Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School looks durable. The school holds 2.5 years of operating cushion, on the lighter end for a boarding school. Revenue runs 71% tuition-dependent (peer median 80%), moderate diversification with a meaningful endowment and contributions base. Staff compensation runs 38% of expenses, well below the peer median, worth understanding why. NACUBO Composite Financial Index: 6.6 / 10, strong.
Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School reported $36.2M in revenue against $33.8M in expenses in fiscal year 2023, the most recent filing on record. Net assets stood at $85.4M — about 2.53x annual operating expense.
Operating margin landed at 6.7%, with 71.3% of revenue coming from tuition. Among same-size peers, that puts Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School at the p43 on operating margin.
Ten panels on Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School: financial health, peer comparison, community demographics, paying & giving capacity, competitive position, enrollment demand, leadership compensation, governance — and the questions to ask. One subscription opens every school.
Ten panels. One school. A year of access.
$250 a year — or $100 the first year for the founding 100.
Why “revenue scale” and not “endowment per student”: independent-school 990s don’t carry per-school enrollment, and NCES PSS coverage is partial, so we cannot divide endowment by a verified student count for every school. The bar above is each school’s latest reported total revenue. True endowment-per-student is scheduled for v1.1+ once Schedule D Part V parsing lands.
Peers are scored by similarity along three equal-weighted dimensions: size cohort (Form 990 employee count + max-revenue tier, a proxy for student enrollment, which the 990 does not carry), geographic region (eight-region grouping), and association overlap (NAIS, NBOA, regional councils). We rank the top 20 nearest peers and chart the first 12 by latest reported revenue. Values are the school’s most recently filed total revenue on IRS Form 990.