A letter grade, A+ to F, for every U.S. private nonprofit four-year college — built from two pillars: its command of the market (can it fill a class without admitting everyone or discounting deeper?) and its financial outlook (can it fund itself from something other than next year’s freshmen?). Search this year’s grades, or watch any school’s grade move across fifteen years.
Every graded institution, every year. Because each component is scored on a fixed, absolute scale, the whole sector is free to slide down the grades — which is what a shrinking pool of eighteen-year-olds predicts.
Read the swings with care. The jumps in 2012, the dip in 2017–18 and the 2023 peak are largely the stock market, not the colleges: IPEDS counts investment return as revenue, and with finance lagged two years those years carry the FY2009 crash, FY2015–16’s flat markets and FY2021’s boom.
The grade answers “how well is this college doing at the things that matter,” not only “will it close.” Roughly 1,150 of these schools will still be open in four years; a scale built on closure alone would call Syracuse and Villanova a flat A+ and say nothing else.
NR means too little was reported to score a pillar — read it as “unknown, skewed bad”: schools that stop filing finance close at about 1.7× the odds. Outlook is the three-year change in the smoothed composite; ±6 points reads as positive or negative.
Plus a demographic penalty of up to 20 points when the state’s high-school class is projected to shrink — scaled by how little else is holding demand up. Encoded on mechanism; the interaction isn’t yet statistically significant (p = 0.16).
Absolute conditions that cap the grade whatever the composite says. Each was kept only if the institution-years meeting it closed at well above the 2.7% base rate — a rule that sounded alarming but ran at 1.2× base was cut.
| Condition | Max | 4-yr closure | Lift |
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