FINANCIALS: From: Elizabeth Gold <egold6215@gmail.com To: Deirdre Conley <deirdreconley@bellsouth.net> Subject: Re: Link to financials is where for update?
Hi there, below is the summary. Llinks to the verbal summary and financials at the bottom. Let me know if you have any issues/questions/etc.Financials: As some of you know, I pulled together some financials.Elizabeth Groves Aycock and myself now have some thoughts on these, mostly in the form of ratios and things. My "summary" ended up being long (those who know me will laugh), so I've attached it below, along with the latest version of the financials and ratios used. The overview (also included at the top of the document):My takeaway here is that we have had a long, long, time to address our financial woes. One thing that is interesting to me is that Betsy Muhlenfeld stated that she was surprised at this decision – she has lead the college through two very turbulent market cycles that impacted the college significantly. To me this means that she felt the college was able to continue operations despite some financial hardship. Yes, 2009 was a catastrophic year for the college, in which an $18.6M loss in realized/unrealized gains/losses on long term investments contributed to a loss of $22.3M this year. Though 2009 was a bad year for the college, it did represent the highest dollar value of tuition received net of scholarships given in the past six years. In the two years after this catastrophic loss, 2010 and 2011, the college did have two decent years, in which our net profit was $4.8M and $10.3M, respectively. The primary issue here is that the health of college has been tied very tightly to the health of our investments. Removing all investment gains and losses shows that we’ve been operating in the negative for a long time.I don’t believe this means that the situation is necessarily unfixable at this time. I think the fact that we’ve been operating at a loss for such an extended period of time begs the question of why we didn’t hear about this earlier. Perhaps this is what was addressed in the strategic plan, but I suppose we can’t know those details. The consistency of this situation also makes severity of the action taken at this time and the decision to shut down the school with no notice more surprising. This decision after 2009 might not have been as shocking, but why now?I did notice (and I'm sure you all will notice) that some of the figures from the audited financials don't match the tax forms exactly. I'm guessing there are good reasons for this, but I do find it strange. Some high level info from the 990s forms is at the bottom of the Analytics tab in the Excel doc.Disclaimer: I don’t proclaim to be an expert here. My background: I have a BA in Economics, and an MBA with a finance and strategy focus, but I’ve been working primarily as a data analyst for the past four and a half years. I just started a new position as a financial analyst at the end of January, so I make no claims of expertise. That said, I can play with numbers a bit, and these are some observations.Please share and repost to the locked SBC groups if possible, and tag in the legal folks if you don't mind.gLink to Summary:Link to Financials (I recommend DL to Excel):
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