Home News Analysis: hundreds of colleges and universities show financial warning signs – The Hechinger Report

Analysis: hundreds of colleges and universities show financial warning signs – The Hechinger Report

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Federal data shows higher education troubles long before coronavirus struck

Dozens of colleges and universities nationwide started 2020 already under financial stress. They’d spent the past decade grappling with declining enrollments and weakening support from state governments.

Now, with the added pressures of the coronavirus pandemic, the fabric of American higher education has become even more strained: The prospect of lower revenues has already forced some schools to slash budgets and could lead to waves of closings, experts and researchers say.

To examine how institutions were positioned to respond to such a crisis, The Hechinger Report created a Financial Fitness Tracker that put the nation’s public institutions and four-year nonprofit colleges and universities through a financial stress test, examining key metrics including enrollment, tuition revenue, public funding and endowment health.

Schools faring the worst in these areas — meaning that they are projected to dip under the 20th percentile in a particular category — are marked with warning signs in the tracker. A total of 2,662 schools were included in the analysis, and 2,264 had enough data to be evaluated in every category. All data predates the pandemic.

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