When the Schools Are in Trouble

What NUNM and Bastyr’s Numbers Reveal about the Future of Acupuncture and Naturopathy

Art by A. Cohen

Picking up from last week’s post on the theme of financial transparency, here’s a guest post by Bex Groebner. Let’s look at some more numbers!

“Net tuition revenue is down 41%. This is worse than schools that have already closed. [...] Clearly it’s financial distress.”

I’m listening to the voice of a financial analyst, Matthew D. Hendricks, reviewing the fragility of one of our major acupuncture and naturopathic training institutions on The College Financial Health Show. The school is the National University of Natural Medicine (NUNM) in Portland,OR. What’s happening behind closed doors isn’t just institutional distress; it’s a mirror reflecting what the profession is doing to itself.

Behind the scenes, NUNM quietly sold its historic downtown campus in 2023 and entered into a leaseback agreement with the buyer. For a school that trains future acupuncturists, nutritionists, and naturopathic physicians, this is not a sign of growth but of contraction. The buildings, referred to by NUNM in a 2021 blog post as “The Mothership,” have housed the school since 1996.¹

I taught at NUNM from 2015 to 2022 and was on staff when the current President took over during the pandemic. She promoted a relocation vision framed in inspirational language, like “closer to nature,” and “well-equipped research facilities,” but those promises masked the underlying driver: financial instability.

Despite all the talk of relocation, nothing materialized. After the 2023 sale, the financial erosion has continued: capital expenditures remain extremely low, which means no new investment in facilities, and revenue continues to contract.

Blockaded by Debt, Dwindling Donors, and Declining Students

The campus sale is only the tip of the iceberg. According to The College Financial Health Show, NUNM’s financial health exhibits multiple, compounding red flags:

● Donor contributions are nearly non-existent, throttling endowment growth and limiting long-term security.

● Capital expenditures are effectively zero, meaning no investment in physical or instructional infrastructure. Perhaps this is because there is nothing left to sell?

● Unrestricted net assets are stagnant, with no buffer for unforeseeable disruptions.

● Thousands of prospective students have dropped away. This can be seen in tuition revenue being down 41% and enrollment plunging to 37%, even after a brief influx from the collapse of OCOM.

These aren’t just numbers in a spreadsheet. They’re structural failures. The institution is running short on the three things it needs to survive: students, trust, and cash.

Pricing Themselves Out of the Market

Matthew continues to look at sets of numbers and graphs for the data from NUNM. He says, “This school really does need a deep dive on the revenue side to see what’s going on. One thing I wonder about right away is the net tuition revenue. You have a school with a high price. I mean, the average, just for tuition is 26K. I just wonder if they are pricing themselves out of the market? They might actually do better at a lower price. I know it’s counter intuitive. But, it’s quite possible that they can reduce the price and increase their revenue.”

Matthew goes on to explain an economics concept called Price Elasticity of Demand (PED). He tells us that even intuitively, we get this. If we reduce our price, it can have a massive impact on the number of people who buy our product and in doing so, it can bring up total revenue.

Community acupuncture clinics get this. The whole model takes into account the PED: Reduce the price, increase patient numbers, increase revenue.

Co-host of The College Financial Health Show, Gary Stocker, who has a Masters Degree in Healthcare Management, asks about Matthew’s Strategic Compass. He wants to know whether a “peer group model” could be used with NUNM to help them revise their financial strategy. Matthew answers that, “We would just find other schools, in this case that are operating similar programs, if not the same and with similar size, resources, stuff like that. We can run a machine learning algorithm to find peers.” He goes on to say that, “ All the people that were offered enrollment to your school, well, we can track where they actually went. I’m guessing a lot of them didn’t go to this school [NUNM], they went somewhere else. And we can find out where they went from the National Student Clearing House and we call that a cross-app peer-set. And it could reveal a lot about what’s happening. If there’s a different school offering different programs that’s just priced lower, there’s your smoking gun probably, right?”

A couple of questions come to mind: Who is in the peer-set for NUNM? And: Does NUNM have “a smoking gun?”

Art by A. Cohen

When the Peer Set Collapses

In higher education, peer institutions can provide important financial benchmarks. For peers, we’re looking for schools of similar size, scope, and mission against which performance can be compared. For NUNM, the obvious peers are OCOM (which closed in 2024) and Bastyr (now under dual sanction from CNME and NWCCU). In other words: the peer set is collapsing.

If the schools that train acupuncturists and naturopaths are financially unstable, then the problem isn’t simply one of poor management at a single campus. It points to a deeper structural flaw: a mismatch between the cost of training and the economic realities of practice. Graduates are leaving with six-figure debt into a field where “success” often looks like earning $40–50K a year as a sole proprietor, with no benefits and no safety net.

The Smoking Gun

When Matthew used the phrase ‘smoking gun,’ he meant clear proof that the real problem is tuition: the cost of the degree far exceeds the value of the product. He gives an example of this when he mentions another client running a doctoral program at their university. The same program is also offered as a bachelor’s degree at another university in town, but his client never saw that bachelor’s program as a competitor. Yet, when Matthew ran the numbers, 20% of the incoming students at the bachelor’s program had applied to the doctoral school but opted not to enroll there. This was mind-blowing to his client. They hadn’t expected a “serious cross-competitor” to be operating at the bachelor’s level.

That dynamic is already playing out in our field. NUNM charges around $26,000 per year in tuition alone. POCA Tech, by contrast, charges just $7,100 per year, with clearly listed additional costs. The total cost of POCA Tech’s three-year program — $24,800 — is still less than NUNM’s annual tuition. Graduates enter the workforce without six-figure debt.

This is the smoking gun in real time: students are price-sensitive, and the presence of a lower-cost, community-rooted program like POCA Tech directly undermines the premise that $26,000/year programs are the only viable training model. It’s not just that NUNM and Bastyr are expensive. Their own “cross-competitor” is showing what’s possible at one-quarter the cost.

the smoking gun, lol

Institutions that refuse to recognize this elasticity will follow OCOM and the many other closed schools into the abyss.

The Bigger Implications

The collapse of schools like OCOM and the sanctions facing Bastyr are not isolated incidents. They’re signals that the current model of acupuncture and naturopathic education is fundamentally unsustainable. The numbers don’t lie: when the average graduate carries six-figure debt into a profession that often pays $40–50K a year, the system is not broken at the margins. It is broken at its core.

This has several implications:

For Students: The pipeline of new practitioners is drying up, not because people don’t want to practice acupuncture or naturopathy, but because the cost of entry is prohibitive. Talented, service-minded students are being locked out.

For the Profession: As schools close and enrollment drops, the profession risks shrinking rather than growing. Instead of reaching new communities, access to acupuncture may become more limited, more elitist, and less diverse. That’s why initiatives like Oregon’s HB 2143, the Five Needle Protocol (5NP) are so critical. These changes show a path toward community-based, accessible training that sustains the profession at scale. And we owe a huge debt of gratitude to Lisa Rohleder and the Community Acupuncture movement, who have been swimming upstream against the prestige-babbling currents of the field for years and building the groundwork for a more sustainable future.

For Public Health: While our institutions contract, other professions expand. In Oregon, HB 3824 just passed and allows physical therapists to move forward with dry needling. The acupuncture establishment has largely framed this as an issue of safety, arguing that acupuncture training is more rigorous (as well as more holistic, more comprehensive, more rooted in tradition.) But the state’s governor, Tina Kotek, signed the bill, noting that PTs should adopt appropriate training standards. The deeper issue we’re avoiding is economic: if you price a service (or a degree) out of reach, someone else will deliver a more affordable alternative.

Patients (and students) will go where they can afford to go.

Here’s where the metaphor comes full circle: Qi flows like money. Both need circulation. Both stagnate if blocked. Both can be diverted, opened, and harmonized. Price Elasticity of Demand (PED) is simply an economic version of what acupuncturists hopefully already understand: when you reduce the barrier, more flow comes through. POCA Tech embodies this by setting tuition at $7,100/year, and their graduates can actually enter practice without suffocating debt. Meanwhile, schools charging $26,000/year are the blocked meridians of our profession.

The implication is clear: if we fail to integrate basic economic principles into our schools and practices, we will also fail in our larger mission. The acupuncture profession will not thrive on prestige or tradition alone. It will thrive only if it can circulate: if students can afford to train, if patients can afford to be treated, and if the profession can adapt to the changing health landscape.

1. For a deep dive on how the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine was dragged down by its own historic building, see How My Acupuncture School Died by Maddie Foley. An additional irony is that OCOM originally moved downtown in part to compete with NUNM. Back in the day, both OCOM and NUNM occupied the same building in the unfashionable (but perfectly fine) (if you’re not classist) Gateway neighborhood on Portland’s outer eastside. OCOM outgrew its arrangement with NUNM and moved just down the street to its own building, which eventually became its Cherry Blossom campus. Then NUNM started its own acupuncture program and moved downtown to a gorgeous historic building, and OCOM quietly seethed for a decade or so until it could do the same. Everybody should’ve stayed in Gateway. (This is Lisa not Bex — I couldn’t resist a footnote.)