California State University-Sacramento

Sacramento, CA

FY 2022-23 fragility

/ 100

high

Composite Fragility Score over time

Pillar trajectories

Operating Margin

(Operating revenue − operating expenses) / operating revenue. Industry-standard debt-rating heuristics — Fitch-style bands for privates, Moody's-aligned for publics. Score reflects current year and 3-year rolling average — single positive years don't erase chronic distress.

Amber dot = unusual single-year shift; smoothed metric attenuates impact. Hover for context.

Pricing Power

Real net tuition revenue per FTE, 5-year change. Falling real net tuition + rising discount rate = market rejection of value proposition. Discount rate is the all-student institutional rate (F2C05 + F2C06 funded + unfunded grants over gross tuition); schools typically publish a first-time-in-college rate which runs 5-10 points higher.

Amber dot = unusual single-year shift; smoothed metric attenuates impact. Hover for context.

Debt Burden

Viability ratio (expendable net assets / plant debt) with debt-acceleration penalty. Catches schools whose covenants are at risk because of recent debt issuance.

Amber dot = unusual single-year shift; smoothed metric attenuates impact. Hover for context.

Liquidity

Days cash on hand. Tuition-collapse override prevents 'deathbed cash' from misleading the score (high cash from emergency relief while school is shrinking).

Amber dot = unusual single-year shift; smoothed metric attenuates impact. Hover for context.

Institutional debt per student

Total institutional long-term debt (not student loans) divided by full-time-equivalent enrollment, nominal dollars. For public-university systems with centralized bond debt (UC, FL SUS), the system pool is allocated across sibling campuses proportional to FTE.

Long-term debt per FTE student · FY 2022-23

$13,147

$363.2M total debt ÷ 27,624 FTE

Breakdown: $347.6M IPEDS-reported + $15.6M FTE-allocated system

IPEDS-reported debt / FTE · trend

▲ 671% since FY 2004-05 ($1,632)

Latest-year debt per FTE student includes IPEDS-reported plant debt plus the LLM-enriched DSO snapshot (off-balance-sheet bonds at affiliated entities — typically FY 2024 audit values). For California State University Trustees, the system bond pool is the sum of all sibling campuses’ DSO_DEBT_SYSTEM values, allocated to this campus by FTE share — not attributed entirely to the flagship UNITID. The trajectory line shows IPEDS-reported debt only (no DSO) for consistency across years — DSO is a single audit-year snapshot, not a time series.

Administrative spending

Institutional Support (administration) measured two ways, from IPEDS expense-by-function reporting: as a share of total operating expenses alongside Instruction (faculty/teaching), and indexed against net tuition revenue to show whether admin spending tracks the revenue that funds it.

Admin: 7.6% → 14.8% · Instruction: 41.7% → 33.7%

Instruction and Institutional Support as a share of total operating expenses. Instruction is the IPEDS faculty/teaching proxy; Institutional Support is the administrative proxy (executive management, finance, HR, general admin). A narrowing gap means admin is gaining on teaching.

Latest-year breakdown (FY 2022-23)

Pillar	Raw Metric	Score
Operating Margin	25.0%	5 / 25
Pricing Power	$6,034 real net tuition / FTE	25 / 25
Debt Burden	0.89 viability ratio	20 / 25
Liquidity	141 days cash on hand	8 / 25

Peer schools

Closest by Fragility Score in FY 2022-23. Financial similarity only — geographic / regional clustering is a separate (future) feature.

Less fragile

Schools scoring below

More fragile

Schools scoring above

Selected raw financials — FY 2022-23

GASB / IPEDS Finance F1A. DSO totals from LLM enrichment of audited financial statements; see /sources for citations.

Total revenue (F1B27)

$696.5M

Total expenses (F1C191)

$682.6M

Net tuition revenue (F1B01)

$161.0M

State appropriations (F1B11)

$273.8M

Endowment EOY (F1H02)

$74.6M

Long-term debt (F1A10)

$347.6M

Expendable net position (F1N05)

$309.5M

Interest expense (F1C19IN)

$12.0M

DSO debt — campus-specific

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DSO debt — system-level pool

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