Castleton University

Castleton, VT

FY 2021-22 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.

Liquidity

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

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.

Varsity athletes as reported · AY 2017-18

36.4%

578 athletes ÷ 1,590 UG
NCAA Division III with football

% athletes · trend (3 snapshots)

▲ 14.3 pts since AY 2012-13 (22.1%)

Coaching footprint · AY 2017-18

28 head + 45 assistant = 73 total

1 coach per 7.9 reported athletes

Typical varsity-only programs run 6–10 athletes per coach. Ratios well below that often reveal off-roster recruiting pools (JV, developmental, club with serious recruiting) that don’t show up in EADA’s varsity headcount.

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.

Admin: 12.6% → 22.8% · Instruction: 35.4% → 32.0%

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 2021-22)

Pillar	Raw Metric	Score
Operating Margin	0.9%	15 / 25
Pricing Power	$13,288 real net tuition / FTE	25 / 25
Debt Burden	—	12 / 25
Liquidity	—	12 / 25

Peer schools

Closest by Fragility Score in FY 2021-22. 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 2021-22

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

Total revenue (F1B27)

$51.2M

Total expenses (F1C191)

$50.7M

Net tuition revenue (F1B01)

$22.9M

Auxiliary enterprises revenue (F1B05)

$6.7M

State appropriations (F1B11)

$8.2M

Endowment EOY (F1H02)

—

Long-term debt (F1A10)

—

Expendable net position (F1N05)

—

Interest expense (F1C19IN)

$1.8M

DSO debt — campus-specific

—

DSO debt — system-level pool

—