ED Financial Responsibility Baseline
Purpose. The U.S. Department of Education publishes an annual financial-responsibility composite score for institutions filing audited financial statements. The composite is the obvious regulator-side comparator for any institutional-distress signal. This track tests how the higher-ed A/G geometry compares.
Source path
The federal data was fetched via the Urban Institute Education Data Portal API (educationdata.urban.org), which mirrors federal U.S. Department of Education / Federal Student Aid releases under public-domain terms. The mirror exposes the financial-responsibility composite at the path /api/v1/college-university/fsa/financial-responsibility/{year}/ with a direct unitid identifier, removing the need for an OPEID-to-UNITID crosswalk.
Coverage in the public mirror used here: 2006–2016. Records returned per fetched year (2014 / 2015 / 2016): 3,396 / 3,709 / 3,627. Data dictionary fields include unitid, year, opeid, inst_name_fsa, and the headline financial_resp_score.
Findings
On the FASB × Sector 2 train cohort (2014–2016, 4,495 institution-years with composite scores joined; 84 closure-positive rows; 92 % join rate):
| Predictor | AUROC (train cohort) | 95 % CI (analytic) |
|---|---|---|
| Federal composite, sign-flipped | 0.747 | [0.686, 0.808] |
| Negated net-position cushion | 0.643 | [0.579, 0.708] |
| Negated cash operating margin | 0.631 | [0.566, 0.695] |
| Negated low six-year graduation rate | 0.788 | [0.718, 0.859] |
The federal composite is a real closure-relevant signal on this descriptive train cohort. Within the same train cohort, the simple low six-year graduation rate baseline has a slightly higher point estimate.
What is and is not claimed
- The federal composite is a meaningful closure-relevant signal in the validated lane on the descriptive cohort.
- Whether the higher-ed A/G geometry beats the federal composite on the locked test cohort is not testable in this run.
- The comparison numbers above are descriptive and on a different cohort from the locked headline AUROC. They are not directly comparable to that locked AUROC.
- This site does not assert that the A/G geometry outperforms the federal composite.
What would close the gap
A future iteration with direct access to federal Financial Responsibility data covering the locked test cohort years (2017–2018 or later) would let us compute joint-weak and the federal composite on the same held-out cohort and report a paired difference, in the same way the cluster-bootstrap track reports the paired difference vs single-variable baselines.