While much of the country remains fixated on the tensions between the Trump administration and elite research universities, a more insidious threat to many other institutions of higher education is brewing.

A new in-depth study by Steve Shulman—an entrepreneur who, in the second half of his 50-year career has served as a software developer and financial consultant for several higher education institutions, including Yale, Dartmouth, NYU, Maryland and many more—examines the finances of 44 private, tuition-dependent New England colleges and universities that enroll between 1,000 and 8,000 students.