Claremont McKenna College
Composite Fragility Score over time
Pillar trajectories
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.
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 schools in public systems not yet in our curated map (CSU, UT, TAMUS, etc.), the system pool is currently attributed entirely to the flagship campus per the dedupe pass; per-student numbers at those flagships are overstated until allocation is added. 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.
Tuition discount rate
The share of gross tuition revenue that’s offset by institutional grant aid (scholarships funded from the operating budget plus endowed scholarships). A rising discount rate combined with falling real net tuition is the canonical signal that a school is buying enrollment with aid that the market won’t support.
Institutional grant aid (F2C05 funded + F2C06 unfunded) divided by gross tuition revenue (F2D01 net tuition + grants). This is the all-student, institution-wide rate. Schools and NACUBO typically publish a first-time-in-college (FTIC) freshman rate, which runs 5–10 points higher because recruitment merit aid is front-loaded onto incoming classes and steps down for upperclassmen.
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.
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.
Notes
Editorial context drawn from manual review of this school’s data, methodology interactions, and external reporting.
FY 2019-20 IPEDS reclassification flagged and corrected
CMC has a $1.2B endowment for ~1,400 students — one of the wealthiest small liberal-arts colleges in the country per capita. From FY 2019-20 forward CMC's reported F2I05 (expendable net assets) read $3.4M, then $2.7M, then negative (-$8.4M, -$5.5M) — while F2A04 stayed at $336–440M and endowment grew. Same reporting break as Brown's, more severe. Without correction this drove a composite of 100 in FY 2021-22 and 2022-23, a clear false positive. The F2I05 sanity check (added 2026-04-27, methodology §6.1b) substitutes F2A04 for F2I05 in viability and days-cash when the F2I05 reading is implausible. CMC FY 2022-23 now scores 75 — still elevated, but driven by real signals: significant plant-debt acceleration (F2A03A grew from $182M to $522M between FY 2018-19 and FY 2022-23, +185% in five years), thin operating margin (-1.5% on smoothed worst-of), and real net-tuition decline. Whether 75 is the right reading for an elite school with a $1.2B endowment is a separate calibration question, but the score now reflects actual data rather than a filing artifact.
Latest-year breakdown (FY 2022-23)
| Pillar | Raw Metric | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Operating Margin | -1.5% | 25 / 25 |
| Pricing Power | $37,659 real net tuition / FTE | 25 / 25 |
| Debt Burden | 0.71 viability ratio | 25 / 25 |
| Liquidity | 788 days cash on hand | 0 / 25 |
Peer schools
Closest by Fragility Score in FY 2022-23. Financial similarity only — geographic / regional clustering is a separate (future) feature.
Selected raw financials — FY 2022-23
FASB / IPEDS Finance F2.