The State of College Finances: What You Need to Know - College Financial Health Show April 15, 2025.

It is Tuesday, Tax Day, April 15, 2025. You've got your taxes done, why not look at some more finances? Hi everybody, Gary Stocker with College Viability. We're looking at 3 private colleges today. The first 2 are in Massachusetts— Springfield College and Williams College in Massachusetts. And the third we're looking at is Carleton College in Minnesota. And Matt Hendricks, what do you have for us today, sir?

[Speaker:MATT_HENDRICKS] All right, I'll get started right away into the Advanced Financial Compass app. These schools look relatively solid compared to some that we've examined in the past, but I'm going to offer some insights into the financials and maybe some policy recommendations for all three. All of it generated, of course, by the data. We'll start with Springfield College in Massachusetts. And starting out, the school does have some financial stress, it appears. 3 consecutive years of negative net income. And actually, if you go back before COVID they had a negative net income in 2020 and then a positive in 2021. That's probably the COVID relief just helping them out there. But we're at like 11% negative net income margin in fiscal year 2024. Um, and if we look at net cash, um, they also went negative on net cash from operating activities, which is a huge problem. Uh, because that, again, if you've seen earlier shows, we saw a lot of really financially stressed schools initially when we were doing the show. Uh, when you have a negative net cash from operating activities, including your endowment draws, which the school does, Gratified-owl. I verified that. It means you got to sell assets to pay payroll or draw down your cash reserves or sell investments, right? I guess.

And their only bump looks like a post-COVID bump from the Fed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this is a problem. And I'm sure— I mean, I hope the folks at the schools are in tune with what's happening here. And negative net cash from operating activities is very bad. I double-checked the way they were able to cover that last year. Looked like they had a 3— so they have a negative cash deficit here from operations of about $4.5 million. They got— they did an extra large draw on their endowment, and I think you might have saw that initially here, but this is a bigger than normal endowment draw. Again, median is 4.4%. This is a 5.2%. It's not huge. It's like a million-dollar extra draw.

I think we have seen bigger.

Yeah. Much bigger, right? Last week was probably the biggest we've ever seen in consecutive years for like a decade. Um, uh, so that was part of it. They also had a big drawdown in cash. Um, probably can see it here. Uh, yeah, it went from $6.7 million cash on hand to $3 million. So there's the other almost $4 million that they needed to cover expenses. So Roughly. There's some other nuances there, but yeah, that's not good. So why are they in this situation? Let's take a look at it again, breaking it down as a revenue side or a cost side. So I'll show you operating revenues. You know, this, this is the school that probably needs the most work out of the 3 that we're going to discuss today. But you can see this is their unrestricted operating revenue since 2016. It's down 17%. So clearly that's going to be an issue.

And look at that red line. What's that red line mean?

Yeah, like in the red line are schools, a set of 9 schools that have already closed, and they're sort of following that same track here. The difference is Springfield has a fairly large endowment. I believe it's like $100 million.

Right, right.

Check that quick. I don't want to say stuff that's not true. Just off of memory. Yeah, $103 million.

Right.

So the expense part keeps us on the same graph. So again, revenue is down 16.8% and expenses are up 4%. So you can see how that's creating that big deficit that they have.

And we see that week after week after week.

Yeah. So, I mean, obviously this is super painful to have your revenues down, but really, you know, you have to keep your expenses in line with that. As sad as it is. Otherwise, you end up with big deficits like what they are facing right now.

And spending down your endowment.

Yeah, and they, you know, they already started doing that. It could get worse. So it's something that will need to be fixed. Let's focus on the revenue side and see what's happening there, why the revenue is down so much. So starting with net tuition revenue. I'm just looking at the change in net tuition revenue since 2016. And this is their big problem. It appears it's down 29%.

Ouch.

That's probably explaining almost all of, if not all of the loss in operating revenue. And so the question is, why is net tuition revenue down so much? Let's take a look at enrollments. So again, it can go down if you have fewer— it's price times quantity, right? So it can be price effects or enrollment effects, which is the quantity part, or both. So their enrollment's down 9%. 9.87%. And remember, net tuition revenue, what did I just say, was down like 30%?

Yeah, 30%.

So what, what's definitely going to see here, and you're— I'm going to show you in a second, is you, you don't lose 30% of your net tuition revenue by only losing, uh, 9.7% of your students. Uh, has to be a price effect mostly here. And let's take a look at that. We can see that here.

I want you to bring that up, Matt. Was that a new, a new report that you have, the percent change in FTE? I know you're always adding students.

No, that, It's just there's so many now.

Yeah, I know. I know.

I mean, I'm always searching on here, but I did kind of lay this out. If you're new to this app, you can lay it— it's laid out like an audit statement of activities and then cash flow stuff and then the notes sections. And then there's some IRS 990 and then enrollment data. So you can find this a lot easier than probably it looks like when I'm searching around for stuff.

And when folks purchase this, they get all the updates, the updated reports automatically, right?

Yeah, and I'll be adding a lot more here shortly. This is kind of like a project that I fit, you know, anytime I have gaps in creating Strategic Compass, I'll fill in time, you know, updating this app and filling in more functionality. Okay, so here, here's, here's where you can see it. They used to charge. So remember the net tuition revenue is down a whole bunch, a lot more than than enrollment is. So it's really not a story, although their enrollment is down a little bit, it's certainly not explaining the massive drop in net tuition revenues. This does, this does. Yeah, this is the biggest problem. They used to charge $24,000 per student roughly on average for tuition and fees. Um, now it's down to $19,000. So I did the math on that. That's a 20% reduction in price, net price on average. So that is, that's pretty painful. And even despite the drop in price, they're seeing a reduction in enrollment. So it's pretty concerning. So right on the revenue side, policy-wise, what I would recommend is they need to look very closely at their pricing strategy here. Is there any evidence that reducing this actually caused their enrollment to do better than it otherwise would have? It sounds, sounds like an easy thing to test, but it's actually fairly tricky because you don't know the counterfactual. I mean, it's entirely possible that if they would have kept their price at $24K this entire time, that their enrollment would have done exactly what it did, in which case this would have been a bad idea doing this.

And you can see, you can see from the data that they were above the 75th percentile.

Yeah, it's 3 or 4 years.

Looks like they're dropping down to be a— yeah, like more towards the median now.

Yeah, so that's a concern. I mean, If this is really an indicator of willingness to pay, which I highly doubt— it's really hard to make a school go from being one of the most sought-after schools in the country in 2016 to all of a sudden it's like barely above the median. Yeah, I suspect there's just an inefficient pricing strategy here, to be honest, and they might experiment with bringing this net price back up and see if it impacts their enrollment at all. But I could be mistaken, right? Like, these are things that need to be tested on their end that I can't see, right? So they need to do experiments with different pricing and see what happens.

And the strategic compass would be a tool to help them do that.

Yeah. And you can find quirky things, um, that we find it all the time and talk to our clients about it. Like, uh, you know, weird, weird pricing for various income bands.

Right. Right.

Um, you know, weird things about a recent conversation was, you know, schools being in the, what's called the CSS profile, which is just another burden on applicants. Um, you know, things like that is making it easier to apply. You know, that could be something with the app not related at all to pricing that's causing this enrollment drop. And then they're responding by— they're responding to an app problem by reducing the price, which price may not have been the problem, right? So really need to dig into this in the strategic compass and identify what the pain point is. Okay, so Springfield, that's the revenue side. So in the meantime though, it's going to take a long time, right, Gary, to get that back up? Even if you fix it today, it's going to take 4 years to get that net tuition revenue back up at least. So, um, best bet is to right-size your expenses. And you can see what I'm going to say here. I mean, their best shot to me looks like to right-size their expenses, they need to bring this staffing per FTE down. Another way to look at it— so by the way, that's at the 75th percentile, right? 85 employees for 100 students is pretty high. And you can also look at it in terms of relative to their revenue. It's also above the 75th percentile. So I mean, this staffing level is very high relative to their enrollment and relative to their revenue. So either— and relative to the, to the line of the colleges that have closed schools and relative— yeah, everything. So What needs to probably happen at the schools, they need to look very closely at their staffing and start, and again, that's where the strategic compass is, it really shines, right? Because it can highlight exactly where to look, which departments in particular, which areas, which SOC codes in particular that may be high and what the right size should be given the revenues and enrollment. I think contractor-wise, they look pretty good. Let's see. Yeah. Oh, here's another way to look at it too. This is their amount of spent on payroll relative to their total revenue. And it's just, again, above the 75th percentile. Serious evidence here of a staffing problem.

So they're spending like they're a wealthy school, but they're not pricing like they're a wealthy school.

Yeah. So probably what happened was they've just held on to most, if not all, of their employees.

Yeah.

Uh, while their revenues have just sort of cratered. Yeah, that's not actually true. So they did do some cuts here.

It's gone down a little bit, but still, we're there.

Yeah, there's probably like 800 staff, um, over a 4-year period, which is significant. But I mean, they're just still way out of line. Yeah. Um, so, um, unfortunately for them, it's probably the pain for like Reduction in force is likely not over. Okay, so their contractors per FTE looks pretty good. That's actually a bit low. And I did, I did notice though some stuff with the contracts. Let's take a look at food service, which I have embedded in this food service cost per FTE. That's very high at $2,500 per student. Again, the median is about $1,700 per student. For food service. So again, I know there's context matters, but the context here is that this school is struggling financially, so they probably should get a contract that's closer to $1,700 per student rather than $2,500.

Maybe you and I should go for lunch there because I bet they have really good food.

I mean, you know, there's more than, more than what I'm saying. There could be additional revenue you're getting, but really take a look at this. I have specific cases with clients where they literally just called their food vendor, talked about how they could reduce the cost, came to an agreement, and got, you know, significant savings without really affecting their mission at all. So the food service contracts, I'll show you some other contracts down here in the vendor table. Spring— I'm spending a little bit more time on this call just because they're the one that probably needs it the most. Springfield. I'll try to speed up a bit on the next.

I can help you with the spelling if you'd like, Matt.

Yeah, okay. So here's again the food service contract that appears high. And this is a vendor that I don't see very often. I don't know if I've ever seen this one. So it could just be that they're less efficient. Say I have a $7 million food service contract for 2,800, 2,900 students. That's That's high relative to FTE, and it's high relative to their revenues. So I recommend they look into that. I can show you other options.

And the best way to read that, that table is the darker the color, the less—

yeah, there is close—

a college is to the median.

Yeah, nearly a standard deviation above the median in terms of this contract. So just go out and get some other, other estimates. Call your vendor, tell them, hey, you need to be closer to these other estimates. This is how we should do it, and work deal. Another one to look at is this IT contract. It's a bit high. You're talking like a quarter standard deviation high. Yeah. But there could be a few hundred K there. And notice the significant increase here, $1 million to $1.8 million. It's possible that this is a half of payments. Did they have a Lucian the year before? Yeah, this is probably not for a full year. But yeah, so you're, you're pretty high here. This is again for a school that has their revenue. This is about a standard deviation higher than what's normal to spend on IT. Okay, that's how that shakes out. Okay, look at IT. Oh, another thing I want to flag, remember this school is shrinking and the students are paying a lot less and we have construction happening.

They're building something.

Yeah, I don't Generally think that's a good idea. What's going to happen is they're going to have fewer kids, more space, and more expenses, right, on maintenance. So, and potentially interest if they're funding this with bonds. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. You know, it's possible that they had a donor, but even then, hopefully the donor's got a fund that's going to cover the heating and cooling and maintenance and all of that.

All right.

So those are some things to check there. Definitely staffing is the biggest pain point for them. And then checking that net price. All right, let's take a look at a really rich school, Williams. Uh, not a lot to complain about here. This school has a— what is it— $3.5 billion endowment. Um, and let me go into net income. Even rich schools can run deficits though, and they did for a long, long time. And it appears they got They took the— when COVID hit, it must have been a wake-up call for them because since then they've been doing great. We have— those aren't— that's perfect. You need to be plus 1% or so on net income. So that's great. Of course, no cash flow issues. This is totally sustainable and actually ideal to be about a little bit above, a little bit of profit basically to cover, cover your maintenance.

And you mean you can have profit in a nonprofit?

Yeah, exactly.

Stunned.

We don't call it profit. We call call it net income, right? But that's exactly what it is. It's profit. All right. So that appears to be fixed. I'll just show you what's happening with their revenue. It's pretty remarkable. Percent change, unrestricted operating revenue. There it is. Operating revenue is up 34%. I mean, you notice there's this surge that happens here about 2022, '23, '24, and that's exactly when their budget started to work for them. Right. They got these positive net incomes. So what happened to surge their revenue here? I think what it was, it's interesting. You can see their net tuition revenue surging higher in those 3 years. And again, is it, is it because they got more students? I don't think the answer is yes to that. I think it's again price. Let's take a look at students. Yeah, slightly higher.

Yeah, a little bit. Yeah.

But they like to keep it constant, it looks like, right? So they brought in some bigger freshman classes, it looks like.

Interesting.

Actually happened with several schools that I've worked on and through with the strategic compass, or there's like accidentally admitted way too many people or had a freshman class that was far bigger than they anticipated. This could have been the case at Williams, but it's good for them because they needed it in terms of their budget. So it looks like they brought that back down. But how are they still maintaining a positive budget surplus now. Uh, let's take a look at net price tuition, kind of a proxy for net price, right? Net tuition revenue. Take a look at this. They used to charge $27,000 per student. Now it's $43,000. A big surge in the net price in here.

It's over 8 years.

Yeah. So there's a few ways that this could go up without the price. But it's unlikely. One way this could go up is just get a lot more wealthy students paying full price. So the price really didn't change, just changed the student body. It's hard to believe that that would be this, but it's easy to check also.

So this is an interesting case study that I'm going to jump in here. These are two Western Massachusetts private colleges. One has clearly done a good job of keeping its prices moving upward, the other not so much. That would be a fascinating in-depth case study.

Yeah.

Yep, yep.

And so yeah, Williams, uh, obviously there it appears they have a demand shift, right? They're able to charge more and keep enrollment constant, um, because the students going to Williams are not going to Springfield or any other college. Yeah, yeah. Um, so they did do some stuff on the expense side to balance their budget as well. I don't want to discount that. Um, so I'll show you their They were at 172 staff. Well, that's per FTE. They were at 3,817 right before COVID and then they cut down to about— looks like they cut about 400 staff, and they've mostly kept it lower, right, um, since then, even though everything's been great for them financially. So there was a rift there, a reduction in force that hasn't, uh, been sort of replaced. One thing to watch out for them is we've got, I'll show you their contractor usage, but it is, I can see, I can see why this is happening. I'll explain. So they have this surge in contractors from 44 to 135. That's a huge surge, right? Like 3 times what they had the prior year, but you can see down in the vendor table what they're doing. Williams College. All right. Look at construction, construction, construction, construction, architects. Yeah, these are— so they're building a lot.

They're building too. Yeah.

Whatever. For whatever reason, then they're splitting the contracts all different. Maybe they're generaling the project themselves. I don't know.

So the price of the contract is right around the median. They're doing a good job of negotiating. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Let me flag something that's really interesting. We usually flag the contracts looking bad, but all their contracts are great. No color.

That's impressive.

I mean, there was one, some consulting and accounting contracts back in 2020 that looked a bit high, but nothing to complain about there.

No.

That's impressive. Yeah. Everything looks good there. All right. I'm going to move on to the last school. This is Carleton College in Minnesota. Um, and this one is again facing some issues financially. Uh, again, everything looked good prior to COVID and even during COVID uh, but since then has been problematic. 3, -3, -4, -2. These aren't threatening the existence of the school or anything, but it's not healthy. Um, So, you know, it's not, it's not like tomorrow they need to fix this, but it would be a good idea to fix this. It's been 3 years in a row. So 3 years in a row losses. And let me just show you, it's not a revenue problem. So the percentage change in unrestricted operating revenue. Yeah, revenue is up 46%. Hard to expect higher than that. And that's better than—

Of the 75th. Yeah.

Yeah, it's better than 75% of schools. Their net tuition revenue, I think, is up even higher. Percent change in net tuition revenue. Yeah, up 61% on net tuition revenue. I mean, you just can't argue with that. So the deficits are definitely caused by just expense.

We know what we're going to see next, don't we?

Yeah, they're spending too much money. And so the question is, where are they spending too much money? And I can give them some hints here. Employees is the same. I mean, really, the big expenses are really where the issue is going to be. So, per FTE employee is very high. Highest per FTE. Yes, their highest they've ever spent per FTE on staff, or not spent, but the number of employees.

I wonder if I— 152 employees for every 100 students.

Yeah. And this is not normal. Normal would be 62. All right, and they're at 153. I mean, this school is relatively rich. I gave them over a billion-dollar endowment, I think. But, um, you know, you gotta keep the spending within your revenues.

So they could have made the business decision to keep the revenues high and the employee count high.

Yeah. Um, and interesting thing about this school is the number of Employees, I can see the number of employ— there's another line item I'm going to add to, to this, but I can see for now number of employees added, uh, that are paid above $100K. It's pretty high, uh, this is relative to their operating revenue. I'll do FTE. So, um, they have a lot of staff that's paid above $100K. So not only they have a lot of staff in general, they just have a lot of high-paid staff. So there could be Some things to look at in terms of compensation or just the number of like upper level like VP positions, highly paid faculty and stuff like that. Paid over $100K per FTE. Let's see this. Yeah, this is just completely out of the norm. Yeah. Yeah, this is what you're seeing here is number of employees paid over $100K. You might say, how many do they have? They have 218. And then per FTE, that's really high. All right. So again, look at staffing and in particular, then sort of high-end pay positions could be overstaffed. Again, the strategic compass, usually those will probably line up in SOC code 11, which is your upper level management position. And so I'm pretty confident if I were to build a strategic compass for them that that area might be high and/or you know, full prof numbers could be really high, so you could consider something like a buyout or something. But surge in contract— wait, I'm going to see— contractors look good for this school, although the contracts themselves may need some looks. Let's take a look at Carleton. Carleton College.

Well, Matt brings that up. This is one of two specialty tables that are part of the Private College Advanced Financial Compass. This one is vendor pricing. And I don't know if he's going to use it today, but there's a table above that that compares more data from the app itself.

Yep.

All right.

So there's really interesting stuff here. Again, here's Bon Appetit. This is a $5,600 contract per FTE. Again, that's like 3 or 4 times the norm. So this is a really expensive contract that needs to be looked at. $5,600 per FTE. It's not in the norm for even schools in Minnesota. I'll show you some schools in Minnesota for, say, 2023, and look at food service. All right, and sort it. Okay, so they're the most expensive in the state, at least at private schools, which I'm sure is the same for public. Uh, this school is right next to Carlton, I believe, literally the same town, same vendor, and they're much bigger. And then they pay less, a lot less, $2 million less almost. But, you know, take a look at—

and context matters. We always say that because it does. There could be different services provided.

Yeah. But again, the context here again is we've got a deficit. Easy way to fix it perhaps could be just cutting down on this expense a bit. You know, there's some other really high-end schools down here, St. Kate's, Macalester, that are paid far, far less. Macalester also has Bon Appétit, right? You might try to match it up with Macalester's contracts. There's no reason that I can think of that. I mean, maybe, maybe the grad student enrollment's different or something, but I think a lot of people would say Macalester is the best school in Minnesota and they're paying far less, far less on food service, half, paying about half, same vendor, and they're bigger. So things to look at there. There are some others down here. My school's not on here. They have their own in-house food service, which I want to have this conversation with them. It's great, but may not be efficient. So there's that. Oh, there's one other contract for that I wanted to show you for Carlton. Carlton. So we'll get rid of food service here. I think it was, yes, IT. IT contract. I think they have the most expensive IT contract in the state as well. So let me change this to instead of contains equals IT. Okay, again, this, I believe this school's in the same town, right? IT, $1 million versus $2.8 million, more than twice as much. Yeah, so again, and I know Macalester, St. Olaf, Okay. Yeah. St. Mary's. Yeah. I mean, just— I'm not saying, you know, you guys are doing some terrible management or anything like that, but it may be worth your time to just look more closely at this. Maybe even call some of these other vendors, like St. Olaf is right down the street, like I said. Ask them about this contract. What is it doing for them that's different from your contract to figure out why you're paying $1.8 million more? Okay, so that's it for today. Gary, I'll pass it back to you.

You know, before I jump onto my stuff, you know, Carleton is clearly doing a fine job of raising revenue, but Matt, you're an economist. Is there some point where the market of students that choose and pay for a college, a private college like Carleton in Minnesota, may say the price is too high?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Obviously I didn't show you, but yeah, some of these schools, it's really bizarre. Like some schools just can't seem to attract students anymore and others are just, they can't keep them out, right? Like the price is going up and up and up and they just keep like coming. It's really bizarre. And I think Carleton was that case. I didn't show you their net tuition revenue per student, but the price is much higher.

But logically at some point, yeah, the price would be too much for even those students.

Yeah, it's hard to say, you know, it's hard to— yeah, it's— this market is very bizarre to me because, you know, usually you can see, oh, other substitutes and what the prices are really easily. But in higher ed, it's a little tricky to get your price right. To get your price, you have to apply and do the FAFSA, the CSS profile in some cases, submit your whatever else, um, before you actually see the price. So you— I don't know, it's becoming easier for students to do that and price shop, but they may still not be doing that with the really high-end schools. It's not really price shopping at all, just paying.

Oh no, in large part students are buying reputation. And clearly the most— the 3 colleges today we looked at, at least 2 of them have a very strong reputation. The other one at Springfield might be under somewhat of an assault. Let's take a look then at just a couple of items before we wrap up the show today. Let's take a look at the 2025 College Viability App. You can see I have our 3 colleges there. Matt, what's the first report I should go to?

Probably graduation rates.

Are you sure?

That's where we usually go, yeah.

And you know what, I have done a heck of a job of picking colleges. Now, I'll back up for a second. I don't often pick the colleges. Most of the colleges, Matt, that we look at each week are from viewer requests. This is a popular show. We have had thousands and thousands of people watch our show. Each show individually gets hundreds of viewers, and that's because folks are looking at the data. And so they say, hey, would you mind doing a review of, for example, the 3 colleges we're looking at today? Were all requested by others. Now don't worry, Matt and I have a database, so if we ever run out of viewer requests, we have lists to pull from. And Matt, you and I also know they're not strong colleges on our list. So for the most part, the colleges that we pull from our list are not strong, and they're kind of a mixed bag from viewer requests. But look at the 3 colleges today. Look in that far column, 2023. Gosh darn it, Dr. Hendricks, they are graduating students. And, and kind of a difference here because they're graduating students, and for the most part, they are financially healthier than their peers. There's some nuances to that, as you talked about in your part of the show. But this is, this is one of the few times, Matt, when we have 3 colleges where we can say they work. And they work on the financial side, albeit with some challenges, and they work on getting students graduated. And how many times, Matt, have you and I had numbers on colleges that are 40%, 30%, hovering around 50%? So, at Carleton, Springfield, Williams Colleges, congratulations. In large part because you graduate students, but in large part because you remain relatively financially healthy on those. And I want to look at one thing that Matt doesn't track, one of the few things that Matt doesn't track, and these are unfunded institutional grants. And these are inside baseball terms for merit aid, uh, and most scholarships, they're unfunded. You may think you're getting $20,000 actual dollars, but no, it's just a $20,000 discount. And look at our 3 colleges. Carleton is up $28 million. Springfield is up $14 million. That might be part of the problems. Williams College, the strongest financially of the 3, yeah, of the 3, has, has only, has only gone up $1 million in unfunded institutional discounts over the last 8 years. Dr. Hendricks, that's an indication that the market really likes this college because they're not having to give away the store to get students in the door.

Yeah, they're paying whatever they post. Yeah, thicker almost.

Yeah. And the last one I want to show here, because I like to do this, is just tuition fees. Again, typically these numbers are really bad. And a fascinating reflection of the market— Carleton has been able to raise tuition fees, Williams has been able to monstrously increase theirs. But of the 3 colleges that are this Springfield College is clearly the less financially strong, although their own runway is really long, and we'll talk about that in a minute. They've had to— their tuition fee revenue is down almost $6 million, and that was reflected in some of the stuff that Matt showed. So that's enough on the 2025 College Viability App. Let's look at the college majors. And I've got our 3 colleges, and we'll look at it in 2 aspects. We're going to look at bachelor's degrees for our 3 colleges, and when we look at this one, we look at the internal market share. This By College tab on the 2025 College Majors Completion app is internal market share. I'm going to show you external here in a second. And the first thing we look at is colleges that might be heavily invested in one major or another. And the threshold I use is anything over 30%. And so at the bottom here, Carleton has no issues. When we look at Springfield, again, look at the numbers. Interesting that kinesiology is high for Springfield College. I have that right, for Springfield College. And they're above 30% in 3 of the 4 years, just 2020 through 2023, in internal market share. And the reason I bring that up is if I am a competitive college in that area, I'm going to look at this business and ask myself, hey, What are my opportunities to move some of these students to my business? Because that puts a lot more financial strain on a college if you take from a strength. I'll scroll down to Williams. They don't have any issues, although they're bumping against it, interestingly, in economics. Matt, you might want to go back to Williams College and, you know, do a couple lectures there for them. The other thing to look at is low numbers.

And not—

again, fascinating what this data shows us. Really, in many instances, Matt, when we do this, we see colleges with 0 and 1. There are some small numbers here, but again, this is where college should be relatively weak. And, you know, I'll pick on dance at Springfield College. Over the last 4 years, they've had 6 people graduate with dance. And again, the rhetorical question I would ask is, why are you doing dance? Because there are other colleges in the market that have a much higher market share, may be able to provide even better dance training, dance education than others. And then finally, that external market share This is by major, and I've gotten— I'm doing this just by Massachusetts. Let me show what I've got. I've got the state as Massachusetts. I've got the bachelor's degree, and I've got just 2023. And I've brought up accounting, and just for private colleges in Massachusetts. This is the pie chart that shows what you would envision as traditional market share, and this one is for accounting and accounting-related services. I categorize the top colleges. Bentley, you can see that here. Bentley dominates. I'm mad I'm not familiar with Bentley College, Bentley University, but they are strong in accounting, as is in this market Boston College, which you would expect. Let's look quickly at a couple other majors. I'm looking at, um, Business of the Common Man. So Business of the Common Man, right? So we've got a lot of colleges playing in the business market. We've got a little feature here you can zoom in on those. You can see the major players and you can hover on top of those. You can click on these to see which one they are. But you can see, look at this market share. And again, thinking from the macro, if I am a competitor, I'm looking at some of these smaller colleges and say, hey, what can I do? I'll be blunt here, to steal their market share just like other businesses do in other industries. This is the kind of data that colleges need to be able to say, hey, where are we strong? Babson. Where are we less strong? Western New England University. Why are you playing in a market where you have, looks like, 3% of the market? With colleges with much stronger— and again, for the students and families, it's logical to think that a university like this, Babson, like Babson, can offer more. University like— and let's look at one other major that I like to look at, and that's— go down here, turn off business, and I'm going to go down and look at— so there are really 5 players, and really they're all relatively strong in that market. And so if you're looking for, you know, Matt, we talk about all the time colleges wanting to add programs This is the kind of data you can use to say, hey, I've only got 5 competitors. Maybe this is an area that's open for a market penetration in this kind of major. So the essence of that, it's the data that matters. Matt, how many times have you and I talked about it's the comparisons that matter? If you're looking only at the internal data at your organization, at your college, you're making a strategic mistake, Matt. Excuse me, you're making a tactical mistake. This is the Moneyball era for higher education. Matt Hendricks and Gary Stocker, there might be others doing this, Matt, but I'm not aware of them. And it's gonna be those colleges that use this data that Dr. Hendricks has developed, that I have developed, to improve their market share, to make the better decisions instead of just throwing a dart at a dartboard or going on gut reaction. Matt, your comments.

Yeah, well, I know for a fact that people are doing the stuff that we're doing, but it's really expensive to get it. The difference that we have is we're offering some of it open source through this show, and then we're also offering some paid information, but it's not even in the same realm as the paid stuff that the same stuff you would get for hundreds of thousands of dollars. So that's the difference. Smart schools are using this to be smarter. And, and it's really— we're, we're making sure it's accessible to all schools, not just the ones that can pay millions for it.

Right.

Or hundreds of thousands for it.

Yeah. So each week we look at a college financial health rating. It's our subjective interpretation. So, Matt, let's look at the 3 colleges. Where do you have the good folks at Springfield College?

Yeah, only really— I'm only worried a bit about Springfield because they have a big deficit. I think it was like 11%. Net cash was also negative from operating activities. And so that needs to be shored up fast. You know, don't want to be selling assets. You don't want to be drawing more on your endowment. It's just going to make things harder for you in the future. So I'd recommend they get that fixed fast. And we showed some things they can do, right? Take a look at that pricing strategy. Take a look at staffing. Those are some quick things that can be looked at and perhaps tweaked. The other two, look, Williams is obviously great. Don't even need to say anything about them. Carl has a deficit, but huge runway. Again, their staffing looks high, highest number of staff per FTE they've ever had. And they also appeared to be a bit top-heavy in staffing as well. Lots of staff over $100K in compensation. So those are some things to look at there.

And in some ways, good for them. But again, if you're looking at the data, those are where the opportunities are. So Matt, I suggest we get together again next Tuesday. But, but before we do, we just finished reviewing our 100th college. We have been doing this show since August of 2024, and most weeks we do 3 colleges. There have been some minor exceptions. So we've done about 100 colleges in about 8 months. So we'll do around 130, 140 colleges per year. And this is a data source that, that is working its way into the minds and use by colleges. And it's also working its way into the minds and use of students and their families. Not the high-end stuff that Matt's showing you, but we have products that students and families can use to compare the financial health of these colleges. It's just public colleges now, Matt. So it's just private colleges now, Matt. Someday public colleges.

Yeah, yeah, soon. Uh, I'm just, uh, wrapping up some details, harmonizing it. So scrape all the stuff with the AI, and then I'm harmonizing. There's like a million ways you can call cash. In your audit, apparently, like 1,000 ways they call cash and cash equivalents. So I'm harmonizing all of that and then moving on to the publics.

Okay. So we'll have lots more colleges to do. We may have to do this show 10 times a week, Matt, just to get all the colleges reviewed.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's all that we'll do. So, hey, for Matt Hendricks, always a pleasure, Dr. Hendricks, to have you on the show and to do this show with you, actually. And we'll do that again next week. So for Matt Hendricks, I'm Gary Stocker. Thanks for watching. We'll see you again next Tuesday.