Cazenovia 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.
Athletics & enrollment
Share of undergrads who play varsity sports (EADA, U.S. Dept of Education). A rising ratio over time at a tuition-dependent private is the “athletic ratchet” — adding sports or expanding rosters to fill seats as enrollment pressure mounts. Snapshots taken at ~6-year intervals.
NCAA Division III without football
What EADA counts: a student who participated in at least one intercollegiate (varsity) competition during the academic year. Excludes redshirts, JV / developmental rosters, and club sports. The actual athletic-recruit footprint can be substantially larger than this count. At D3 schools, “athletic aid” reads $0 in EADA because institutional merit aid that functions as recruitment subsidy isn’t classified as athletic aid — so the discount-rate signal on this page is the right place to look for that money.
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.
Closure correctly flagged but severity understated — endowment raid + operational debt
Cazenovia closed in June 2023. The model flagged composite high every year from FY 2019-20 through FY 2021-22 (79, 69, 65) — directionally correct, but the actual fragility was likely closer to terminal. Two compounding signals weren't fully captured: (1) Endowment raid. F2H02 fell from $32M in FY 2015-16 to $7.8M in FY 2016-17 to $4M by FY 2018-19 — a 75% drop in two years. Markets at their worst (2008-09) saw -30% endowment losses; a 75% decline at the same time markets were rising means deliberate drawdown, not market loss. The endowment is the durable buffer of last resort; consuming it for operations starts a finite countdown. (2) Hidden operational debt. F2A03A (PP&E debt) and F2I06 (plant debt) both read $0 from FY 2019-20 onward, but interest expense (F2E136) stayed at $1.5–1.7M per year through FY 2021-22. At typical 5–6% rates that implies $28–34M of debt the standard IPEDS variables don't capture. The pattern is more consistent with working-capital lines or bridge financing funding operations than with a DSO-style off-balance-sheet structure (which would also strip the interest expense — Cazenovia's stayed flat). Borrowing to plug operating shortfalls is a worse fragility signal than capital debt because there's no productive asset behind it. Combined, this is a classic late-stage death spiral: depleted endowment, operational debt growth, and revenue that can't cover expenses. With both signals visible to the model, the Debt Burden pillar would likely have scored 25 instead of 14 and the composite would have been in the high 80s or 90s. Two methodology candidates queued: (a) interest-implied debt when F2E136 > 0 but F2A03A + F2I06 = 0; (b) endowment-raid detector flagging YoY drops larger than concurrent market index losses.
Latest-year breakdown (FY 2021-22)
| Pillar | Raw Metric | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Operating Margin | -14.2% | 25 / 25 |
| Pricing Power | $9,457 real net tuition / FTE | 21 / 25 |
| Debt Burden | 1.03 viability ratio | 14 / 25 |
| Liquidity | 316 days cash on hand | 0 / 25 |
Peer schools
Closest by Fragility Score in FY 2021-22. Financial similarity only — geographic / regional clustering is a separate (future) feature.
Selected raw financials — FY 2021-22
FASB / IPEDS Finance F2.