Every year, the U.S. Department of Education is required to issue a financial responsibility score for private nonprofit and for-profit colleges, which serves as a crude measure of an institution’s financial health. Colleges are scored on a scale from -1.0 to 3.0, with colleges scoring 0.9 or below failing the test (and having to put up a letter of credit) and colleges scoring between 1.0 and 1.4 being placed in a zone of additional oversight.
Ever since I first learned of the existence of this metric five or six years ago, I have been bizarrely fascinated by its mechanics and how colleges respond to the score as an accountability pressure. I have previously written about how these scores are only loosely correlated with college closures in the past and also wrote an article about how colleges do not appear to change their fiscal priorities as a result of receiving a low score.