single year on this, on this, um, time frame.

Is it possible that Illinois Wesleyan is building— is it possible that Illinois Wesleyan is building something?

Yeah, that's what I suspect here. There's probably a building going up here '23-'24, which is actually a really interesting question. Uh, when you see the next slide, let's just take a look at their, uh, enrollments. Okay, so Illinois Wesleyan's enrollment's down about 14% since 2016. And down 40% for Azusa. So yeah, I mean, I think an interesting question to ask, an important question to ask is if we are building new buildings, what's the why? Are we trying to get bigger or are we just replacing some old buildings finally that are just crumbling or what? So understanding that would be important. I don't think it's probably— it's probably not a great idea to be trying to grow the campus because the campus is actually shrinking in terms of enrollment. So that math gets very tricky.

Yeah.

You get more buildings and fewer revenue-generating students, the math gets very tricky.

Yeah, Mitch, you've often, you've often said it takes, when you get a bad enrollment year, it takes at least 4 or 5 years to replace that. What if you've had 8 bad enrollment years?

Yeah, yeah, clearly there's a new trend that started here for Azusa about 2020. But yeah, this is gradual decline in enrollment for Illinois Wesleyan as well. Take a look at net tuition revenue and change since 2016. Yeah, both of their net tuition revenues are suffering. Um, interesting, remember the enrollment for Illinois Wesleyan was only down 14%, but their net tuition revenue is down 21%. So that should tell you there's two ways your net tuition revenue can go down. You can lose enrollments or your price can go down, or both, right? So I suspect we're going to see a price issue here when I flip this over to net tuition revenue per student and 28% decline here for Azusa. This means their price has probably gone up. So let's see what that actually happens. If one way you can get a good sense of the, the price that students paying to go to a school is take a look at net tuition revenue per student. I know it's not exact, but it's a very good proxy of the price the school charges. Um, and you can see right here the, uh, exactly what I just said. Uh, Azusa's price has gone up to $24K almost, and it used to be about $20K. So up about $4,000 per student on average. And by comparison, Illinois Wesleyan's price has fallen from— well, at its peak it was about $23,000 At 2016, it was $22,000. Now it's down to $20,000. So that explains why you're seeing a bigger loss in net tuition revenue for Illinois Wesleyan relative to its change in enrollment. Enrollment's only down— I think the numbers were enrollment's down 14%, net tuition revenue is down 20%. The reason that's a bigger loss in net tuition revenue is their price has actually fallen as well. And the opposite for Azusa. One interesting— again, another interesting policy question. A very important policy question is, are these prices too high? Both of these schools are shrinking, right? There's a lot of— this is a very, very competitive marketplace right now in particular. And if you're charging $20,000 per student on average for tuition when the average school's charging about $15,000, it raises important questions about, are you just pricing your school too high, right? And if they're seeing— there's a lot of ways to dig into this, and we can do it in a strategic compass, but I think it's definitely worth a deep dive out into the pricing strategy. Both of these schools have very high net price, it looks like, on average.

It's all just private colleges.

Yeah, this is relative to all private colleges, but, um, you know, they're above the 75th percentile here, so I mean, uh, getting up there in price. So I think it's definitely worth looking into, and if we had an advanced, uh, or a strategic compass, I could get a sense of what they look like compared to their peer set. Um, And see, perhaps, you know, especially with a really sharp decline in enrollments, it's not common to see that the net price is also going up unless that's the causal factor, right? But usually schools respond by reductions. This is like reverse causality here. Usually see the other causal link, right? Or, oh my gosh, we're losing students. Let's reduce the price. But maybe it's the other link for Azusa, right? We've increased the price and that's causing us to lose students. So they should check into that. It could be an issue. All right, there you go. It's policy questions to check into. It's not that hard to check into this. Like I said, we got the Strategic Compass that can do it in a matter of one day and get a sense of what the net price looks like relative to peers and other peer competitors. So pricing, staffing. Let's take a look at staffing for these schools. So those are revenue side. Policies we just talked about, pricing strategy, enrollment strategy. It could be that their yields are very low because the prices are high, um, but you got to dig in more and figure that out. Let's take a look at employees per FTE. I see something here, Gary, for Illinois Wesleyan. Yes, 116 staff.

They tried to cut back on employees.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, more staff than employ— than students generally is, uh, not going to work out very well financially, and it's probably not necessary. I mean, some of the best schools on the planet have far more students than they do staff. Um, I know there's some economies of scale and stuff like that which needs to be dug into, but, um, this doesn't look right. Okay, even for a small school like Illinois Wesleyan, typically see small schools right after the 75th percentile. Yeah, that doesn't look right. So again, you want to look at staffing here. This is a A very important question to ask at this school. And the other question maybe to ask is Azusa, their staffing looks low. Like, how do they feel understaffed? Maybe they have a lot of contractors, but they are a California school, so that might actually be optimal because the pay there is so much higher. So we, one way we can look at this is to look at salary, wage, and benefits spending per FTE. And there you go. Susan's spending on payroll is actually high even though they're low-staffed. This is so expensive in California. So they may be doing the best they can given that labor market. But again, Illinois Wesleyan, just very high payroll costs per FTE. One way to think about this is each student is paying $20K Towards payroll. I mean, that's one, one way to think about it. Yeah, it's not exactly right, but there's other revenue sources, of course, but asking your students to pay $20K towards payroll is a lot because you got to cover the building costs. You got to heat the place, cool the place, right? All the other expenses that go along with running a university that have nothing to do with salaries. Typically salaries are actually only about half. I can show you that. of total spends, salaries are usually about half of the spend. So really, you're asking your students to pay about $40K just to cover everything on campus. About— I had the math right there. So yeah, long story short, check, check staffing at both of these schools, more so at Illinois Wesleyan than at Azusa. Contractor spend. So here's some other things to check.

This is one of Matt Hendricks' favorite topics, contractor spend.

Yeah, I mean, well, it's like you could see so long ago the history of this whole analysis was I could see a school that had a ton of spending, right? But it wasn't on staffing. So it's like, where the heck is it? I can see all this money going somewhere and it's not going into payroll. And lo and behold, turned out it was going into contractors, which is a huge expense. At some schools, and they don't really seem to have a good handle on it, and there's not a great way to benchmark it until I brought in the 990 data. And so here we go. So both of these schools have a high number of contractors, but let's normalize it relative to FTE. Azusa's contractor spend is actually a bit low. So again, I don't think that's ideal for a school in California. Again, you probably, given the labor market there, want to bring in contractors and reduce your staffing. So they might look at ways to substitute that high payroll spend with more contractor spend, potentially increase efficiency that way. But you can see again, Illinois Wesleyan, just, you know, a couple of things here, very, very high contractor, number of contractors per FTE. And there's this surge that's happened in the last couple of years that they may not be fully in, you know, understanding. So again, this could be the construction that we saw earlier, Gary, with the CAPEX. So they went from 12 contractors to 40, but that doesn't mean it's not an interesting finding, right? Again, like, why is the school building?

Right, right, right.

Like, that's a question to ask. The school's shrinking, right? Uh, you definitely— you probably don't need more square footage, right? In fact, you may need less. Um, so those are questions I think the board and, you know, faculty alumni, administrators should be asking. All right, so that's the contractor side. We can look at specific contracts for both of these schools and try to give more guidance on what they might look at in particular. Start with Illinois Wesleyan because, because they had the high contractor spend numbers. Let's see what we have for contractors here for Wesleyan. All right, Illinois Wesleyan, and I see a lot of color here, Gary. What does that mean? It means the contract is high for—

Color is not a good thing, especially dark colors.

Yeah, means this amount per FTE is relatively high for this contract type for food service. Yeah, that's $2,800 per student, and normal is about $1,500 per student. Again, not guaranteed that, you know, there's some context to figure out, of course, but I can give you lots of examples, and we can do that in a second, where the contract is much lower for a very similar school in terms of number of boarding and all that. So I would say, you know, really easy, double-check this contract. This looks a bit high at $4.2 million, and even looks high compared to their own standards. If they just go back and look at the 2022 contract, spend, it was $3.7 million, and now all of a sudden it's $4.3 million, and they have fewer students, right? So that's another question to ask. Why did the contract go up so much with fewer students? Might be worth shopping around for other prices or just renegotiating this down. I think vendors are open to that, and I've experienced that firsthand with, uh, so yeah, here we do see the construction, right? But again, take out the construction contracts and double-check First, ask about the construction. Why are we spending so much on construction here in '22 and '23? Looks like they are building a new building. Yeah, yeah, potentially, or it could be a massive remodel or something like that, but a bunch of contractors in here. Double-check that. The IT spend contract looks high as well. I would scrutinize that. It's almost $1 million. It's higher than normal for that kind of contract. Security looks fine. Okay, so lots of stuff to check out here. Also check the numbers. There's that surge in contractors that it's hard to believe that they would all be construction contractors, but it's possible. Double-check that. So I was going to show Azusa, double-check that. Again, lots of policy options to look into here. And nice thing about Azusa, check a look at their contractors. They all look Good. All right, no color here means no color. All about that. Yeah. And you see their amount per FTE is $700. That's very low. Probably have a lot of, uh, maybe online students or graduate students, um, kind of see that case. But, uh, definitely worth checking in if you're Illinois Wesleyan. All these contracts look fine to me, uh, at first blush, but, um, One thing I will say is this vendor, as we said in the previous shows, not to pick on a particular vendor, but this vendor tends to be quite expensive relative to competitors. So you might actually price shop this anyway. And there's this questionable increase here again from $2.4 million in '22 to $4.7 million. What caused that? That's a really interesting question to answer. Could be simple that they started like halfway through the year or something. Double check. Did they have a different food service vendor in '21? No food service vendor in '21. So it's possible that they started halfway through the year here, which explains that. But at least shop that. I would shop this, right? Like I said, Bon Appétit and what was the other one? Parkhurst tend to be more expensive than peers like Sodexo. What were some of those cheaper ones that I Fresh Ideas, I think, was one of them. That tends to be priced really well.

Yeah, it was. You're right, Matt. You're right. Yeah.

And maybe there was like Aladdin or Pioneer, I think, was the other one. It doesn't hurt to go get another estimate, right? And then just say, hey, like, current vendor, even though we have a contract, maybe that's another couple of years, I'd like you to get closer to this price. And they'll probably work with you, right? Maybe it means fewer you know, take the white linens off of the tables or something like that. But, you know, those are strategic decisions, right? It's not necessarily a bad thing to do that. It's going to save you some money and the school has financial problems, so why not start there? I'm going to move on to Milliken. Okay. And so you take a look at the net income margins first. And income margin. And it looks weird, right? So one thing I noticed right away, there's super volatile, right? Up, down, up, down, up, down, and then way down. Uh, that usually is a good indicator that on their audit they're not doing operating— separating operating expenses and revenues from total revenues and expenses. And it's easy to verify that on the app. I'll just show you that functionality here. You can click on the audit And what they— what I'm looking for is in the statement of activities, if they've split off, and they haven't. You can see it here. They have all the revenues here and all of the expenses. Typical statement of activities will have another section here that's non-operating revenues and expenses, and then they'll have change in net assets from operating activities or operations here in isolation. And they're not doing that. They're combining everything, which is problematic. Rates, the volatility you see in the net income. So when you, when you have a case like this, typically better to look at cash flows, all right, to get a sense of their operating result. So net cash from operating activities is not going to suffer from that sort of volatility in the market returns and all that. It's only going to focus on operating activities. And you can see the red flag here, a negative net cash from operating activities is not good. And that means basically they're not generating enough cash from operations to cover the operating expenses. One caveat though, sometimes you'll have to see if a school tends to get a lot of money from investing activities. That means usually that they're pulling their endowment draws out and putting it in this section, but they're not doing that. It doesn't appear. So this is a problem. They have a negative operating margin here in '24 and probably other years. And we can double-check that on the app. Do net cash operating cash flow margin. All right, and so they had a bunch of negatives— 2, 3 here— got a bunch of positives, and then this negative that we just saw here. Um, again, not ideal, but it doesn't look to be catastrophic since they had a bunch of positive years here. But I think there could be a problem here. If you look at their endowments, what do you suppose is happening here? Again, Gary, their endowments down 17%, and that's a red flag because again, that could be that these results up here are being masked by massive draws from the endowment that are showing up in net cash from operating activities, as I showed you. And making that number look like it should. And that is, I believe, what's happening here. Yes, that is one of the highest endowment draws over history that I've ever seen. 16%, 11%, 17%, 18%. It's no wonder their endowment is shrinking. You would need like a 25% return every year on the stock market just to break even. Uh, plus the contribution.

And that is bad. We looked at a lot of colleges drawing their endowment with big numbers, but I've never seen one that big either, Matt.

Ah, and, um, it's becoming potentially a legal problem for them. And so if you're at Milliken, you need to get tuned into this now. Uh, they have on page 45 of their audit— let me just draw your attention to something. So they're making these massive draws on the endowment So this is a really important line of disclosure in the audit. They have original gift values, restricted donor gifts of $54 million, but those gifts are now only valued at $39 million, which means that their endowment is underwater by almost $16 million at the end of fiscal year 2024. Okay, so that may not be a huge deal. But I see a lot of endowments that are underwater, but that's a big underwater value, especially given that the school only has $40 million in revenue and is running a deficit. It's not clear how that's going to be repaid. And these deficiencies are not part of market fluctuations. Their returns have been positive. It's all about those big appropriations, I would imagine, unless they're really bad at investing because the market's been crushing it. and every school's endowment's way up if they just invest normally. Um, I could check their returns, but this is a self-inflicted thing, it appears to me. They're very, very big draws, um, which opens them up to legal potential lawsuits from donors, um, and maybe even the Attorney General's Office. So this is something that's going to need to be paid down very fast, um, and They're planning to pay it back with donor contributions. It's kind of a curious strategy because you've already violated the donor agreements and then you're going to ask them to give you more money. I don't want to overemphasize this, but this is not good and definitely needs to be scrutinized by the board and, and all stakeholders, especially given what's happening right now in the stock market, Gary. If the stock market is down 20% this year, this underwater endowment could go, you know, $30 million at the end of this year just from the market being down, and which would actually make this statement up here true finally, where the, you know, the market fluctuations causing this. But it's mostly the big draws during good years of the market. And now we might have a reckoning in the market this year, which could be catastrophic if they're underwater $30 million on this endowment at the end of this year. That could be pretty damaging. Um, and I made a note of that. The market's down this year, uh, that underwater endowment's likely to also grow, that underwater portion, and that could be a, a problem. Um, all right, let's see. Specific contracts, staffing. Yeah, they have a lot of the same issues. They have staff, high staffing to check out. So if they want to balance their budget, that's one option. I think on the revenue side, net tuition per student. Yeah, they both have declining enrollment and declining price. So let's show that. So net tuition revenue. Oops. Tuition. So here's the revenue side strategy or just some things, some facts to help you develop strategy. So one, first of all, their net tuition revenue is down quite a bit, from $30 million to $22 million, $23 million. That's, that's up quite a drop in percentage terms. I think, I mean, I could give you the exact percent, but it's not—

Look how close that is to the red line for closed colleges.

Yeah, let me just do net tuition. I want to show you the percent change. Yeah, it's down 24% and a sharp drop. In just the last couple years. So that's problematic. Probably some small classes coming in here combined with a lower price. So let's take a look at net tuition revenue per student. Take a look at— watch at '21-'22 if the price drops sharply there. Uh, net tuition revenue per student. And yes, it does. $3,000 price drop. I wonder if they tried a tuition reset here and just kind of bungled it with the actually reducing the net price. That's not good. That's a really sharp drop in net price in just one year. So you see the catastrophic effect that had on net tuition revenue. Not good. And, and here's the thing, check if their enrollment went up. I mean, it's easier to check the freshman class in the Strategic Compass, but if this big drop here in the net price didn't give you a much, much bigger freshman class, then I would say immediately bring it back up. That happened actually at the school I was at and has happened at several that I've seen since. Per FTE employees, again, not as high as Illinois Wesleyan, but this is definitely— there's some room to bring this down. And you can sell it to your staff too, right? I mean, people are reasonable generally. If you have far higher number of staff per FTE than what is normal, then, you know, Sell it to them. Yeah. Contractors.

Yeah.

Let's take a look at a specific— their actual numbers of contract looked okay, but let's take a look at— here's this Aramark contract. I actually made a— I just made a post about this. It looks like this Aramark contract is a bit high. Yeah, they've got one for food service and one for maintenance with Aramark. Interesting. And a construction one. That must be some maintenance. But let's take a look at this maintenance contract in particular. That is suspicious. Again, may not be— I don't want to do 2023. I want to do— let's do greater than. Let's do the last 2 years. Greater than. 2021. All right, and I want to focus on this maintenance contract. All right, so I just made a post about this. So notice the school shrunk quite a bit from 2022 to '23, but yet the maintenance contract has gone up by a million dollars. Uh, it already was high for their size in 2022, and now it's much higher. $2,000 per student just for maintenance and grounds. Again, it's possible that this is okay, but you need to dig, right? This is easy to check. Get some price quotes, double-check if you actually need to have beautiful maintenance ground, beautifully maintained flowers and all that. This could be an easy place to cut a million bucks if we can just go back to the contract in 2022. It could be more complicated than that, than I'm able to see with this, but It's up to the staff at the school, the board, to make it happen, right? Do a deeper dive research on this. Get some price quotes and there, you don't know, there could be $1 million here to save or more because this contract was already high to begin with. So I double check this contract, talk to AirMark about how you might bring it down below, below even $2.5 million maybe, right? Just see what you can do. Maybe they can do fewer. MOSE or something like that. All of that is going to add up over time. There you go.

So we're looking at the 2025 College Viability App, and let's take a look at our 3 colleges. And as Matt well knows, I always start with graduation rates because we pay colleges to graduate students, not just to have them attend classes. And again, these 3 are not as bad as I've seen. Matter of fact, Asuza, Azusa and Illinois Wesleyan do a decent job. Illinois Wesleyan in particular does a pretty good job of graduating students. And Matt Milliken, for all the financial issues, they don't even— on average over the last 6 reported years, they don't even graduate half of their students. And you know, Matt, that's going to get them on my— take them off my Christmas card list, because you got to graduate students to be able to, to be, you know, to be a fully functioning college. You got to graduate students. Let's take a look at a different perspective on enrollment. Matt took a quick look at this, and I always look at the change. And we can see that for the enrollment for these 3 colleges, that all 3 have had declining enrollment. Not a big deal. We can see Azusa has suffered— what, Matt, that looks almost 50% loss of students in the last 6 reported years. And again, the data is from— seeing this is just data the colleges themselves submit. When it all goes down, maybe it goes down from year to year. And we can see— look at this, Matt— the red numbers indicated lower value from the previous year. After 2016, which was the base value, every single year Azusa enrollment went down. Not a good scenario. I know they have some issues. I've seen some media about Azusa. They have some issues as well. But this is the data. This is the Moneyball era. We can tell you whether you're a college president, a board member, faculty member, student, family, local community leader, the data is there to say, hey, there's an issue here. And you saw Matt delve into great depth on these colleges, and I'm just touching on the surface. Let's look at one other item. Let's look at tuition fees. And again, look at this. Now, you shouldn't fall out of your chair because we just saw, Matt, that all three had decreasing enrollments. There's different reasons for that, for sure, and Matt touched on those. But look at this. I mean, Matt, if you and I owned a coffee shop and we lost 30% of our revenue from— for the last 6 years, we probably still wouldn't have a coffee shop because we wouldn't have enough money to keep that coffee shop going. Same thing here. And again, not, not unique, not special. Way, way, way too many private colleges and many public colleges have decreasing tuition and fee revenue over the last 8 reported years. Enough with finances, enough with enrollment, enough with endowments. Let's take a look at actual majors that are completed for each of our 3 colleges. And so this is the 2025 college majors completion app, and we're looking at our 3 colleges. And this is the internal market share. I've got Illinois Wesleyan, I've got Millikin, I've got Azusa down here somewhere. And we look at this to see where our colleges are weak. And Illinois Wesleyan, we kind of look at this top section. What are they doing in chemistry business? What are they doing in the anthropology business? They're— first of all, the numbers are low. And it's a really small percentage of their internal market share. I'll show you external market share here in a second. We also look at this to make sure colleges aren't too heavy. Anything over 30% concerns me. We don't see that here at all, so they've got a decent balance on some of these majors in the bottom. You can pause the video to take a look at this more closely if you're interested in what's going on at Illinois Western. Same approach at Millikin. You can see where they are weak, you can see where they have chances to grow, and we can start looking at the bottom. And again, we can go from 2020, their market share in business administration was 12% internal, 29 students, essentially flat over the last 4 reported years, and same thing for the market share. But again, Matt, this is data that you can use to say, hey, where am I— if I'm, if I'm at— where's this one at— if I'm at Milliken University, where am I getting some growth and where am I not getting some growth? Either to look at doing partnerships with other colleges are actually looking at where these colleges should be ones that I need to get out of, or whether these, these colleges, these majors are ones I should get out of, or whether these majors are ones I should look to grow my percent market share internally and externally. Same thing for Azusa. But the other thing I wanted to show, I went to Illinois. So let's look at market share, and I think it's Illinois, the state of Illinois, bachelor's degrees for accounting and accounting-related services. Again, there are 60-some-odd majors or common majors that we pulled out of the IPEDS data. We can see market share. This is for all Illinois colleges, right? Millikin and Illinois Wesleyan are part of those. And you can see who's dominant. And we can look for one of our two colleges, and it may take a while. There's Illinois Wesleyan, has 2% of the Illinois private college market share in accounting. Millikin has 1%. And Matt, give me your favorite major. Econ. Economics, right? Let's look at economics because that's Matt's background. Same thing, we can now see economics. And again, you're not going to be surprised, the University of Chicago, Northwestern, DePaul all dominate. But again, we're looking at our colleges. Illinois Wesleyan, yes, 14 students graduated, but in terms of market share, that's really small. We can even look at a bigger picture of that and see the market share. We can see the dominant players and we can see the less dominant players. Look at the data, do with it what you want, but at least look at the data. And then finally, let's take a look at growth, and it's going to be a handful of colleges. So let's look at the bachelor's degree, and astronomy is not a good enough one. Let's go to maths, economic, economy, economics. And we can see a set of 5, 3 colleges here, uh, actually 5 colleges. And you can see what the trend has been. University of Chicago has grown their econ business Northwestern is flat, and you can see the other two, the three listed aren't really much of a player in terms of overall graduation of majors in economics at the bachelor's level. So, Dr. Hendricks, we do this every week. Next week we'll be doing our 100th, the review of our 100th college. So it looks like we're on a pace to do about 150-some-odd private college financial health reviews and maybe some public colleges in the coming weeks and months. It's the Moneyball era. I think I mentioned that earlier. Use the data. Don't use the data. Question the data if you want. You're welcome to do that. But it's, it's an— if you're choosing to stay with your internal data only, trust me, you may not believe me, but I do this every day, day in and day out. You're going to fall behind. Matt, final comments before I wrap this up?

Yeah, yeah, again, just emphasizing looking at your own internal data. Remember the contract I flagged at Millikan looks like they've had Aramark doing their maintenance contract for at least 9 years, probably much longer. And it looks like they're just giving them a bump every year, right? Like, so that's the symptom of just looking back at what you did last year, add some inflation, right? But the problem is the original contract way back in the day was probably too high, right? And they wouldn't know that unless you compare across schools, right? So, um, this is the way to sort of break that, that trend.

So Matt, next Tuesday when we do our 100th show, should we wear a shirt and tie? Should we kind of dress up for our 100th show? 100th College Review, not 100th show, our 100th College Review.

Uh, I like the relaxed apparel.

Right. Okay. All right. We'll stick with that. Hey, for those watching live or for those watching the recorded version and the recorded version, always has some enhanced graphics. We zoom in, give you a better feel for things. We thank you for making the time. We appreciate you looking at that. Send your feedback. If you're from one of the 3 colleges we did today, or from any of the colleges we've done, the last 97 I guess it would have been, drop me a note. I'll give you the contact information. We'll welcome you to come on the show to look at your data, talk about your data, give you some ideas to kind of do that stuff. And if you just want to look at it privately, drop me a note, get in contact, information in the show notes. And I'll set up a private demo to show you all the tools available. You can make the decisions which will, which ones will help you the most. So for Dr. Matt Hendricks, I'm Gary Stocker. Another episode of this, of the College Financial Health Show has ended. We'll be back next Tuesday and we'll do our 100th college. Until then, so long.