Financial Risk Assessment of US Higher Education

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This blog series is based on a tool that mines longitudinal financial and operational performance data and uses peer benchmarking and predictive analytics to identify patterns indicative of financial decline in US colleges, universities, and systems.

This page links to analyses of individual universities and colleges.

For analyses of university and college systems, see What's Up With Systems.

Contents in chronological order

EARLY FINDINGS (June-September 2025)

• Where the Cracks are Forming
• Risk Profile of 4-year Universities and Colleges
• Cross-Sector Risk Dynamics
• Risk Archetypes: Seeing Financial Stress Before it Hits
•  Recognizing resilience: What the numbers really say about HBCUs 

WHAT DRIVES FINANCIAL RISK AND RESILIENCE

The Impact of State Funding and Demographics (October 2025)

• What Really Drives Financial Risk in Higher Education? It’s Not What You Think 

The Qualities of Scale (November 2025)

• Part 1. The Privates: The Fragility of Small Scale
• Part 2. The Publics: When Scale Helps But Isn't Enough
• Part3. Cross-Sector Insights: When Scale Stops Being a Shield

Selectivity and RIsk (December 2025)

• The Price of Admission. How Selectivity Shapes Financial Resilience in Private Higher Education
• The Limits of Buffer: Selectivity and Financial Resilience in Public Higher Education

Perusal of Other Segments (Winter 2025/26)

• The System is the Strategy. What Portfolio-Level Analysis Reveals About Higher Education's Future 
• Community Colleges Under Pressure. What Financial Risk Patterns Reveal About Resilience, Mission, and the Sector’s Future

On Governance. The Key to Scale (Winter 2026). A Taxonomy of Governance Models and Readiness Assessment and Diagnostic Tools 

• Scale, Complexity, and the Governance Imperative
• What Differences Do Governance Models Make for HE Collaboratives
• Designing Governance for Scale: A Readiness Framework
• From Taxonomy to Trajectory: A Governance Maturity Model for Collaborative Scale 
• From Choice to Execution: Why Collaborative Scale Fails and How to Prevent It 
• Governing for Scale: What Leaders Must Do Now

Tools for Those Pursuing Collaborative Scale (Winter/Spring 2026)

• A Rich Governance Taxonomy for Collaborative Scale 
• A Readiness Diagnostic for Collaborative Scale
• A Maturity Model for Collaborative Scale

Risk, Resilience, Opportunity and Challenge in US University and College Systems (Spring 2026)

• The System is Not a Bigger Institution

Related Topics and Observations

• The Limits of Scale
• Questions Boards Should Be Asking. A Primer
• Why Now? Reading Higher Ed's Program Restructuring Wave

The Global Imperative of Scale (Winter 2026)

• A Look at the UK. Great Universities, Sub-scale Ecosystem
• The Global Scale Imperative: Australia and New Zealand

DEFINITIONS AND METHODS

• Risk assessment methodology. An Overview
• Financial Risk Archetypes, Patterns, and Accelerators. A Glossary 
• Glossary of Measures and Data Definitions
• The Risk Architecture, Part 1. Scoring Individual Measures
• The Risk Architecture, Part 2. Scoring Archetypes, Patterns, and Accelerators