All right, that's loud. Good morning everyone. Thanks for joining us early on the last day here at the conference for the APEI session. I'm Stephen Sheldon and I'm an analyst in the Edu in the tech group at William Blair covering the education space, including American Public Education. Please go to our website at williamblair.com for a complete list of research disclosures and potential conflicts of interest. Yeah, it's great to have the APEI team back at our conference again this year. As most probably know, the company is the leading provider of education in a few key and attractive buckets of the market, including educating military personnel. I think what's really interesting, the creating of new supply of nurses, which is, I think it's most probably now going to be a very strong secular growth area. We upgraded the stock earlier this year on the back of improving execution and just a generally better growth outlook. We continue to think it's a really good time to be looking at the story. From the company today, we have CEO Angela Selden. We also have Steve Somers who runs Strategy and Corp Dev here in the audience. With that quick intro, I'll turn it over to Angela. Great. Good morning. Okay, before you all ask me questions, my question to you is how many of you went to the event last night? Okay. That is why you are in the room. Right. Because those that did are not here. Right. Thanks for joining it. I know you did. And thank you for showing up at 8:00 A.M. I appreciate that. It is great to be here today. Thank you very much for your interest in APEI. I am really excited to introduce you to our story. How many of you have any familiarity with APEI? Hands? Okay, a few. Great. Excellent. My colleagues at William Blair would raise their hands too. Off we go. Just a quick overview of who we are. Steven did a beautiful job of introducing one of the things that create distinction for us today. We are four institutions. Three of them are degree granting, one of them is a training institution, all unified by this idea that we create accessible and affordable education in high demand fields. We see much of our education as AI proof because we're training people to be nurses. We're training people to advance their careers in the military. We are giving veterans an off ramp from their military experience. And so many of the degree programs we offer give people access to careers they may not otherwise have access to, if not through the educational platforms that we create. The education industry is very interesting and it's growing. In particular, the for profit education space has got a lot of tailwind right now as a result of the new administration. We believe this industry is poised to grow. Today it is a $100 billion market and it is growing. As Steven mentioned, we are the number one educator of active duty military by a mile. We are twice the size of the next closest competitor which is a state school, University of Maryland Global Campus. We are also the number one educator of veterans and we are the number one creator of new ADN, which is the two year degree RN nurses, and LPNs in the United States. We do that in a footprint of only nine states. We are very pleased with the momentum we are seeing in our nursing platform. We acquired Rasmussen at the end of 2021, have been working to stabilize and improve the performance of that business. We delivered positive year over year enrollment in the back half of 2024 and positive EBITDA. The trajectory for that business as we described in our most recent earnings call is positive and the momentum is building there. Overall, our financial performance includes a trailing twelve month revenue of $635 million. The adjusted EBITDA of $76.5 million. Free cash flow is produced in many ways by our online, our fully online institution American Public University System, which we'll talk about in a little bit more detail in just a moment. A very strong balance sheet with $188 million of cash on the balance sheet. What drives us and what is the unifying theme is our mission. Our mission is to power, purpose and potential and prosperity, importantly for those who are in service to others. We educate people who serve others, nurses, active duty military, veterans, et cetera. We believe our education transforms lives, advances careers and improves communities. are those states that I talked about. 9,400 enrolled nursing students. We have 26 campuses in eight states. We have a ninth state that we are exiting, which is Wisconsin. That is the ninth state I mentioned. We have 23 nursing and allied health programs that we offer to students today. Why does that matter? Because the Bureau of Labor Statistics says each year for the next 10 years there will be a shortage of 200,000 nurses. We are the number one producer of ADN and LPN nurses today. Our graduating students will fill less than 5% of that shortage. There is a significant tailwind in nursing that we believe we are poised to help support and fill. The second part of our platform is our public service platform, which includes American Public University System, which is the fully online institution educating active duty military and veterans. Importantly, in 2024, we also discovered an important adjacent segment, which is that families of active duty military and veterans have a deep affinity for the brand. They trust our brand. We have seen significant growth in the families of active duty military and veteran families in 2024. Graduate school, which is the number two educator of the federal workforce, with over 100 federal agencies as customers and 25,000 students educated last year alone. Our momentum is measured different ways. If you follow our story or intend to follow our story, it is important to create this distinction. American Public University was purpose built to educate military 32 years ago. The dilemma was that those serving the country could not get themselves to a campus. The online education platform was created to make education accessible was also an acknowledgement that they would not have time in their schedule to do more than one class at a time. As a result, a student. We do not measure student count at APUS because one student might be taking six or eight classes a year and another student might be taking two. You may say, how many students graduate? Right. Graduation rates are a big deal. I was just telling Stephen I was proud to participate in the recent American Public University System APUS graduation. We had over 17,000 students graduate in 2024 and my niece graduated from Penn State with about the same number of students. If you want to think about what kind of impact we are having on that population of the United States, it is significant. I'm very, very proud of what we do in not just educating students, but allowing them to obtain their degrees. The last statistic I'll share with you is almost 30% of all students who complete a degree or a certificate at APUS come back for a second degree if you want a measurement of quality. Quality is measured not by what we tell you, but by how the students vote with their time and their pocketbook. We're very proud of that statistic at Rasmussen and at Hondros. Those are cohort-based programs. Those are students who are taking a very regimented set of courses. We measure by students, we measure by enrollments in those two institutions because most of our students are being educated on campuses, in the case of Hondros, fully educated in campuses. Hondros only offers nursing degrees. That's the difference between the 381,000 NAT course registrations and the enrollment numbers that we use for our nursing schools, Rasmussen and Hondros. There is an up and to the right growing trend at APUS. As I mentioned, all of this education is online. There are 137 degree programs people can choose from and 111 certificates. One of the things that attracts students to our offering is that we are accredited by the same accreditor that accredits Notre Dame, the University of Chicago, Michigan, Arizona State. They put their stamp of approval on our educational experience and our quality of our curriculum and teaching in the same way as all those schools. The price point for our degree programs is often 30% lower than in-state tuition, not including room and board, just for the tuition alone. You get access to education when you want it at a price point that you can afford, and you will graduate as 17,000 people demonstrated that they can do in this past 2024 graduation. You can see up and to the right trailing twelve month enrollment increases. This again measured by Regist. We really are excited about the prospects of what APUS has to offer in the future. These are our two nursing schools. Now just to be clear, Rasmussen is not fully a nursing school. About half of Rasmussen's revenue comes from both campus based nursing as well as online post licensure nursing programs, and the other half has degree programs very similar to what APUS offers. So business degrees, technology, et cetera. Those Rasmussen degrees, 47 of them, include a mix of programs. The enrollments you can see have significantly improved and the breaking news and part of the reason why we filed our 8-K this morning with this presentation is that Rasmussen has gone through two changes of control. We were the second. They had been purchased private equity to private equity before us and have been under campus and program growth restrictions, meaning no new campuses, no new programs for the last six years. Those growth restrictions were lifted two weeks ago and we are very excited. The growth that you're seeing here at Rasmussen is coming from same store sales. It is not a result of new programs. You can't sell no new product and it's not coming from new campuses or new locations. We've now had those restrictions lifted and we anticipate that we will see good results from that. Could be as early as Q4 of 2025. As it relates to Hondros continuing to beat and continue to outpace prior year enrollment growth. It is the 21st consecutive quarter of year over year enrollment growth that we have seen at Hondros. We have added four campuses there since I joined five years ago and Hondros continues to drive enrollment momentum. Let's just talk about financials for a minute. This is what we shared in our most recent earnings call where we have put $164 million of revenue on the books for 1Q. That is the expectation. Net income $7.5 million, earnings per share at $0.41, notably as compared to a - $6 last year, $21.2 million of adjusted EBITDA, which is a 25% improvement over last year's Q1 adjusted EBITDA. Many of these things we've already covered, but I will say that Rasmussen's improvement in 2H2024 continues as we have described here in 1H2025 and beyond. This is the revenue expectations for each of our three large higher education institutions. You can see in each case we are outpacing the prior year quarter and we're very proud of the results that we're producing at each one of these institutions. Also, profitability continues to outpace prior year. You can see the root cause of each of those at APUS both in terms of registration. Growth at APUS of 3.5% and margin in 1Q is anticipated at 30% EBITDA margins generating a very nice return on $83.5 million of revenue. We've talked a lot about Rasmussen in here. Hondros enrollment continues to grow at high single or low double digits in the last 10 quarters specifically. We are seeing a little bit of headwind at graduate school as a result of the DOGE initiatives that are not just taking out federal workers who might be eligible for training, but also limiting the amount of dollars that are allocated in agencies to spend on training. Graduate school is the area that we are turning our attention to in terms of improving profitability. This is an eye chart, but it's in the deck so you can take a look at it. You can certainly see that as it relates to APUS on an annual basis delivering 30% margins. Rasmussen delivered the 10% improvement in the fourth quarter which averaged out to a minus three last year. We expect positive EBITDA margins at Rasmussen, at Hondros, and these headwinds are creating some challenges for graduate school. Happy to dive into any of that if you have any questions on that. The second breaking news item for our 8-K filing is that another one of the long standing obstacles we had with the Department of Education was during our change of control with Rasmussen, which occurred in 2021, we had a $25 million letter of credit. All right, the money was sitting in escrow. We could not use it. They had been holding onto it for two years of two full years of audited financials, which we completed at the end of 2023 and submitted in early 2024. Now, one year later, they have released our $25 million. We no longer have to have that set aside, waiting for Department of Ed to approve its release. We're really excited about the positive relationship that we're building with the Department of Education, which signals their support and confidence for the type of education we're delivering to our students. In summary, we operate in a high quality way, in an affordable and an accessible way, in a very large addressable market. The nursing business in particular has significant tailwinds as we described. Importantly, our military business is a place where we are by far the number one educator, 2x the next largest competitor. We are measured by a third party. There's a Georgetown study of workforce and education which looks at return on educational investment, which is a big deal for us, right? Half of our students are first generation. They are looking to transform the trajectory of their lives and the lives of their families. For us, return on educational investment is the most important focus. We are very proud that APUS is in the top 11% of 4,500 institutions for return on educational investment. That is a measure of both what is the cost, but also what is your lifetime earning potential. If we were a low cost provider with degrees that did not offer long term earnings potential, you still would not fare very well on that ratio. You have to really have the balance of both. We are very proud to have met that threshold as measured by a research study done by Georgetown. We have talked about the nursing demand and the fact that there is this really nice tailwind there. We see the continuing performance of Rasmussen to be improving in our nursing platform and boosting Hondros performance as well. One of the things that we announced in our March earnings call is that we are in the process of simplification of our business and that's taking many forms. We are closing underperforming campuses. I mentioned we have two campuses in Wisconsin. I grew up there. It is not that we do not love Wisconsin, but the TAMs are very small. We were in Green Bay and Wausau, and we had educated the population of students who were going to become nurses in those two small TAMs. We are looking for other ways to actually educate the students in Wisconsin. We are also importantly combining our three higher education institutions, which is APUS, Rasmussen, and Hondros, into a single system. That is going to allow us to do a handful of things. One, it's going to allow us to provide the capital for campus expansion more easily to our Rasmussen and Hondros divisions. It's also going to allow us to create this healthcare platform by bringing Hondros and Rasmussen into a single healthcare platform. It's allowing us to make sure that we continue to stay in good standing on all of the regulatory measures that the Department of Ed holds all of us in for-profit education accountable for. We believe that there will be synergy benefits from this, which we will not see in 2024, but expect to, excuse me, in 2025, but expect to see in 2026 and beyond. Finally, this is a business that has a very strong free cash flow which this year alone will produce $51 million of free cash. With that, I'll turn it back to Stephen and let's see if we have any questions. Thanks Angie. That was great. I have been waiting a long time, I think, to ask you about Rasmussen campus expansion. Maybe talk some about that process, what that will look like. You know, I think you mentioned we might see some as soon as the fourth quarter. Talk about the process and how aggressive you plan to be on that front. Is it going to be more about adding capacity in current states, new states? Just talk about how you are thinking about it. Yeah, it's a great question. You know, when you think about a campus-based business, there are many ways to unlock top line and bottom line growth. You want to make sure for the campuses you own that you're filling them up effectively so that you're bringing out the most profitability out of the campuses that you already operate. We're doing that today. That's part of the result that you're seeing from Rasmussen is the filling up of the campuses that we currently own or closing those campuses. The two I mentioned in Wisconsin, who don't have the ability to be operating at that capacity. The second thing you want to be able to do is open campuses. That's the question you're asking about. At Hondros, we've opened four campuses in the last five years. The most recent campus that we opened was in a new state in Michigan. That campus has gone from about 250 students to now 450 students in a very short period of time. We found in the area of Michigan where we are operating a very significant gap in access to new nurses. It has created a really wonderful opportunity for us there. Michigan was a great case study for us and it was an adjacent state to Ohio. The Michigan Board of Nursing allowed students who were Michigan residents taking our program in Ohio. We had students driving back and forth 90 minutes to our Toledo campus to be used as a case study of the quality of the education. That's an example where you can move more quickly in a state that's adjacent because the state says, the State Board of Nursing says, we can see you've offered quality education to our residents. What would have normally been a three year process for Michigan was a one year process for us. Adding states that are adjacent are a really important part of our growth strategy. Additionally, if you look at the map that we have in Florida, we're concentrated in the central part of Florida. We're in Tampa, we're in Ocala, we're in Orlando, we're not in Jacksonville, we're not in Dade, Broward, Palm Beach. That's an example where the time to opening campuses is much quicker because you don't need the Board of Nursing to actually give you your first stamp of approval. What you need to do is make sure you have a facility with faculty. The main thing is to make sure you have the proper clinicals available so that the students can get that hands-on education they need as part of the overall experience. We are looking at both, we are looking at states that have great supply-demand gaps, where we have a reputation, where we can use the students that have already been educated by us to demonstrate efficacy. We are also looking at our existing states where we believe we still have opportunity to grow in the states in which we operate. It is exciting times and we look forward to sharing more with you when we have more details. That's great. I'll ask one more and then we can open up to the audience. Wanted to ask about, you know, the macro trends and I guess how it might impact your business. I think higher education, typically you see a pickup in enrollments. I think when there's macro pressure, when unemployment rises, you know, unemployment's been up a little bit, and, but I guess how are you thinking about how the business, you know, could, you know, play in that environment if unemployment does continue to rise? I would think on the military side may not have as much of an impact, but there's a lot of other areas where it might. So maybe just talk about what you'd see, you would expect to see if that plays out. Sure. I think that rising tide lifts all boats. Right. Certainly as people start to feel pressure about access to jobs, they're going to turn to education as a way to improve their lives. Generally speaking, we look at two different trends, I think, and in particular what I'm very pleased to share is that the Army this year, who has had difficulty recruiting to fill their slots in the last couple years, has filled their target recruiting class four months earlier than they had expected. We see that. When you think about what are the impacts of the administration on higher education, there's a lot of turmoil that's going on right now and it's hard to point to. This is the good pile, this is the not good pile. One of the things that is beneficial to us is that there is a renewed interest in serving the country from a military perspective by, in particular, young men. A disproportionate number of our APUS students are male, whereas our Rasmussen and Hondros students are primarily female. In that case, the filling of those ranks earlier gives us enthusiasm about the prospects of the students that we will see entering the education at APUS in the future. That is a good sign. The fact that the nursing supply demand gap is not closing is something that we continue to pay attention to. Both are trends that we think are making a big difference for us. All right, any questions from the audience? I think we've got probably time for one or two here. Anyone's got one otherwise? Yep, go ahead. Yeah, you guys are right behind each other, so. Yeah, go ahead. And then you next. Yeah, can you introduce yourself? Okay, hi. I'm a generalist. So the competitive dynamic in the nursing segment is there. I mean, you know, the supply demand gap, how's that being built by competitors? Yeah, it's a great question. Nursing at a simple level sounds like a business that's easy to understand, but there are really important differences pre-licensure, post-licensure, and then we'll talk about the different ways that you can become a first licensure nurse. What we're seeing from the conversations we're having with the largest health systems in the country is that the four-year degree nurse, which some of the larger competitors offer, the BSN, is an expensive nurse to hire and it's a nurse that perhaps has less interest, generally speaking, to provide bedside care. You're going to pay more, they're going to want to have more administrative and strategic responsibilities. We are finding significant interest and demand from employers around our two-year degree RN nurses and our LPN nurses because those are nurses who, our students are from the community, intend to stay in the community, are often English as a second language so they have familiarity with the patients they are serving culturally from a language perspective and are willing to provide bedside care. We are different from most of the other pre-licensure nursing educators because our predominant degree offering is LPN. The two-year degree, which is the associate's degree or ADN nurse, still leads to the same RN license as a BSN, which is the bachelor's degree nurse. Hospitals are finding that they can create a better mix of their workforce by having across that ladder LPN, ADN RNs and then the BSN RN. Sure. Yes. Okay. Super. Great. Any other questions? Yes, can you introduce yourself? Great. Do you have advantage on recruiting students in that channel compared to others in your legacy there? 40% of our APUS students come from referrals. We see that as a significant advantage. It reduces our marketing cost. As I mentioned, 30% of our students at APUS are with us for a second degree, our reputation allows us again to reduce our marketing costs and have those repeat customers, which is not often the case in higher education. The reputation means everything to us at APUS. Yes. Yes. Gotta introduce yourself. Yeah. Peter from Rockefeller. I was just wondering to what extent do we change the Education Department impact programs approved? I had the good fortune of meeting with the Department of Education three weeks ago when we asked for our consideration of our growth restrictions, the consideration of the $25 million they had been holding on to for over three and a half years, and a third matter that we still are working on with the department, and we within a matter of weeks got those two of the three matters attended to, and we are in constant email and conversational dialogue with ED on the third matter. We see an openness for people who are in good standing with the department to be treated fairly. We're not asking to be treated differently, we're just asking to be treated fairly. One data point doesn't make a trend. I'm very pleased to say that within three weeks two of our three requests have been met and the third one is under deep consideration. Out of time Angie, thank you so much. The breakout is going to be upstairs in Jennie A. Hopefully everyone, always a pleasure. Thanks to you all for hosting us. We really appreciate it. William Blair Team, thank you. Nice to see all of you. Hope to see you upstairs. This presentation has now finished. Please check back shortly for the archive.