Why Eureka College Is 95% Likely to Close: A Case Study in Board Dysfunction and Financial Collapse

Jeremy Lakosh [00:00:00] And then you worry about the students and the faculty and the staff. These faculty and staff have tied their livelihoods into the institution, and there are some really scary studies out about students who are at closed colleges and what outcomes happen for them, mainly being how many of them don't graduate? Well, I mean, I think in a lot of ways college has become a sort of

Vance Crowe [00:00:24] Adult daycare for kids that want to not grow up. And so they

Jeremy Lakosh [00:00:30] Get to take out loans for massive amounts of money. They get a four year time where they're living with very few responsibilities, and they don't realize that what they're doing is selling themselves into a form of indentured servitude. Yeah, so the treasury buyback is interesting. I think it's, I think it's kind of lipstick on a pig, if you will, there, there isn't a flat rate of interest on every single treasury bond.

Vance Crowe [00:01:01] I'm Chris Haworth, a grain originator and accountant living in Pocahontas, Iowa, and you are listening to the Vance Crowe podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. Jeremy Lakosh returns. Jeremy is a longtime friend of mine that I met through the podcast, and it turns out he is living in the small hometown that I grew up in. I'm having Jeremy come on, because in that small town of Eureka, Illinois, there's a college there. It's the college home of Ronald Reagan, and it is in dire straits right now. Jeremy has been looking into the details of how did this happen and what can a small liberal arts college that is not getting the big East Coast money isn't getting state money. How is it to survive in this wild world where universities all over the country are closing down? Then of course, if you're a long time listener of the podcast, you know that Jeremy and I love to talk about the economy. We are gonna talk about US treasuries, specifically the buyback program that's coming online here pretty soon, and just the general state of things. So we're gonna get to that interview in just a moment. But Mother's Day is right around the corner, and just the other day I had a woman in here talking about her life and the different things that went on, and one of the things that she discussed was the marriage that she had and the children she was able to raise. And when we got done with the interview, she stopped me and we actually sat in my waiting room and spoke for quite a while about how wonderful it was to look back on all of these experiences.

Vance Crowe [00:02:35] She hadn't even received the video, but just the experience of sitting down and talking about all those things you went through talking about how she met her husband, how they had children, all the trials and tribulations from that, and even talking about the loss and moving on, and what she wants more in life. If you are interested in having me interview your mother or your parents, particularly as a Mother's Day gift, go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more. All right, without further ado, let's head to the interview with my good friend Jeremy Lakosh. Jeremy Lakosh, welcome back to the podcast.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:03:12] Thanks for having me back. Vance. Glad to be here today.

Vance Crowe [00:03:17] So I learned a new word when I was looking up what's going on with Eureka College, and it's one of those things sometimes if you just read a word, you don't exactly know how to pronounce it, but legerdemain, what is going on with Eureka College and how, what is legerdemain as far as you know, it

Jeremy Lakosh [00:03:35] Le Yeah. legerdemain, I, I did not use that word, but it's a, it's a crafty word that was used by Rodney Gould, who is an alum of the college from the 1980s, and basically it means sleigh of hand where somebody is trying to distract you using language that would make you feel better so that you think things are going well, when in fact when you dig deeper. The reality is, is that there's some significant challenges and threats that have presented themselves. So that's kind of the situation that we're in at Eureka College right now. We're, we're trying to get to the bottom of what's going on, and unfortunately the, the language that we're getting back from people is this generic word salad legerdemain.

Vance Crowe [00:04:26] So I'm maybe a good way for us to start this is what's going on in the world of colleges. I know that in St. Louis right now, Fontbonne University has just closed down. Webster University, who I've even had the dean of that university on my podcast before, they are in dire straits. Their board is having all of their decisions looked at really closely all throughout the United States. Colleges that aren't supported by some giant trust are really struggling. What's your view of this, and how is Eureka College involved?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:04:58] Yeah, and I'm glad you brought up Webster and Font Bond, because they're in the same athletic conference as Eureka College. They're, they're kind of all together in the SLIAC. Yeah. Higher education right now is going through a, a flux of changes. The, the market around them is changing. There is an enrollment cliff that people refer to coming where basically the size of college educated population or college, college age population is going to decline starting in 2025. Yeah, Webster's a great example. They've got some significant financial problems there, and interestingly enough, their board has taken the action of turning over leadership at Webster. So we'll see how that goes for them. And I believe they've also requested access to the restricted endowment funds to use those for general operating purposes. But yeah, it, it is, it's a tough environment right now, macro wise, but to be honest with you, Vance, there's a lot of other industries that are going through difficulty. I'd point to banking as one of them. Right now. There's a high cost of funds to borrow for banks, and if you look at last year, yeah, in the first quarter of 2023, we had four notable banks fail, actually three in the first quarter, one in the second quarter. And nobody ever looked at that situation and said, gee, that was a well-run bank that went under no, that, that's not what happens when, when markets begin to shrink.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:06:34] The, the institutions that are poorly run are gonna be the first to go down, and that's gonna be the signal to everybody else that there's a problem. It happened in banking, it happened back in the oh eight financial crisis, and it's happening now in higher education.

Vance Crowe [00:06:51] So let's talk more specifically about Eureka College. I mean, on the one hand, it's interesting to me because I come from Eureka and I understand that this is one of the core things that made this town that I grew up in so special. There's not very many rural central Illinois towns that also have a university that brings in mathematics professors from all over the world. My, you know, my best friend growing up was Evan ura from Sri Lanka because his dad was a math and computer science teacher, and I would never have encountered somebody like this, if not for the university being there. It also brings in basketball camps, and they have a football program, and so the small farming community has this gem in it. And to hear that this gem might fold is heartbreaking to me. But I think it's important for other people to hear about too, because this is not just Eureka College. This is going on in other places, but what are the specific things that are happening in Eureka that are, that are making it worth you spending time thinking and, and talking about this?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:07:51] Yeah, so I mean, I'm a Eureka College alum. I graduated from Eureka College in 2005. Obviously when I have conversations with people nationally, it comes up that Ronald Reagan went to school there. Abraham Lincoln spoke at Eureka College in 1856, and there's actually a rock that marks where, well, it used to mark where he spoke. It has since been moved, but it's just on the edge of campus. And so there's a lot of history on that campus, and you meet lifelong friends there. You have small educational settings, 12 to one faculty to student ratio, which helps with learning. It's a, it's just a great environment to, to get an education in. But for the town, and as a community member, the concern now becomes, you know, if the college fails, this is only a town of 5,000 people, and when you look at the college's balance sheet, there's about $50 million worth of assets on that balance sheet. So it gets kind of concerning if that goes down, what's gonna happen to the town? What's the economics of the town gonna look like if that whole area of Eureka stops functioning? So there's another layer of concern there. And then you worry about the students and the faculty and the staff. These faculty and staff have tied their livelihoods into the institution, and there are some really scary studies out about students who are at closed colleges and what outcomes happen for them, mainly being how many of them don't graduate.

Vance Crowe [00:09:31] So let's talk more specifically what is going on with Eureka College? When did people start sounding the alarm that, that something peculiar seems to be going on there?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:09:40] So over the last six years, there have been ebbs and flows. Some event will happen and there'll be a big flare up of some type from the alumni. A notable staff member who's an alumnus might get fired or somebody resigns in protest and all of a sudden there'll be a ton of letters that come into the board, a lot of inquiries, people wanting to know what's going on, and then it dies out kind of over time. In December of 2023, head coach Kurt Barth, football head coach Kurt Barth resigned suddenly, and this was important because Kurt has worked in the Eureka community, whether at the college or high school for over 20 years. And he is very well known in the community, not for what he does necessarily at Eureka College, but he basically runs the largest volunteer group in the town. When we had the wall that heals out here at Maple Lawn, 6,000 people came to see that we needed to clean up a huge area of grounds quickly. We called Kurt Barth, and he came out here with a dozen football players and whipped that whole place into shape. So he, he was a huge asset to our community as a volunteer leader, as a coach. He's an excellent human being. He was bringing in 90 to 100 football players on the roster at Eureka College, while the enrollment was under 500. So he's supporting the enrollment of the school while it's, while it's going through all these difficulties, and you know, I don't have the exact details of what happened, but we do know that he was treated poorly.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:11:22] He resigned suddenly, and then all of a sudden, Vance, Eureka College puts out this press release about him leaving. They don't mention the fact that he was there for 15 years. They don't mention the fact that he was the winning this football coach. They don't mention the fact that he took him to two NCAA playoff appearances. They don't mention any success. Instead, they say, we're looking for somebody to align the cultural values of our program or of our college to the football program. So they, they put this press release out that basically slaps Kurt Barth across the face. All of the alumni start getting angry because there are so many high school football coaches in your, in Illinois who know Kurt Barth, who played with Kurt Barth, who were coached by Kurt Barth, who send kids to Eureka College, and they're looking at that release going, what's going on? And so it got a lot of attention. Aaron Pelcher, who went to Eureka about the same time as I did, he's an attorney in South Dakota, started a Facebook group called Eureka College Alumni Update, and within a few weeks there were over 1300 members. Today we're over 1500 members, and we've just

Vance Crowe [00:12:37] Town of 4,500 people and a yeah, and a college population of around like 450 students a year, something like that.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:12:43] 7,600 living alumni of Eureka College. And we've got this group of over 1500 people, and we decided since, you know, these flare-ups keep happening and the board doesn't even respond to people, they don't even acknowledge that they've received, you know, your letter. We decided to have the conversation in a public setting. So that's what we're doing now. And my role, everybody does certain things in this group. My role is to look at the publicly shared data, data that Eureka College tells its regulators, and I analyze that data and present it to the group. And a lot of what I've seen has been very concerning. And so that's, that's kind of how this all got started. And so for the last four months now, we have been kind of back and forth with things. The college has issued a statement here and there that hasn't gone over well. We really haven't moved any closer together. We're still miles apart in terms of this issue, but new information continues to come to light that makes the situation at Eureka College more and more troubling. And it makes the situation at Eureka College unique from what's going on in higher education. There are things going on there that have nothing to do with the industry that are dragging the college to the ground.

Vance Crowe [00:14:10] To me, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is because it's very rare that, that you actually, like bureaucracies all the time, have bad leadership, and then, you know, things start to crumble. But generally those bureaucracies are so far away from the public view that you, you don't actually get an inside view of it. And I know that you and I talking over the last few weeks, I mean, Jeremy and I talk check in all the time, but, but one of the things that's that's come to light is you're saying, look, the the bureaucracy is breaking down and the board of directors who should be overseeing this don't seem to have their arms around it, whether it's because they're not aware of it, whether it's because they're not facing the challenges. And to me, this is emblematic of so many boards of directors that they, they seem to have an either an agenda that is not aligned with what the public wants or the employees or, or if they don't have an agenda, they're just like, yes men. And so they're just sitting there saying, Hey, I'm glad to have a boar seat, so if you want me to, to vote on something, I'll just go ahead and vote yes on everything. And so when you've been talking about this, I thought, well, it's very good to have a, a specific situation that we can analyze because this plays out in situations all over the country.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:15:27] Yeah. And, and you know, when you, when you look at the bureaucracy side of it, it's, you know, I, I haven't been comparing Eureka College from a bureaucratic level to other higher education institutions, but I have been thinking a lot about the board and whether or not they're actually engaged in what's going on at the institution. A lot of times people will accept not-for-profit board positions because they're volunteer. They'll do it more as I'm a trustee of this institution and not so much for the responsibility that goes with that. So you have, you have a status symbol issue versus a active responsible role. Now, is the board of trustees of Eureka College engaged in the institution? I have no idea. I have no idea if they are or not, because we're really not hearing from them. They issued a statement on January 8th supporting the president, and in that statement signed by all 17 of them, they mention the science hall, venom, binkley, and in that they misspelled venom and binkley. So that to me tells me that they're not engaged at all. 17 people signed off on that letter with that misspelling. You know, I, so that, that to me says that there's probably three or four people that are the, the bigger driving force of the institution, and the other ones are just sitting back idly. Maybe they come to meetings, maybe they don't, maybe they speak, maybe they don't. But the board does.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:16:59] If the institution is gonna survive, they've gotta come out and prove they're engaged. They can't say they're engaged, that's not gonna work anymore. They've gotta prove it.

Vance Crowe [00:17:09] So what is the threat to the institution? Are they running outta money? They don't have students, what's going on?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:17:14] So enrollment year over year has actually gone up. It actually shot up about 12% in fiscal year 2023. Eureka College capitalized on the closure of Lincoln College and was able to bring in a lot of students there. But then the fiscal 2023 financials came out. They actually just came out recently. The audit and operating cash flow went from 565,000 to negative 1.75 million. So it dropped by 2.2 million. And by the way, Vance, to give your viewers an idea of proportion here, the college only collected six and a half million dollars in tuition, and it burned 1.75 million in cash flow loss from operations. So it's a huge hemorrhage. It's the largest I've ever seen on any of the college financials I've read. And the reason that happened didn't have to do so much with tuition and discounting, although it's contributing, it's because the college went from $2 million in grant money down to less than 200,000. So they had a $1.8 million drop in grant money. And this came despite the board chair telling us that the college has been awarded $7 million in grants across the two year period. Well, that's great that they've been awarded, but they're not collecting it per the audit.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:18:45] So the money is just sitting there waiting to be collected. The college has to follow through to collect it. So this hole has opened up and they have borrowed from their line of credit, almost maxing it out, and now they've had to tap into the unrestricted part of the endowment to keep the lights on. You talk to anybody in higher education who knows what they're talking about. This is a major red alarm. This is the hatch of the ship is open and water is flying in. You have to figure out how to turn this around. And I, I want people to understand cash flow from operations for a second. They burned 1.75 million. It's not that they need to get to zero to be better off, they've gotta get over a positive million dollars because they need to put a million dollars a year into capital expenditures, which is not included in cash flow of operations. So they have to find a way to improve the operation by $2.75 million in order for it to be sustainable. That is more money than they pay all of the faculty combined plus an additional million dollars.

Vance Crowe [00:19:58] So when you're thinking about all this, are you coming at it from a place of like frustration? Are you like, Hey, I just wanna help. Are you thinking this is too far gone? What, where, where are you at on this great

Jeremy Lakosh [00:20:13] Question. I am, and, and I told this to Gary Stocker who interviewed me earlier this week, there's a 95% probability that Eureka College will close 95%.

Vance Crowe [00:20:25] Oh, that is,

Jeremy Lakosh [00:20:26] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:20:27] Absolutely devastating. 95% chance.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:20:31] Yeah, 95%. And, and I, I mean, I hate to say that, and I'm willing to fight for the 5% chance that it stays open, but I'm really having a tough time figuring out how that happens if current circumstances remain the same. And, and, and I wanna make it clear, because several people in our group think that there are people who need to be fired from the college. There's a petition that has over 700 signatures calling for the termination of the board officers and the president. This issue is bigger than any one person at Eureka College. This is a chaotic organization throughout that is gonna need a total rebuild. And none of that happens if the board doesn't decide to take the action to do it. So none of the staffing positions at Eureka College matter, none of them in terms of turning this thing around. There are some great people there who can certainly do the bailing of the water that is needed, but if the board does not decide to become engaged in that turnaround process, it's not going to happen. And a better way to look at it, or a better challenge is we've seen Eureka College go from here in 2016 to here today with all the market challenges that are coming up.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:22:02] How can we expect the exact same people to take it to here in the two years? We need it to turn around. There's a lot that's gotta happen.

Vance Crowe [00:22:12] To me, the the the point that you can extract out meaning to somebody that's not involved with Eureka College or doesn't care about higher ed, is the role of boards of directors. And unless you've been on one, it can seem like, oh, the, the boards of directors automatically know what they should be doing, or they automatically have like some mystique about them because of the position. But the reality is every board that exists is comprised of individuals that are expected to have some responsibility. You need to be aware of what's going on with your organization. You need to understand some skills you need to bring to the table, like a, a knowledge that other people don't have. So you can ask good questions. The, the board typically hires the president. And so they're really only responsible for does the president of a board, are they managing the company the way that we want it to, or the organization the way that we want it to? Because you don't want a board that's like, Hey, let's bring that administrator up here and that person up here and judge it. They just choose one person. And then that one person goes and works inside of the organization, comes back to the board members, but the board members, if they're chosen by the president, one, become vulnerable to just wanting the president to like them, wanting to be a part of that, wanting to keep getting asked back. But then the other thing is, oftentimes if you have a, a board that's really large, people begin to feel like, well, my vote doesn't really matter. What I say doesn't really matter. So people phone it in.

Vance Crowe [00:23:44] And I think that you can say, wow, it's, I I'm only gonna phone it in on this meeting. And you do it a couple meetings, and if you're only meeting once a quarter or something like that, you now have had an entire year of supervision of this organization that everyone around you is expecting is being done well, and it's it's not being done well, and you are the one that's supposed to be watching it.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:24:03] Yeah, that's excellent insight. I mean, and you, you have served on a, a board. I have been in, in and out of not-for-profit boards now for it's hard to believe, 20 years. And you have to, our board here at Maple Lawn Homes has people who have different various backgrounds and specialties, human resources, legal, we have one that's a resident that could give good resident,

Vance Crowe [00:24:30] I'm gonna stop you for a second. You're describing, so Jeremy oversees an organization called Maple Lawn, which is a retirement community in this small town. And it really is the backbone of, as our population ages, will there be a place that they can go if they are not able to live in their home, they need somebody to, they want to be in a community, they want to be able to have housing and snow removal and all these things. So you oversee this organization and, and help guide them through some pretty turbulent times.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:24:59] Yeah. So I've been in a situation where there's been significant financial distress here with our retirement community where it looked like the lights were gonna go out without a doubt. We had borrowed every dollar we had, we maxed out our lines of credit. We didn't have an endowment to tap into. At one point we stopped paying the mortgage on an asset. So we had to sell assets, we had to reset our pricing in order to get things turned around. But something very critical that we had to do in order to do this is that we had to tell our residents, we had to have meetings with residents to let them know what was going on and the decisions that we were making and why we were making those decisions. And so, yeah, I mean, I, I'm seeing this thing at Eureka College and I'm having flashbacks to my own time when we dealt with a liquidity crisis of our own. And I'm, I'm very, very blessed to be in the position I'm in today. And, and quite frankly, the whole thing is an answer to prayer that we are now in a position where it's not cash resources, that's the problem. It's labor, the supply resources. That's the problem. I'll, I'll take that over cash any day of the week.

Vance Crowe [00:26:11] So I How do you know that you're not just being too hard on them? I mean, inflation has gone absolutely wild and people, you know, didn't have a sense for how this would impact what their expenses were gonna be and how this would impact, you know, the way that just the whole situation would unfold. It seems like it'd be very easy to say, look, that board is not handling this problem, but maybe it's the fact that these ma macro conditions are too much for anybody to handle. Yeah,

Jeremy Lakosh [00:26:44] It's a great question. And my answer to that is to focus on the students of Eureka College and their outcomes. That's what I've been very passionate about through this pro process. There's a statistic called retention, and it's measured based on the percentage of freshmen that come in the fall year, the number that return their sophomore year. And the average retention rate of colleges in the United States is around 75%. So 75% of the freshmen are back for their sophomore year. Now, when you look at private not-for-profit colleges, it's a little higher. It's 81%. When you look in Illinois, it's 79%. So you wanna be in those seventies to low eighties range. In 2015, Eureka College was at 82% in 2022, Eureka College was at 57%.

Vance Crowe [00:27:41] Ooh, that's not, that's almost, yeah, you're getting close to half, half, almost half the students that start leave.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:27:49] And that statistic bottomed out Vance in 2018. So it's not the pandemic that did it, it's not the industry that did it, because I'm comparing to everybody else. Everybody else had COVID and the retention rate in the United States during COVID dropped one or 2%. Something else is at play here to cause the retention rate to basically fall into the toilet. And I'll give you a better number, Eureka College is a part of the Associated Colleges of Illinois. It's a 25 single site college program. It's a, it's a coalition, 25 of 'em in the last five years. Eureka College on retention ranking amongst that group of 25 has either been last or second to last. So clearly they're not educating students to graduation, which is what I'm most concerned about. And the graduation rate has tanked as well. The four year graduation rate at Eureka College used to be over 40%. It is now 24%. 24%. And so they're, they're underperforming on retention versus the industry versus their own historical metrics. They're underperforming on graduation rate versus the industry versus historical metrics. If you are a college and you are not taking students in and graduating them, what are you doing?

Vance Crowe [00:29:23] Well, I mean, I think in a lot of ways college has become a sort of adult daycare for kids that want to not grow up. And so they get to take out loans for massive amounts of money. They get a four year time where they're living with very few responsibilities, and they don't realize that what they're doing is selling themselves into a form of indentured servitude, where the university education that they're receiving is often not enough to drag them from, let's say, middle class to middle upper class. And in fact, what it's oftentimes doing is enslaving them in debt so that the number of options that they have are, aren't actually increased that dramatically by holding a piece of paper. But that is hugely amplified if you have the debt, but then don't have a degree. So all of those students that 75% of students that start, that don't graduate. This is devastating. And, and I, I noticed when I was looking up some research for this, you know, you could say, well, it's what we should do is look at the six years, you know, what, what happens? Maybe they didn't graduate in four, maybe they graduated over six years, but the reality is a number like 24% after four years. This is, this is not a good statistic.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:30:38] No. And it's, it's un well under 50% at the six year mark. And so whatever way you slice it or dice it, it's underperforming and it's been underperforming for a long time. And that's where I look at the board of trustees and say, A or ask A, are you aware of this? B do you feel like something should be done about it? I mean, again, we're not talking about a big drop that's alarmed people over one year. We're talking about the drop happening in 2018, and it stayed at the bottom. So again, that's where I question whether or not there's engagement and whether or not anybody's gonna be held accountable for this, somebody needs to be held accountable for the fact that they're bringing in students and they're leaving without a degree. Almost half of them are gone within a year. And another statistic I'll throw out Vance, is there's, Eureka College has accounts receivable, student based accounts receivable. When you look at that number on a gross basis, back in 20 16, 20 17, there were years where it was under a million dollars. It is now over $3 million. It's over $5,000 per student. And I can't find a comparable college that even comes closer, holds a candle to that huge surge in ar. So not only is the college, you know, discounting tuition, but they're not even collecting all of the revenue. They're extending credit to students who then leave and they never get that money.

Vance Crowe [00:32:15] Wow. So, as I think about this, you know, my father was a member of the board of trustees. It was a very big deal. It took a lot of his time. And I remember every year at graduation he would put on his investments and, and go to the graduation. What is going on? I mean, are the board members are, are they gonna be able to hold their heads up in this small sleepy farm town as, as after the, the college closes down if, if it falls that 95% chance?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:32:42] Oh yeah. So the board of trustees won't have to worry about holding their head up high in Eureka. All 19 board members Vance do not live or work in Woodford County. So they'll just go back to wherever they are, Missouri, Massachusetts, Florida, and they'll just go about their daily lives like it never happened. Who cares? That's, that's what they'll, they'll never mention Eureka College again. And, and that'll be the end of it. There's nobody in this, there's nobody in this community on that board of trustees. And I can't recall a time in the college's history that's ever been the case.

Vance Crowe [00:33:21] How in the world did that happen? I mean, how, how does the board like, is so, is this like a gradually then suddenly, how, how does the board not be comprised of the people in the community?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:33:33] Well, there's, there's a very poor relationship between the community and the college. Right now, the college's feeling towards the community is that the community needs to be more supportive of the college and the community is kind of like, well, we're not obligated, you know, to

Vance Crowe [00:33:52] Go to

Jeremy Lakosh [00:33:53] Athletic events or to go to anything at Eureka College, especially when the college really doesn't broadcast events that are going on on campus, nor invite the community. And so I think it's just gotten to a point where the board has decided to isolate themselves. They use, they, everybody's been forced to sign an NDA for my understanding of things. So you have this culture of NDAs for the staff, for the faculty, for the board. So you can't talk about anything, can't talk about it. And obviously they don't talk to folks like me. They're, they won't answer any questions. And so for them, it's probably better to have somebody in another state come in as a, as a board member than it would be for, for somebody like in a town of Eureka. 'cause somebody from Eureka that gets on that board is gonna be like, what in the world is going on here? And, and, and the other piece of it too is I'm not making an overly arching effort to reach out to the board of trustees. I sent them a letter in 2018. They never acknowledged that they got it. And I don't like repeating myself, but the last thing I want to do is call somebody in, in Indiana and have them try to tell me that things are going okay two miles from my house. It's clearly obvious that it's not. And anybody who's on the Eureka College alumni update will know on Facebook that the cat here is clearly out of the bag, that there are systemic problems at the institution that need to be addressed.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:35:30] And so I they, they've wanted to be isolated. They're isolated now, believe me, they're isolated.

Vance Crowe [00:35:36] So I think

Jeremy Lakosh [00:35:37] Let's, I don't know where,

Vance Crowe [00:35:38] Let's zoom the camera lens back out of, away from it just being Eureka College. This kind of goes along with a subject, a past podcast guest brought up, and I talk about it a lot. That, that our institutions that we have, those are social technologies, right? The, they don't just exist. You can't just have an institution and say, here's a checklist on how you're gonna make this institution work, whether that's a university or a rotary club or a Boy Scout troop, right? Like you have the things that you're supposed to do, but there's like an aliveness to the whole thing on how do you get people to participate? How do you get people to buy into what you're doing? How do you make the mission be encompassing? And as I think about the boards of directors that I've either been on or near or watched, I think that the social technology about contributing to a board has been almost completely lost. It, it's, it's like taking night classes that happen to have the word Harvard in them somewhere and then telling everybody you have a Harvard degree, that it's just play acting. It's, you know, another word for it is LARPing, where you're live active role playing, but you're not actually, you don't, you don't inhabit what it is that you're doing. I sense that this is not just Eureka College, I actually sense that this is most boards including for-profit boards. What do you think of that?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:37:02] Yeah, yeah. I, I think you're right. I have a, I have a acquaintance who is a shareholder activist. He takes money that he manages, buys a chunk of a publicly traded company, and then he tells that company, you need to unlock share value for shareholders, and we would like a board seat and begins a proxy battle with those boards. And it's clear when I look through his research that this issue exists. So publicly traded company boards of directors, and it's pointed out, it's actually pointed out best through compensation. They'll look at executive compensation as compared to other metrics of the business, and they'll be like, guys, this is way too top heavy. You gotta start cutting some management back and making your compensation structure more reflective of the performance of the company.

Vance Crowe [00:37:59] Oh, absolutely. Like if you start seeing that a board of directors is paying the, the president and maybe the, the top two or three people disproportionate from the rest of, of like your, your industry, you know, competitors, but then you also go and look and you say, wait a second, but they're not turning a profit, or they're, they're actually falling way behind people. Then you gotta go and say, how much of this board is ideologically captured? How many of them are just there because, hey, this looks good. Or they're getting, they're getting a huge, you know, 'cause 'cause board fees can be quite high. So you're getting paid ostensibly to, to actually look at the financials, to actually read the, the contracts that you're about to sign to, to probe and to ask. When you bring in the company's attorney or you bring in the president, you know, you as a board member, you should be sitting there asking them questions. And in my own experience, when I first joined a board, I actually had a bunch of the board members come up to me afterwards and be like, really grateful, very open about it. And it was because I have no problem asking a question when I don't understand something. So I can make a 30 minute meeting last four and a half hours because I'll be like, wait a second, I don't know what that means. Can you tell me that? And I think a lot of times on boards, people are having ideas just like zoom past them and they're voting with real money at stake. They're, they're signing documents that really are going to obligate your organization to something and they have no idea what they're doing.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:39:39] Yeah, I not only do I totally agree with what you just said, but I believe that there is value in having disagreeable board members, having people who question a certain line of why are we doing this? You know, what led us to this point? What are the risks associated with doing this? And I'll give you an example. For me personally, we had at Maple Lawn Homes, a disagreeable board member, and he resigned when we sold our assets off for a nursing home to stabilize the business. And his reason for resignation was, I don't believe the business is viable. I don't think it will survive. And it took several years to realize his, the loss that he had to us, because we didn't have somebody in the room really questioning what we were doing. I had to take more risk and navigate into a dark space kind of on my own, putting the life of the organization a danger to figure out whether a strategy would work or not, because I didn't have that disagreeable voice telling me, you ought to consider this, you ought to consider that you ought look at the risks. So it, it really, it really slowed our turnaround to not have that peace pull. So I kind of had to operate a little more blindly, a little more carefully, but I had to take risks that maybe I didn't need to take if I had somebody like that around.

Vance Crowe [00:41:10] Yeah, my mentor Pete always talks about how every board, every really every group needs what he called a hair shirt. You know, this is a shirt that's made out of like horse hair and if you wear it, you're always itchy. You can't, you never get comfortable in it. And he said, the reason you need this is most people wanna get along with you. They want you to like them, they want you to smile, they wanna get a big warm greeting when they're somewhere. So if you get a person that is willing to tell you like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't agree with that, or I don't like that, or You better explain that to me in the moment, you can be like, this is a pain. But the value of it is that most of the time people won't tell you if there's something in your teeth and they'll go ahead and sign something because everybody else around them is signing it. And so if you don't have that hair shirt, then you're in the exact position that you're in. I think it's so easy for a president or executive director of an organization to load their board up with people that are just gonna keep saying yes. Not realizing that all you're doing is tying a blindfold and probably your arms behind your back.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:42:18] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I'll point to something else. I actually have it right here. It's Eureka College's 2022 strategic plan, and it fits onto a, a trifold pamphlet. Something interesting about this when it comes to strategic planning, we can't find more than two people who were actually involved in putting this together. Nobody knows anything about the compilation of this. There was no press release, no announcement, it was just dumped on the website in 2022. Now remember from my earlier comments in 2018, retention bottomed. So by 2022, you would think retention and graduation is gonna be important. Well, let me read some of the things that are in the strategic plan campus, hotel, hotel on campus. How does, how does that help retention? There was talk of a pub, there was talk of a daycare center, there was talk of a student success center, which that's an interesting idea of a student success center, but when you read this, you really don't know what the Student Success Center does. It's just a nice label. So you look through this stuff and you're kind of like, how do you, how do you improve retention, the mission, the vision, and the core values, which are right here. Don't mention liberal arts. There's no liberal arts mention in those. So what are we doing if we're, if we're throwing resources at a hotel, if we're throwing resources over here, we're throwing resources over there, you know, what are we really doing?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:43:55] And, and so this, this needs to be revamped. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:43:58] I think that that's emblematic of the challenge of strategy. People look at strategy and they think, oh, that'd be fun. I wanna be a part of strategy. But strategy involves details. And I think that we over time have gotten very used to, particularly in corporate America, where what we do is we wanna put strategy into bullet points on a PowerPoint or in a tri-fold brochure. And, and you have this big idea, but then you have to say, well, how does this fit into this goal that we're shooting for this, this place that we're trying to get to? And that, that is one of those things that it's like, it's like trying to build a house and saying what appliances you wanna have in your kitchen before you've designed the kitchen, before you even really have a picture for, for what is the kitchen's purpose and how are we gonna use it and how many people are gonna be here? And I think that that is 100% at the foot of the board because the board comes together to say, this is our vision, this is our mission, this is what the people that put us in this position are supposed want us to do. And we're willing to take a risk and we're gonna choose a person. We're gonna put them in the executive seat and they are going to implement this vision and we're gonna keep bringing them back here and asking them how it's going. And the reason that person gets paid is because they are able to execute on the strategy that we created. So if you have a board that is not creating a strategy, or that strategy is just a, a smattering of, of like out there ideas, no matter how good those ideas are, it's impossible for someone to execute on.

Vance Crowe [00:45:37] And I think that this is, I mean it's going on at Eureka College, but I can tell you it is going on in corporate America at all times because strategy is hard. It's not easy. People think they want to be a part of strategy, but you gotta not only have an imagination, but you have to be obsessive about the details.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:45:54] Yeah. And we are starting our strategic plan right now. In fact, we had our first kickoff meeting last month, and already as part of our strategic plan, we've asked the opinions of our residents, which they've provided about 65 survey responses back. And we incorporate the history of those surveys into our strategic plan. And we went out to the Eureka community as a whole and asked for information, and we got about a hundred responses, give or take a few. So we've already had about 170 people, if you include my board, participate in this process because they are stakeholders of the not-for-profit. You gotta ask everybody about, about what you do and what they would find a value of what you do and what, what they're gonna

Vance Crowe [00:46:45] Want. Well, you gotta, if they interact with your organization, you understand that you are a part of a community, you are a part of a network. And that if you don't, if you isolate yourself and none of the edges, none of your nodes touch the nodes of the other people in your community. Like, okay, you can go off on your own, but then when you need help, when you need people to contribute, when you need people to jump in and, and bail out the ship, then you don't have it. If you've not gone out and done and done this engagement. When I was in the US Peace Corps, the, the Kenyans were very, very good at this. Now, there are a lot of things that are not great in Kenya, but I can tell you that the way that they got community involvement, the way they kept their nets really strong in a place where they didn't have many resources was that people went around and, and got the sense and, and brought in this kind of community. If your board's not doing it and your president's not doing it, you you might as well be in another state or in another country because it doesn't, you, you don't matter for the integration into your own community. Yeah,

Jeremy Lakosh [00:47:45] Yeah, I totally agree. And we, we have, we have just scratched the surface of our strategic plan. There's gonna be more surveys, more interaction with our residents and or community at large. You know, we're bringing in all the stakeholders to try to get feedback. It's not gonna be a one and done type deal. It's, there's gonna be multiple rounds of this before we come out and present the direction that we want to go as an organization.

Vance Crowe [00:48:11] So Jeremy, you are a very, very creative investor. It, it often intimidates me to talk with you about in investing because the ideas that you come up with and the nuance and the detail that you know is, is incredible. If we see this going on at Eureka College, that they're failing 95% chance that they're gonna fail. Let's, let's kinda game plan this and think about it from the other side of the, the, the table, the, the people that are sitting there saying, is there an opportunity here? So if you are gonna try and turn this around, you're obviously going to have to come in and slash expenses and try and raise income as you, as you slash expenses you, this means you're probably selling things. You're, you're, you're offloading it. And if this is going on at colleges about the size of Eureka College all over the country, is there buying opportunity that people should be looking at to say, ah, colleges are gonna need to un unload these things. They're not gonna be that valuable to the college. But me as an investor, I could, I could swoop in and grab something.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:49:13] Well, I, you know, it's interesting 'cause Eureka College's core assets are their academic buildings and they're all over a century old. And when you look at small colleges that have closed, most of those assets sit empty until they get bulldozed. So there's, there's a lot, there's so much deferred maintenance on the campuses of small colleges that I haven't seen a situation yet where a a school has been totally repurposed. There are, like, in the case of Fon, it looks like Wash U is gonna come in and they purchased the campus and they're gonna utilize some of the assets.

Vance Crowe [00:49:50] Yeah. So for listeners, this is, these two colleges are right next door to each other. Font Bond used to be an all girls school, wash UI believe used to be an all a male school. And then over time Wash U became, you know, a billion dollar endowment, a huge university, you know, kind of the Harvard of the Midwest. And now with Fong closing, they're just gonna whoop grab it. Now they've got new facilities, they've got new dormitories, they've got new, all kinds of stuff. But most pla most colleges don't have somebody sitting there ready to buy up their thing.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:50:21] Right? And so, like in the case of Eureka College, there are assets that the college owns that aren't of educational purpose. They own seven or eight single family homes. They own a lot of land that could be of value to somebody else should they want to develop a, a residential real estate, but they're gonna have to do it next to a closed college if the college doesn't survive. So that, that's kind of a tough area to look at. I I, I'm sure there's opportunity there Vance looking towards the end of this decade, but I'm not seeing it right now because there's so many schools that are probably headed towards closure and they've got so much deferred maintenance, it's easier for somebody to acquire those assets to do a, a tear down rebuild of whatever they're wanting to do.

Vance Crowe [00:51:16] You know, this is the kind of the kind of wildfire that I believe has to burn through as a result of, of, you know, not not having taken care of the undergrowth that's underneath it. You and I talk a great deal about the economy, so I'm gonna make a shift from where we've been talking about into what's going on in the economy. Sure. You know, that my largest fear has always, and probably will always be the mobs that come from, from inflation hitting people hard. Right? All of a sudden things are too expensive. You can't buy the things that you used to be able to afford. You're not getting paid in the same way that you were. And so inflation has been running wild. The fed kind of claims that it's slowing down, although I I would disagree with that. They are now instituting a treasury buyback program. This is the third time that this has happened. I just read a little bit about this this morning and, and it, it does not appear to me that the Fed doing a treasury buyback program is a sign of a strong and healthy economy. What do you see when you look at a treasury buyback? First of all, what is it and what do you think this means?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:52:26] Yeah, so the treasury buyback is interesting. I think it's, I think it's kinda lipstick on a pig, if you will. There, there isn't a flat rate of interest on every single treasury bond. The market that you see when you turn on CNBC that tells you what they're selling for today. But people are buying and selling these treasuries all the time. And I think what the treasury department is trying to do is identify arbitrage opportunities where they could come in and pull out some treasury debt that may be trading at a rate of interest that's higher in an exchange issue, low coupon debt or, or tips or whatever, and, and try to kind of manipulate their interest expense obligation by touching in and out of that market. I I read the article you sent me and I, I saw that there was discussion of robust or enhanced liquidity, and I thought that was absolutely not because the treasury market today trades just as freely as as US dollars. I, I could go out and buy treasuries just as much as anybody else. So I think what the government is trying to do is they're trying to identify opportunities to lower their interest expense. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:53:42] I was reading a little bit this morning about how treasury auctions work and how in the news you, you keep hearing like these little rumblings, like well, they went out and they, they didn't get to sell everything that they had to offer. And, and there was one treasury auction recently that the, you know, as the interest rate goes down, people want to purchase more of them. Right. So if, anyway, I don't wanna get into the details of it. I'm going to get this wrong, but I, I sense that the treasury market is not as solid as it once was. How is this something that I'm, I'm just a doomsayer or is, is this right? Are treasuries not the rock solid asset that they used to be?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:54:26] So the way I would frame this is that this, the ground is shifting underneath the debt markets right now. And the reason that's happening is because the amount of liquidity that's in the economy is, is shrinking. The fed is doing everything it can do to try to control prices. So they're trying to pull as much money out of the economy as they can. And one way they're doing that is through quantitative tightening where they are selling US treasuries. So they sell treasuries in exchange for cash, and that pulls liquidity out of the economy. The problem that we're seeing right now, Vance, is that the federal deficits are just way outta control. The federal government is dumping huge amounts of debt onto the market. The Federal Reserve is also dumping debt onto the market, and recently the Social Security Trust has started running deficits, which means they have to dump treasuries onto the market in order to make social security payments. So you have this huge supply of debt coming onto the market in a shrinking liquidity situation. And so what a lot of the, the, the bond vigilantes are saying is at some point the liquidity level's gonna drop to where there's too many bonds for the amount of money that's there. And because of that, prices have to drop and yields have to go up. And that's how you get to a six year, or a 6% 10 year bond, or a six and a half percent, 10 year bond is because the amount of liquidity in the economy reaches a tipping point.

Vance Crowe [00:55:58] So if I could try my best to describe what a treasury is, you can kind of correct this, and I, I may be totally off on this, but my sense from what you're describing is a treasury is, Hey guys, we want your cash because we're gonna spend that cash on something and like we're going to, we're gonna pay down debt or we're going to, so they go out and they say, if you give us your cash today, then 10 years from now we will give you all that cash back plus this amount of interest on that for the, for the, for the fact that you couldn't use that money for the last 10 years. Is that, is that an accurate way to describe it?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:56:35] Yeah, yeah. So you're talking about long-term debt. There's long-term debt in the treasury. You buy a 10 year bond, it pays a four and a half percent coupon. So you get a four and half percent coupon every six months. And then at the end of the 10 years, you get the full principle back when the interest rates go up, that means the price of that bond is dropped down. So it requires less money for the investor to come in and and acquire it. And that's why you see interest rates go up. But then there's another type of bond that I participate in, it's the short term treasuries. They trade within six month periods. And the Treasury Department is constantly issuing these, these are actually zero coupon bonds. So I will buy a thousand dollars bond for $974 and in six months I get a thousand bucks. And when you look at that from an interest standpoint, it comes out to 5% or five and a quarter, whatever. So I've been engaged in that lately. It's the same thing as a thousand dollars with a 5% coupon attached to it. It's just a kind of a different way of, of altering things. And I don't know if the government reports that as interest or if it just creates new principle. That's a great question. I don't know. But those are the two primarily present durations in the treasury market.

Vance Crowe [00:57:58] People talk about, you know, the, the gears freezing up or the music stopping, right? This is, this is kind of the mantra of what happened during the 2008 liquidity crisis, right? Like all of a sudden people stopped paying their, they, they couldn't pay their mortgages, so you couldn't cover that debt. Now that you start having this cascade, are we worried about the music stopping in the same way right now?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:58:21] I think I would worry about the music slowing. I would worry about situations where all of a sudden liquidity is not present enough to support the debt markets because then you get volatility. This happened in Europe in 2011, and if it, and it's probably gonna rear its head somewhere else other than the United States because the US Treasury is the number one demanded sovereign debt instrument. So it's probably gonna raise its head somewhere else around the world and it'll probably get ignored until it hits an industrial economy and then it will ripple through the entire global financial system. Liquidity has a way of being incredibly destructive when it starts to go away. So music stopping would be the equivalent to a IG failing in 2008. And the domino effect going after that, I think it's more or less the music slowing and all of a sudden governments are having trouble extracting liquidity that they need from the capital markets in order to operate.

Vance Crowe [00:59:28] So people talk about how much money the government is spending. It seems like they, they've become, you know, drunken sailors or something, right? That they don't have any limits on it. They can spend whatever they want. How does this seem like people right now seem to have this sense that like, we are not gonna have to pay that back or we're so strong or, you know, but, but you know, it feels so wrong. It feels so like why are we doing this? Like we're harming ourselves. What are your thoughts about, you know, debt that, like taking on all this debt? When does it come due? How does all this work out?

Jeremy Lakosh [01:00:02] Yeah, so I think one area that we're not considering when we look at where does debt start to turn around on us is in the event that population declines begin to start happening worldwide, we're starting to hear a lot of information about worldwide population could actually start declining on the back end of this century. So if all of a sudden the number of people that are around starts to shrink and you've got this huge debt, not to mention a majority of 'em will probably be older. So it's not like they're, they're going to be in a position to, they're gonna be living off their savings, not accumulating wealth. I think you've got a real problem on your hands there. So it's hard to say when it's gonna raise its ugly head, but it is gonna raise its ugly head. I mean, there's gonna be a moment where the capital resources that exist in the global financial markets cannot support the amount of sovereign debt that's out there. And I just don't know where. And another area we may end up seeing advance is in the private credit markets, all of a sudden businesses with double B or triple B credit ratings are having trouble getting money. That might be where it shows up because everybody's lending to the government that's also known as crowding out. So there's a lot of different ways that this could come up, but to your point of it feeling wrong, it definitely is wrong. And we've done it for so many years that we've got an addicted to it. It's become a, it's become a bad habit. The American people are being bribed by the legislative branch of the government with their own money and with their future money.

Jeremy Lakosh [01:01:39] And so there's a lot of behavioral things here that have to turn around in order for us to get this under control. You have an

Vance Crowe [01:01:47] Economic school of thought that you would say you largely belong to?

Jeremy Lakosh [01:01:52] Yeah, the Milton Friedman Thomas Sowell Camp is probably my biggest area. I'm sympathetic to the Austrian School of Economics, but I really like Milton Friedman because he talks about the role of money supply in growing and shrinking the economy and managing inflation. In fact, it's his theories that the Federal Reserve used to implement quantitative easing during the financial crisis, and they're using it now to try to tighten on the other end. So that's the area that I kind of buy into is that the money supply plays a huge role. Now the, the central bank becomes more incentivized or, or becomes more pressured to flood the financial system with money when the government is borrowing out of control. Because when you hit that breaking point, what happens, the central bank lowers interest rates and they start buying up government debt. And so there are weaknesses to, to that, that, that monetary management, if you will. But for the large part, the money supply I think is a huge factor in economic output and price stability.

Vance Crowe [01:03:06] Yeah, I mean, it's so funny 'cause I, the, I was, I came to libertarianism through Milton Friedman, and then later as you get further into the MEUs world, the the Hayek world, those people say like, ah, he's actually kind of the, the turncoat, right? He's the guy, the libertarian that, that says, oh, it's okay for us to use the Fed. And I of course feel very strongly that the Fed is like wizards coming down from a mountain making these pronouncements about what the, what money should cost as opposed to allowing it to free float. Where are you at now and has, has anything changed on your thoughts on Bitcoin?

Jeremy Lakosh [01:03:47] Huh? Bitcoin? So I actually did put a little bit of investment into Bitcoin and let it go. And it went up as we saw recently, and then I sold it. So I don't, I'm not so, I'm not, I'm not, yeah, yeah. So, so I'm not, I'm not in Bitcoin right now, but again, it's, it's an inst it has value. It, it, it, it has all of the means of what a currency is. And so, I mean, it is a legitimate item out there. And I love hearing the monetary establishment demonize it because it's a competitor, you know, much like if I started a private school in, in Chicago, Chicago public school system would demonize me, you know? Oh no, it's a competitor and that's what Bitcoin is to the, to the financial system. I think that it is still way too volatile. The volatility is, is unbelievable. But you know, I hear people talk about it going to 1,000,002 million, that's not as crazy as it sounds. I mean, when I was a kid the Dow was under 3000 and today it's what, over 40,000? So, you know, a 10 x move on something is, is not totally irrational. But I'm not using it to buy anything. I'm not using, I don't have a card or anything like that. It, it to, you're probably not surprised to hear this Vance, but Eureka Illinois is not a, a big Bitcoin hub.

Jeremy Lakosh [01:05:23] You can't go up to, you can't go up to Hucks and buy your gas with it. And so, but if it, if it were to sell off again, if it, if there were to be a really big plunge in it, I I would probably look at it again, just from a store of value standpoint.

Vance Crowe [01:05:37] My personal belief is there is a sell off and we are at rock bottom prices right now, so, so buy and, and hold for the long term. But I gotta say that's a pretty far movement from, from where we were a few years ago, right? Like, I, I don't think you were, you were never negative on Bitcoin, but it, it's, it, it lightens my heart that you got in for a little while and then got out. Did you hold that as an ETF or did you actually hold the coins and, and buy and sell that way?

Jeremy Lakosh [01:06:05] Okay, so I don't totally know. I bought it through Robinhood. I did not buy it as an ETF because I bought it before the ETFs came out. I am kind of studying how that works right now and seeing, you know, if, if the ETF is of a better value. So I bought it through Robinhood, I guess as regular coin. They probably held it for me 'cause I never had it on a hard drive or anything like that. And then when the, when the price took off the way it did, I was like, yeah, it's, it's a, I'll take the capital gain. I'm gonna, I'm gonna sell it and there'll be a time where it's lower than this and I can maybe look at buying it again. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:06:45] So then that, that just means you bought it on an exchange. You held it on the exchange and then sold it out that way. So, you know, I am always a big proponent of not your keys, not your coin. That once you buy it on an exchange, pull it off. But I'm just glad you went somewhere you bought it. You, you know, you, you started to get the little touch of what it feels like in one day, Jeremy, in the probably not too distant future, you're gonna say, well, isn't it nice to have a little place where I can store value that somebody can't inflate it away? Jeremy, do you, as you look out on the world, what is something you are excited about and looking forward to?

Jeremy Lakosh [01:07:19] I'm excited about the fact that I live in Eureka, Illinois and that I live in Woodford County. I, my wife and I love it here. We wouldn't change anything about the lives that we have here. Somebody who's a mutual friend of ours, Vance told me, don't worry about the whims of the global economy because so much around here is rooted in hard assets. So if something really bad were to happen, this community could probably pick itself up better than a community that's rooted in financial instruments. And, and you know, I I, I really do ascribe to that. We've got some great relationships here with, with our vendors and with independent contractors and in the community. And, and one of the greatest honors of mine is that there are people who I will meet who are shocked, shocked that I wasn't born and raised here. And I think that's just a huge privilege and honor when I hear that, well,

Vance Crowe [01:08:18] You, you joined the community in Eureka and you contributed and you showed up and you've been there over time and just you can, any human being that shows up in a community over and over and over again and shows they're willing to, to give and take becomes a part of that community. You could do it in Eureka or you could do it in Africa. If there's a small enough group of people to to be known to, you know, you get into the city and you become anonymous, it's a lot harder to necessarily communicate, to deliver, like give and then also be a part of that. So I wanna wrap up by throwing in my 2 cents on Eureka College. And I hesitate to, to say this is advice because I, I don't know, I haven't lived in Eureka in more than 20 years. I don't contribute to the school. I didn't go to the school. But one thing that I think that has happened in, in small town America is that in a place like Eureka, there's an opportunity to do things that are against the grain. So many universities right now are just mono thinking. They just have one way of thinking. And you could go to an elite university or you could go to a state university and the the discourse is the same. What they believe you should and shouldn't be allowed to say, what, what social causes you should support. All of these things have become a monoculture. And even though Eureka is a small town in, in rural Illinois, what you could do is create something that is different than that monoculture. You could create a university that says, we welcome people from the far left, the far right, the middle, in between those areas.

Vance Crowe [01:09:55] People that are orthogonal to, to a political way of thinking. And we are allowing discourse to happen here in a way that these other universities can't do it and, and they're never gonna do it. And those universities, whether they, they might be solvent right now, but they won't be in the future because the value of going to college is, is going down because it's really just a, almost an indoctrination camp and, and a like child, an adult daycare. So I think Eureka, if they're gonna survive, they need to not think how can we be more like other groups, but instead should say, how can we be different than all of these other universities? How does that advice sit with you?

Jeremy Lakosh [01:10:35] Yeah, I've actually said something similar in higher education right now. Those who differentiate will survive. If you differentiate yourself in a way that makes you marketable and you say, Hey, this is what we do. Well, nobody else does it like us. And at Eureka College, quite honestly, the education program is superb. There are three, two people that I went to college with who are superintendents in districts around us right now, and a third one who's well on his way. And I'm not even aware of that entire group of educators. So you have a great education program, you've got a great business administration program, you've got programs that are the core of differentiating who you are. You've gotta start selling yourself as that. You differentiate yourself, you survive. Well,

Vance Crowe [01:11:29] Jeremy Lakosh, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Good luck helping Eureka to find the right answer to their college challenges and man, looking forward to having you back on the podcast again soon.

Jeremy Lakosh [01:11:41] Thanks again for the opportunity Vance. Appreciate it.