Good morning, everyone. I am the CEO of Yduqs, Yduqs, Eduardo Parente. I would like to welcome you, who are here at Campus Estácio, near the stadium of Maracanã. We are close to the neighborhood of Tijuca. There are many of you watching on YouTube. Thank you for your attention and your trust. We are here today to talk about our future. Our last investor day was in November 2019, at Campus Dom João VI. We talked about the future, and the future that didn't end, because we were at 2019, and we were concerned about the decline of years, but we had then COVID, the second wave of COVID. We had this interest rate increase that is persistent, and this never-ending economic crisis.
In 2019, we told you what we were going to do ahead, and it was a very different world, and we had very good results as the world evolved. We talked a lot about that in 2019, and every time that we met one of you, we talked about M&A, we talked about medicine and distance learning. That was our mantra. Everybody knew what we were going to talk about, and we had very good M&As. We had 4 acquisitions ever since we've been together. We had Adtalem, and then we transformed ourselves into Yduqs. That was very good, because we were able to leave that old world, incorporating new elements to this new world. We brought Adtalem, that was a very important step to us, and they brought Wyden, and we grew a lot due to that, and that enhanced our perspectives.
We were able to bring new openings. We brought Ibmec, and it was the first operation working in an exclusive with exclusive education. So Ibmec put us at a different level, and we brought Athenas. We entered Midwest with that. We've been growing in distance learning a lot in the Midwest, only after São Paulo. And we brought HardWork and Qconcursos, two startups that were generating a lot of cash at the time, and they were steadily growing, and they operated independently, and they brought a lot of technology, and we work differently because we have these companies with us. And we lost some of them, big ones, small ones, and we believe that we were responsible at that time, taking good care of your capital.
And we were responsible last year as well, because we were able to get 20% of our revenues from there. And in medicine, we are now getting more and more students. And what did this, we see in medicine? We had this room for working this premium segment. We were able to analyze, and we saw that we had a lot of room for ticket there, demanding other language, different brands, and we also grew a lot, and Silvio is going to show that to you, because we decided to enter Mais Médicos, a Brazilian program on new doctors and so on, and the result is here in medicine. And when we observed distance learning, we also decided to expand different hubs all around Brazil, and we got to 2,500 hubs.
And when we see this combination of distance learning and medicine that was close to zero in 2017 and 2018, it's now 72% of our EBITDA, from business that didn't exist before. So it was a beautiful journey. We delivered a lot. We had this very strong movement of increasing investments during the pandemics. We went from 7%-12% of CapEx, and we had a much greater technology. We are now a reference in technology, even outside the educational field. People come and ask, what - about what we are doing today, and our future journey is going to be different from the last 45 years. So what happened that was different in the last 5 years? We had a serving until 2020, that we had to compensate a lot of, of the percentage that was dropping.
So we had to increase distance learning, medicine, and sometimes we grew 20%, 30%, and we are compensating the face-to-face that was dropping. In 2023, that was very different. We had this, the strength of the portfolio. When people speak about the portfolio, they think about defense. This is a good portfolio to defend us from the crisis. It's good because we could have regulation problems at some point. And this is true, because we were very strong during the pandemic, when we had concerns about regulation, but this portfolio is very important in when we are coming back. As we saw in 2023, we had this moment to breathe. We were optimistic with Brazil, and we had fantastic results. So what do we have ahead of us? We have different growth rates.
We are evolving together with this high single digit. With fantastic years, such as 2023, when the economy was bouncing back, and the new normal is one-digit growth. What does it mean? When we observe the business, that has a high impact in net income and cash generation. When we observe the net income, it's close to the net income that we had before the interest rate increase. We had 2% interest rates, we didn't have much debt, we had different depreciation, because we invested a lot, and we look ahead, and we see many of you making projections in your spreadsheets. You're going to see similar numbers in different spreadsheets, but we are not talking about that. 2-3 weeks ago, we talked to one of you, and regardless of the EBITDA rate, you're going to have a very good rate from the future.
That's what we are going to show to you today. What are we going to do with the money? This is very important. When you're not generating a lot of cash, it's less important to discuss what is the process for allocating capital. When we have the cash generation that we foresee, the capital allocation is very, very important. So we are going to have three phases during this day. First part is that we are going to have these three gentlemen here, and people who we listen to when we are thinking about the business, about the institution. I'm bringing three people who are going to give you a different outlook, and we are bringing students as well to talk to you. Until yesterday, we had the General Attorney, who was going to talk to us.
He was responsible for this Mais Médicos program, but due to the tragedy in Rio Grande do Sul, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, he couldn't come, but we brought a video with him. Why are we bringing these people? Because we believe that most of you, and I'm also part of this group, had an exclusive education experience. We were in elite undergraduate courses, so it's very hard to understand the a share of our business when we think about our experience, and we try to translate it into our reality. We want to spend this morning talking about a world that is different from your reality, bringing you closer to that, showing you the value and importance that it has to society and different people.
In the afternoon, we are going to talk to you directly, showing to you why we are so good in what we do, why we have all conditions to bring this sustainable business to everyone in the long term. Of course, when you're generating a lot of value to society and individuals, you're going, we are going to generate a lot of value to you. We should understand what is waiting for us ahead. To start the day, I disturbed her a lot to come. I called her many times. She's been in for much longer than most of us, and she's back to the board now, and my team is always asking to talk to her. She knows a lot about education. She has great ethical values, and she's always pressuring us to talk about the future.
So with you, Thamila Zaher, the Vice President of our board.
Good morning, everyone. It's a great pleasure to be here on such an important day. Eduardo, when he invited me, I immediately accepted, because it's a very important moment for all of us at Yduqs. I'd like to say that Yduqs is a great market player. It's different from the other players, very clearly. Our strategy is very different. In the last years, we've been making strategic decisions that fostered this pathway ahead. The first thing is having this diversified portfolio. We have a very robust portfolio, and by the way, education is key, because we have this growing positioning and a very robust one. The second point that I'd like to bring here is about this movement of operating efficiency.
We have investments in technology, we have consistent investments, and we are understanding the market better than anyone. We have several managers with us today, and they know about the operations. They have very important positive outlook. So when you see that we are best in class and many numbers, that's because we understand about the operations. And another point that was very important, that we were able to evolve over the years, was this concept that I call it becoming premium. And I'm very comfortable to talk about this movement at Yduqs, because becoming premium is a movement of delivering the best value proposition for that audience. So if I'm observing this classy audience, what is the best value proposition that I could deliver in terms of experience, academic results, employability, efficiency, and cost, cost efficiency? So providing the most relevant delivery in that segment.
We've been very positive in that, and we've grown our share in all of the markets we entered. Allow me to say that this point are showing that there's no best structure than this company's structure, in terms of organic growth, creating new products, quality in the delivery, redelivery for students, managing the process as a whole. And we talk about M&A, this company is prepared to have this growing positioning, because the higher education is at different levels. We are a consolidated segment now. And who is the company that is becoming relevant? The one that is ready to navigate in this sea. And the board, we have this process to monitor closely. We have board members from different segments, including education.
We have this follow-up to understand if we are going to have new tracks in the future, if we are going to have personalized education in the future. We're doing our homework every day. I should speak briefly, and I wanted to highlight two things only. I wanted to talk about this vision, and Eduardo has a team of giants working with him. At management level, at C-level, regional directors, business unit managers, they know about their business deeply. They know the strategy, the purpose, the delivery, the audience profile. So this is the type of company that we expect in the future, and we have the best management in the market, that's for sure. We're going to talk about the future and the present, and the future is closer than we imagine.
An educational company must have this clear quality, with this clear purpose, being very assertive. When we observe the higher education elements to bring us to the future, we have ready responses for this future that is happening now. When I monitor the student journey, I have this entire team that is able to talk about the quality of the educational journey of each one of these students. When we think about the NPS, we know that indeed, when we talk about employability, we can talk about being assertive in this contact with the student. From Ibmec to Yduqs to Wyden the journey for the student, the best journey is that one that is fit for that moment. There's not a single recipe.
We must serve the purpose of the student, and we are very well prepared for this future. I'm very proud to be close to Eduardo, this great CEO that is able to lead this team, and as a board member, I'm very proud to be part of this team. Thank you so much.
Based on what she said, we have here a few board members that you don't know, and they'll be present during lunchtime and our coffee breaks. I'd like you to actually talk to these people, look at the name tags. You know, if there's anybody you don't recognize, basically, it's one of our directors or board members. During lunch, you know, if you want to tour the building, we will have some people taking you around to get to know our institution. Thank you, Thamila. Thank you for your words. You're always very kind. Now I'd like to call on stage somebody who everybody knows, which is Juliana. I always give her a call, and you probably all know that our life changed once she arrived. You have the floor, Juliana. Juliana Blanco.
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our Investor Day. So on screen, you will see the agenda of the morning, and here you also have a QR code, which will give you access to our Q&A session. At the end of the day, we're going to have the Q&A session, so please send your questions, and if you're accessing the session via the transmission, you can also access this QR code, and we'll be answering your questions in the afternoon. Now, without further ado, I'd like to start our meeting by presenting the Plano CDE. This is so focused on a social and behavioral analysis of a lower income segment of our society. We believe that a large part of the growth of higher education will come from this segment of society.
And that's why, that's why I'm calling Breno Barlach, who's the Director of Research and Innovation at this consultancy, so that he can tell us about the concerns, expectations of these people and what education means to this target market. So Breno, you have the floor.
Good morning. So let me introduce myself. Can you hear me? I'm Breno, Breno Barlach. I'm a sociologist, political scientist and director and partner of Plano CDE. Plano CDE is a research company. It's a consultancy focused on the base of the pyramid. That's why we call ourselves Plan CDE. We don't work only with this target market, but they are our focus. We've been operating in the market for 15 years, and we've worked with large companies related to communication and marketing, and companies that do diagnosis of this sector.
We've also been working also in third sector, the public sector. In 15 years, we ended up specializing in the specifics, in certain topics. Half of what we do is related to education: public education, higher education, and transition to the workplace. Besides education, the second important topic for us is financial inclusivity, debt, the use of financial instruments and credit. This is another important topic that we deal with. Because we are specialists, we're specialists in working with this target market, you know, we're kind of like the translators of Brazil. The class of this target market represents around 55% of Brazilian market.
And so we ask ourselves: how can decision makers and CEOs and directors who have never, or who have never lived in poor neighborhoods or who don't understand this target market, and how did these people who have never studied in schools where the base of the pyramid studied, and people who have never, participated in the public education sector, how will these people make decisions and adapt their program or their institutions to this public, to this target market? So this is what we try to do. We try to provide some answers. So to start off, when I am giving talks, I also say that the base of the pyramid in Brazil is basically, Class C.
So the thirty percent poorest people in Brazil, who—and the twenty most richest people in Brazil who have access to elite courses, amongst these, we have around 100 million people or 50% of the population, that lives in a kind of Sweden of Brazil. So the Class C in Brazil is a very egalitarian part of our country. So the family income is of about 2,000 BRL, and the total can go up to 7,500 BRL. So we've got a lot of people in this income amount that is very similar. And what does this mean? Here we have the same amount of data, but instead of totally family income, we have the per capita. So we end up multiplying this number by four. So this is a real middle class.
So the people in this middle class live with around 4, this amount of money, and it reaches around 2,000 of family income per capita. So this is our main target market. This is where half or where more or less half of the Brazilian population is. Excluding, of course, those people who live in misery and excluding also those, of a different social strata. So I always like to call attention to the class A plus, which those who have around 4,500 family income per capita. So those people are amongst the 5 or 5% of the population, if your family household is between BRL 16,000 and BRL 18,000 per month. So this gives us an idea of what Brazil really is.
So we are. We think that, you know, when we're at the top, we understand what the middle class is. So this middle part here, this is what really moves Brazil. This is what really consumes and, and what works in Brazil. But income, besides being very similar to this target market, it's also very variable. And why is that? Well, families have multiple sources of income. It's very common for, the family to have a fixed source of income, some formal sense of income, and lots of different sources of variable income. So maybe I work with safety, but then during the weekend, I do some other things to get extra income. Or perhaps my wife works for Avon, and then during the weekend, she works at a hairdresser salon. So people don't really know how much they make.
Their regular work usually doesn't require a lot of skill, and so it has high turnover. What's the consequence of that? Well, we do studies of the market, and we say, "Oh, I wanna speak to Class C1, C2, or B1." Today, people in class D, tomorrow will be in a different class. So there's a lot of variation of where you are in the social stratum. A consequence of that is that Brazil is the country of prepayments. So for example, Netflix has a prepayment program where you pay before you consume their services, telephone services as well. Uber also has prepaid solutions, and that's because people have a hard time having all these fixed expenses. They're very scared of fixed expenses because they know that their income varies a lot.
Now, this variation in income doesn't mean that things haven't changed. Since the '90s, when our currency stabilized, we've had some consumption booms. So first of all, we said that consumption improved in the households, including, access to, new source, new types of food, such as, you know, access to yogurt. And then in the 2000s, you started having people being able to buy household appliances. But then life also started to improve outside the home because people started having access to other kinds of services. After 2005 and up to 2010, we started to have a boom in the consumption of services. So you're not talking about buying a new category or having your first household appliance.
This was a reality in the early 2000s, but now it was a matter of maybe having access to higher education, or having a bank account, or going to a restaurant, or being able to travel. That is, being able to access services that improve our lives outside the home. And with this improvement, we do a lot of research, qualitative research related to quality of life. We use quantitative surveys, and we do a lot of different studies. And in our studies, we always have this question: What's your biggest objective? What's your biggest dream, the biggest dream of your family? And this always includes this idea of a consumption boom of the consumption, improving people's lives.
The ranking changes a lot, but having your own home and giving your children education is a dream of a lot of these people. Your home is an asset that you buy because you believe that it will give you social mobility. It will bring improvements to the quality of life of your family. And the same applies to education. You're investing in something that's perennial, that you can't really go back. You may have any kind of economic crisis, but you still have a diploma. So you still have somebody with a college diploma. So this is a promise of transformation in the long term. These are two assets that people really dream about. But as I've said, these are recent booms. So a lot of times you're talking about a first generation of families that are consuming these new assets.
The first generation is the generation that has an active bank account, and this, a lot of this is a result of the pandemic. It was the pandemic that universalized bank access. This is also the first generation accessing private health services and technological services. So these are people that are learning for the first time how to deal with this. We did an ethnographic study related to financial inclusivity, where there was a young person that had a lot of debt in the bank because of an insurance program associated to the credit card. And that person didn't know how that worked. That person had a credit card only for emergencies, and that person didn't know that when they didn't use the credit card, they would still be charged for that insurance.
That person, you know, never really paid for their credit card and ended up accumulating expenses, and that person became indebted. Sure, we can criticize the bank manager who gave that person a credit card, but basically, this person really didn't understand anything about that. That person didn't have any references. You know, this is something that you and I, we all learn from our parents, from our brothers, from our cousins, and we end up understanding that we have to pay attention to these issues when we end up opening a bank account or perhaps when we buy an apartment, there will be some hidden costs related to notary services. These are things that, you know, you end up finding out when you don't have references, and you're doing this for the first time.
So, you know, when your parents didn't have an education, when you didn't have a proper education, makes it so that you need greater support. It means that you need better services. A lot of times, we associate premium services to higher incomes. But what we really need to have is providing careful service to the target market that's accessing these services for the first time. And this is even more true when you have a target market that believes they're not well-treated in the different areas of society. In our studies, it's very common for people to complain about banks. They say that they're discriminated at banks. Now, this may be true or not. We don't know. We're not there to verify that. But that's the feeling that these people have.
They think that they're always being persecuted by their skin color, the clothes they use, the way they talk. So these people believe that they don't get good services because of that. So providing better service or paying attention to the service you provide is important for capturing this target market. When there was a store that was open in São Paulo, and the store was at the entrance of a slum, and basically, nobody was going into the store. It was a really nice store, it had a really nice facade, and we did some research, and we found out that people thought that they couldn't go in there because it was probably expensive. They thought that that place wasn't appropriate for them, but then people understood that there was a place for them.
So people really need to understand that they deserve these spaces. Another important point related to the base of the pyramid is where these people live. We talk a lot about that when we talk about education. That is, the time it takes people to get to their destination. So the average time is about two hours. So we have some people that some people take about 30 minutes to get to their destination, some people take around three hours, so the average is around two hours. And this ends up impacting our decisions, consumption decisions.
At Plano CDE, a lot of times we take people to the households of our clients, and sometimes, you know, we see that the homes of these people without furnishings, or rather without a decent exterior, and then you go in, and these houses are really nice. They have all the furnishings. So a client that's not well trained in this, sometimes, you know, they discriminate. They're thinking: Oh, you know, these people are spending so much money buying TVs and on Netflix subscriptions. Maybe they should be spending their money in another way. And, you know, sometimes these people spend a lot on transportation, for example, when they go to the movies.
So investing in leisure at home and not wasting time getting to your destination, not spending money to go to the movie, makes less sense than, let's say, paying for a subscription service. So, you know, subscribing to Netflix for these people is a more rational decision. It involves bringing leisure inside their homes, and this sometimes also applies to technology into distance education.
It's even worse when a person has to stop in different places during the day, so that will affect their processes. If they should go on studying and so on, and I'm going to talk about that in the future. Now, I'd like to give you an overview of this Class C, D, zooming in on education. The first point is, it's almost a buzzword to say that we are living the first generation of higher education in Brazil. This is a reality, in part, but we are also having the first generation of high school in Brazil, and this is very important. It's not universal yet. 35% of the young adults do not end the high school. And more important to our ends is this middle, the centers in the middle.
Most of the parents of the C, D class has studied less than the study, than the student. So if you have a high school, you most probably went ahead of your parents, and this is very important in terms of reference when you consider the credit card, the, their own home. We've all talked to our parents ever since we were 12, and most certainly, we talk to our children, not only scolding them, but we discuss with them, talking to them about what we do, what, the, they should do in the future. So the Class C parents, they are a reference of hard workers. So I admire my parents, but I don't want to work with what they work.
We have a study for the Coca-Cola Institute in this employability project, and the young adult said: "I'd love to work sitting in front of the computer because I don't want to have this manual work that my father had or my mother had." The fact that the parents didn't go on with their studies, this is very cruel because we are not able to advance the years of study of an 18-year-old young adult compared to the mother education is a great predictor. It's the main variable that allows us to foresee if they are going to study or not. So if the mother has more than 12 years of education, they can end up with 11.5, and the less education their mothers had, the greater the chances of them not finishing the primary education.
So we must increase the pools of mothers with higher education so that the next generation is going to study more, with more references. And another important point that we discuss a lot in the third sector is about the technical education as an alternative to higher education. But this is not the reality of the Class C. They see the technical education as part of the pathway. Two to three children in public schools, they want to have this technical education to access higher education. Differently from us, who are the traditional middle class, we spent 20 years studying, and then we go to the market. But the Class C, they are studying in order to work as they study. So the education in the base of the pyramid is not linear.
Almost all of us had the basic education, primary education, secondary education, then higher education, and then everything was solved. The base of the pyramid, they are going to stop because they are out of money, because they got married, or they had children, or they divorced, or they got a job, and that was very important at that moment, because if you don't have a good reference from your parents, you believe that that's a good choice for your future to leave the university to go to this job. The drop out is multifactorial, and we must understand what's generating these doubts for the young adults to keep studying. Sometimes they are not so young because they enter higher education when they are 25. It's not only about money, sometimes it's a different reference of future.
They don't understand that the job that they found in a restaurant is not worthwhile leaving university. However, we see this evasion problem as something very hard, generating an impact to higher education. And for these young adults, it's not enough to finish high school. So we're talking about references, we are talking about dreams, and it's very common to see young people from high schools in public education that they don't trust they are going to access higher education. They don't believe that this dream is going to come true. And I'm not able to show the impact, but here we have the average income of high school education students and those with complete higher education from 18 to 27 years old.
So this young adult doesn't trust the ability of accessing the higher education. But when they look ahead, when they see this cousin who is 23 and graduated in high school and didn't go to higher education, and the other who didn't even finish high school, the income is very similar. One is earning 1,300 BRL per month and the other 1,700 BRL. So sometimes they say, "I won't finish high school because I will have the same income," and they drop out. So it's important to show them that they can access this purple line so that they can dream. And this is very important. When they believe that they can access higher education, that this is a possibility, they won't drop out because they know that they are going to earn much more. There's a great leap.
So if I get a good education, I will be able to get a good job, and then I will access this purple line. They see that this can become a reality. This is core for this high school student not to abandon school and move on accessing higher education. My last three slides, I normally give bad news, but I'd like to talk about the good opportunities for the future, about increasing access concerning all of the issues that we've talked about here. The first opportunity is the school time high school increase. We have seven to nine hours in different states, and they spend all this time in school. These schools are a revolution. They are radically changing the rates.
Recife is now the third capital in terms of education, 80% of the students in Pernambuco, and this is growing in all the states. This is government policies ever since we had Temer administration. These schools are improving the rates, not only in education, but we have violence rates dropping and even homicides dropping because the students spend their whole day in schools. They have more classes in Portuguese and Math. They now trust that they are going to have a better grade at the SATs. What's more important is that they have specific classes concerning project of life, mentoring with teachers. They spend their whole day sometimes talking to teachers who have higher education, so they have different references. They are going to talk about the future with them.
They are going to try and solve this bottleneck. And sometimes they don't have a reference at home, they don't know what they want to do, and now they have more options they can trust in this possibility of accessing that purple line in terms of income. And another opportunity, a great change in public policies that is going to bring a lot of effects in the midrun, is New High School. it was very polemical, but it's being implemented, and this New High School is very interesting because it's dialoguing with the higher school, higher education, because it has different tracks of studies. So you have this mandatory education, and you also have optional disciplines.
In these options, the states are promoting, and also the Minister of Education is promoting, that they implement this technical professionalizing track, so they are increasing the technical offer. This is not competing with higher education, but it's improving the access to higher education. So we have less dropout rates, and we have more students entering higher education, and we have this track into the future from the state of Minas Gerais, when in the morning, in high school, they have the traditional education of high school, and in the afternoon, they go to SENAI-SESI to a private partnership from the S System to have a very robust diploma concerning technical studies. So they will be able to dream again about that purple line, their main dream that they might have.l
Last but not least, a giant public policy, which is this Pé-de-Meia program, which is a scholarship for high school students. So these students are receiving this allowance to keep studying, and a great amount at the end if they are able to finish high school. If I'm not mistaken, it's 2,000 BRL. So this program has a great potential of diminishing those 35% who are not able to finish high school, and more importantly, they get some money to consider more viable this investment in higher education. So they do not leave high school to be lost, and they start considering this possibility of accessing higher education. They're able to dream and consider about that. So we have demographic changes that are possible with great opportunities addressing these problems that I've mentioned throughout the presentation. That's it.
I'd like to give the floor to the next speaker. Thank you, Breno. To introduce our next speaker, I'm going to tell you that every Monday at O Globo, we are able to read his column, and he speaks deeply about education. He's able to get that not only because he has this journalist content, but he's also a writer. Antônio Gois has written three books, and I'd like to invite him to talk about the perspectives on distance learning and the contributions for higher education. Thank you, Antônio. The floor is yours.
Thank you, Juliana. It's a great pleasure to talk to you.
You will notice that my presentation has some similarities with Breno's presentation, and one of the slides by Breno said that the past influence the future, and the past also influence the present, and we, and for us to understand the future, we must understand the past, and this book talks about that. We go back to the imperial times, and I'm going to summarize now. I'd like to start by saying that the first thing that I'd like to dialogue with you is that in order to understand the educational past of Brazil, we must remember that we usually say that in the past, public education was better in Brazil. I sometimes have hard debates when I try to debunk this myth. I'm not challenging your individual memories from your mother, your father, yours.
If you were able to study in a quality public school in the past, that's great for you, but I'm talking about the educational system. The Brazilian educational system in the '40s, supposedly a golden age in education in Brazil, was like that: out of 1,000 children that got into the first grade of our old primary school system, out of every 1,000 children going in, only 404 ended up going from the first grade to the second grade. We had a loss of more than 50% of students. That's—we're talking about only people who had access to school. We're not even talking about people that had children. Those who got to higher education were basically 1% of the population. Those who finished third grade of high school were only 20 out of 1,000 students.
So that was the educational scenario we had in the golden age of Brazil. Now, in the 1960s, very few things changed. We ended up still losing half of the children. So what happened to these children that went to first grade? They got held back, got held back, got held back, and finally, they would give up. They would abandon their studies. And up until today, we say, "Oh, but wasn't the good teacher, the one that would flunk students? Isn't that what we expected from educational system, you know, a rigorous teacher that would-
... flunk students that didn't learn? Well, there's, in, in my book, I talk a little bit about this, but if you compare the perspectives in the past and the culture of high-performing educational institutions in the past and the world, what was the logic of the educational system, for example, in the United States? Let's use that example. The logic was that for society and for the American society, and for American society and economy, it was important for you to have the largest number pos-, largest number of students completing education. That was, brought economic value to society. Now, the logic in Brazil is very different, and Anísio Teixeira produced a lot of studies, related to, to-- related to that.
They said that the logic of education in Brazil was very selective, because the idea was you will only-- you won't flunk only if you deserve to not be flunked. So that was the logic of high-performing educational institutions at the time. So what did the system produce? Well, it produced a large machine of segregation that abused of this idea of flunking students, and this didn't result in higher quality. And that's very important, because you think, oh, if you flunk more students, you have more better quality, but you don't have that. And the evidence shows that the more you flunk people, the more evasion you have, and you don't have a gain in quality. Now, if I presented you this graph without presenting you the previous graphs...
Uh,
And again, this shows the trajectory of our educational system today. If I showed you this data without showing you the giving you the background, then we would have to recognize a series of problems. Rena has already talked about one of these problems. Look at the number of students who don't complete high school, who don't even get to the third, grade of high school. And look, I'm not trying to sugarcoat anything. We still have a problem, but in terms of historical perspectives, we have to recognize the evolution that we've seen, and I talk about this in my book. This is something that we see. This is a debate that we see in relation to higher education and middle school, and all of the educational steps of education.
As we began expanding the system, there was always a lot of tension between those who were pressuring the system so that it would democratize itself more, so that it would open up more positions and spots. There were those who wanted to pressure the system, because they wanted to put a brake on things, because they thought that there would be a decrease in quality. When in the sixties, they tried to expand these programs, there were a lot of debates about this controversy. You know, they wanted to accelerate the democratization. There were people who wanted to increase quality by reducing this speed of transformation. This debate isn't only happening today. This is something that we see in all of the different stages of the development of Brazilian education.
So here we have a historic series that starts in 1965, and that goes all the way to 2022. And here we have the number of students enrolled in higher education. And you can see that there's a phase I of the expansion of the system in the first 10 years of the military dictatorship, and you can see here that there's an expansion of higher education in Brazil. So this period was the first time where we breached the barrier of 1.1 million students. Considering a historical perspective, there are a lot of things that we should consider here.
So on the one hand, there was a significant education expansion of higher education, but on the other hand, unlike what other countries did, such as Asian countries and South Korea, which is considered a role model when it comes to expanding education in the past century. Unlike what happened in those other countries, the expansion of higher education in these countries happened in detriment of investment in basic education, and this is a cost, a price that we pay until today. Now, in the first 10 years of the military dictatorship in Brazil, there was a significant expansion. Between 1965 and 1995, that is, in the last 10 years of the military dictatorship, in the first 10 years of democratization in Brazil, we had stability. And when we consider the growth, the population growth, we actually have negative growth.
So we had about 20 years of stagnation between 1965 and 1995. In 1995, there was an important milestone, and this was a milestone in terms of public policy in the Fernando Henrique government. Under Paulo Renato Souza, there was a decision, a public policy decision, which was the following: So the, the government would facilitate the expansion of higher education provided by private institutions, because in the past, it was very difficult for you to create new positions to higher education, with private institutions. But they would try to control this expansion, you know, trying to resolve that issue of democratization and quality. So they would create an, an evaluation system. So this was created in the Fernando Henrique government. And we can talk about whether, you know, this evaluation system needs improvement or not, but the model remains until today....
So you have a system that grows because of the increase in private education. But again, you have an evaluation system. So then we went through the Lula government, the Dilma government, the Temer government, the Bolsonaro government, and the situation didn't change. Sure, in every period, you have a little bit of a driver of growth. And here we have a graph of an educational census. In blue, we have the private sector, in red, you have the public sector. And this just confirms the data that I shared with you, that the expansion of higher education has occurred with the opening of new private programs, new private institutions, and this has been happening since the mid-'90s.
And today, I believe that this trend, I believe that the main driver of expansion of higher education in Brazil, actually, the only driver of the expansion of higher education in Brazil has been distance education, distance learning. So in red, you have the enrollments in distance learning, and in blue, you have the enrollments in in-person learning, in learning programs. So it's possible that these curves have already met and crossed each other. So if this trend continues, you know, we'll have more people enrolled in distance education programs than in in-person education programs.
Now, if we look at Brazil, and if we could look at just Brazil and ignore the rest of the world, then, you know, we would be able to celebrate, because the expansion that we had in higher education in Brazil in the last 20 years, in terms of. We can look at the person who have completed the university. We go all the way from around 10% to 23%. So, you know, we should be celebrating these statistics. But then, when we compare our numbers to the rest of the world, you know, each one of these lines here represents a country. And this data in black is basically the average of the OECD countries. So despite the efforts in Brazil, which were significant, and, you know, they were important, we should recognize them.
But despite these efforts, when we compare ourselves to other countries, we can see that in 2021, all of the efforts that we invested to reach 23% of people with a college degree, that's insufficient for us to reach the numbers of the OECD numbers last century. Sure, we overcame Argentina. Our numbers are higher than that country, but we're not even close to Mexico. Colombia is growing even more. Same applies to Chile. So these are just some examples of countries that have a similar economic reality to Brazil. And I'm going to be repeating this today. The trajectory of the educational indices in Brazil is, involves progress, but it's insufficient progress. So we make advances, but we're not advancing fast enough, and that's why we need to grow even more.
Now, I want to go back to talk about higher education, but here I want to focus on the last two stages. What this table shows us is the net enrollment at these age groups, but I want to call your attention to the age range of between 15 and 17 years of age. In 1985, only 14% of youth in this age range were enrolled in high school. In 2023, we had 75% of people in this age group enrolled. Now, if we also consider the youth that are back in basic education, then the number of schooling would reach 92%. But here we go, from 14% to 75% in this period of re-democratization of the country.
So here, you know, we're talking about percentage of people between 15 and 17 years of age who are enrolled in high school. Now, when it comes to higher education, we go from 4% in 1991 to 26% today. A lot of times, you've probably heard, or maybe you've already thought about, you know, oh, what did this do for us? Because we still have people who are functionally illiterate, we still have a lot of people who are unemployed, or PISA ratings are still amongst the lowest in the world. So we have a lot of arguments, and we have a lot of reflections related to the expansion of higher education access and these numbers. Okay, so fine, but let's look at the numbers. So if...
When we look at this in perspective, this graph shows us great numbers. This is the percentage of children who complete the fifth grade of basic education with good grades in Portuguese and Math. And if we look at the evolution of this, we have to recognize that there was a lot of progress. Now, if we look at only the 2019 numbers, then, you know, these are insufficient numbers. But in order to better understand the scenario and create better public policies, we need to understand what we did right, and we have to understand the limitations of what we did. The ninth year of basic education, the trend also involved improvements, but with worse indicators. And in the third year of high school, that's where we have the most worrying numbers.
So there was an improvement in Portuguese and languages, but you can see a stagnation in the learning of math in high school. Here, it's important to emphasize that those who complete high school today, we have a higher number of people completing high school. These are youth who are coming from low-income families and who are being able to complete high school. This is something that wasn't possible before. Now, again, I'm not trying to sugarcoat anything. We still have a very low number of people with math education. But when we consider all of this in perspective, you know, this is a youth that came from a family that before didn't have access to this kind of education. We're talking about families that didn't even complete high school.
So we have to consider this to understand the profile of, of the students that we're able to provide service today through public policies. And you've probably heard the argument saying: "Oh, what's the use of that, which if we're still in the last position in PISA?" Well, look, PISA is an international evaluation that compares developed countries to, you know, some developing countries, and Brazil is one of these countries.
We had the administration of Paulo Renato in the Ministry of Education, and then we decided to compare ourselves using PISA, and we decided to compare ourselves with wealthier countries. But if we talk about reading and mathematics, it's almost a stable result. But we are talking about many more people now. What would be expected, since the socioeconomic level is the main factor influencing the performance of the student? When we have this standardized test, with this average of students in standardized test, most part that we are capturing is the parent schooling. It's not the effort of the student, the effort of the teachers, it's much more the data from the past than the data from the present. It makes a difference to have good teachers, good schools, there's no doubt about that.
But the main factor to determine the student performance in this standardized test, such as PISA, is the socioeconomic level of the parents. So notice that reading and science, we are, we are stable. The OECD countries had a drop even before the pandemic. Some authors said that that's because of cell phones and social media. There's, there's a great discussion that you must be following up as parents. And in math, when we observe PISA data, this evolution that Brazil had from 2012 to 2020, it was very meaningful. Very few countries was-- were able to maintain the evolution. All of this effort that we were able to accomplish, the-- we imagined that in 2012 that Brazil would keep improving, but that didn't happen.
Again, this is a serious problem, but we must ponder that today, it's a system that is catering to more people. But Brazil was forming functional illiterate people. Well, when they say that, I ask: What is the source? Is that WhatsApp group? Is it a friend, an uncle who talked about that? Let's observe data. What is the best data for us to analyze that? The only research that is evaluating the literacy in science, math, and Portuguese among adults is a survey called INAF. Functional illiteracy indicator is the best survey we have. The last edition was in 2018, and we are going to have a new edition this year, and they apply this test for adults. And INAF, it doesn't have a historic series, it starts in 2001, but it compares different generations.
This is an obvious data. If the educational system is improving, the older the population, the higher the illiteracy rate. So this is the table that I believe that is more interesting. Even when we filter only for those who at least got to completed high school, the percentage of functionally illiterate people among the population from 50-64 years old is greater than the younger generation. So there's a lot of prejudice, the, but if you're not based on data, this common sense that the, that now we are forming illiterate, a functionally illiterate people, according to who? If you observe data, that's not what data is showing. If you observe the generation from 15-24 years old, the fact that only 57%...
have a level of proficiency that is accepted that is so low, this is a very serious data. But in historical perspective, we must recognize that we advanced. I'm going to be quicker now. This is another way to show the same data that Breno presented. This is the unemployment rate in terms of schooling, so they can't find jobs. What is the point of educating? But this is not the case. This is data from the fourth quarter in 2023. So it's according to Breno's data, those who didn't finish high school, they have this terrible performance, but each step they go ahead, it makes a lot of difference in terms of employability. So in historical perspective, it makes a lot of difference in terms of salary returns.
This is data from this annual report from OECD, which says that in Brazil, the average income of those with higher education is more than 100% when compared to the average income of those who finished high school only. So having a higher education diploma is more than doubling your salary. It's enough to observe the countries to the right and those to the left to interpret that this is an indicator that in the countries where the educational system and the higher education didn't expand much, this return is greater for obvious reasons.
It doesn't mean that our higher education is better than Norway, but we have this room to expand, and that's why the salary increase of those who are able to to finish higher education is very meaningful when you compare to the other-- the rest of the world. So what's the point of expanding public education in Brazil? I talked about economic data, learning data, but my book talks about that as well. And this investment in education was able to reduce was able to reduce the birth rate.
In the beginning of the century, the important newspaper used to say that Brazil had this populational explosion, that the poor layer was having a lot of children, and those who study demography, they say the demographic transition started with the richest women, but it's coming to the poorest women due to schooling. And who was able to analyze the data and was able to hear the experts, we knew that we would have this demographic bonus, and then we are going to have this problem with our Social Security. So we had the early pregnancy diminishing. We had homicide rates dropping. We had an increase of female income and schooling and so on and so forth. And that's why we must advance even more.
We must recognize that we have many issues, but it was not in vain. It worked a lot, and we must advance even more. We must advance more and more, more and better, in reality. That's it. I'm sorry that, I went over time, and you may call me, you may contact me if you want to go on dialoguing about this subject.
Thank you, Antônio. Okay, let's talk about technology now. Here at Yduqs, we have this very clear proposition on how technology is important to enhance access and improve educational quality. And in this developing process, Box1824 contributed a lot. We are part of CI&T, a great partner in our technological advancements. They have their proper approach, also evaluating tensions, impacts, and transformations that were provoked by digital, digital technology.
I'm going to call the expert to explain this process to us, Gabriel Millan, who is a sociologist, a researcher at inequalities fields, and also, he is the vice president of strategy at Box1824.
Good morning, everyone. I'd like to thank you for the invitation. It's a great pleasure to talk to you.... team of Yduqs. I'd like to show you fragments of the study that we developed last year, that was aiming at identifying territories for the future of higher education in Brazil. Defining strategic opportunities of innovation for Yduqs. We were able to compare the what was happening in the world. We had interviews with experts in Brazil and the world, and we had 16 discussion groups with all social classes in Brazil, with different profiles, to understand what were the expectations of Brazilian concerning higher education.
Let's talk about what we are going to see today. At Box1824 , we are a strategic consultancy with analysis technologies to foresee the future. The base of that is works, analysis, studies concerning behavior and culture. And why do I highlight behavior? Because we understand that a very efficient way to design innovation for the future, but relevant innovation, relevant innovation that will have a great chance of profit in the future, is understanding what people want. When we're able to identify problems, issues, when we are able to identify responses, and we are able to identify dreams and aspirations, and then we get fertile ground for relevant innovation. Not only to attract investors to enter this brand ecosystem, but also to establish long-term relationships.
So when we analyze what the Brazilian students are asking us, the most important is to say that the value propositions that they see in higher education were not born today. So people talked about history, so it's important to observe the history, to see that this value proposition models, they exist for a long time. So the students talk about two value propositions, mostly. Here, I want give you the background of higher education in Brazil again, but it's important to understand that higher education has a long history in Brazil. When we observe the first higher education institutions, they were not universities because we are talking about imperial times. We had medicine, engineering, and you may observe that when we analyze the politicians, artists, intellectuals, scholars, they studied one of these three courses, either law or medicine or engineering.
So it was a place of status that was accessible for, for very few people, people from the elite. So this place shows how it was born. So in the beginning of the 20th century, what do we see? We see the first universities. These higher education schools, they got together and they form the universities. We have the first federal universities, and then in the 1930s, we start having the state universities, such as the São Paulo University. And then we have professional ones and philanthropic ones, such as the Catholic University. So we start to have many different courses, economy, pharmacy, and so on. And what would I like to highlight here? This value proposition, these exclusive places for higher education, they exist up until now.
So we are talking about this model of a university where you have a restricted access, with high income students, with high prestige in terms of social aspects, and, and you have a lot of cultural capital, you have different references of world, the networks and contacts that you develop within the university. So we coined this term, exclusive education, to refer to this model of education that also contemplates the, the children of the elite. When you observe the work by Antônio, at that point, we had very few people entering higher universities. But these institutions, they exist up until today, and Eduardo talked about that. Most of us here in this room, most probably studied in these places. We are talking about the great public universities, the federal universities, the confessional philanthropic universities.
We are talking about the excellent centers, private excellent centers such as IDOMED, Ibmec. This is the universe of the exclusive education field. What, what's going to happen in the 50s?
Well, in the sixties, we start to see an increase in higher education in Brazil. And what ends up happening? We start to have more industrialization, more urbanization, cities end up growing, and we start needing more people, more professionals to work in this urban, new urban life. So higher education begins to stratify itself. So we still have these excellent centers and these exclusive education centers, but new institutions start to have training for the workplace in order to meet the demands, these increasing demands of the economy. So especially private institutions, they start providing options to people with a focus to technical training for the marketplace. In the last few decades, this process accelerated. So in the nineties, there was this change in higher education in Brazil. You had started seeing private institutions growing more than the public sector.
There was a multiplication of the number of courses, not just new courses, but also gastronomy courses and courses related to video games, games development, and distance learning. Public policy started to attract more people to higher education, such as ProUni for private education, you start to have quota in public education, and a lot of workers, and especially older people, went back to studying. So the trajectory of higher education isn't linear in Brazil. It is that it has people from minority groups, Black people, people from lower income parts of society. And what did we see in terms of this expansion of spots? Well, it's what we're labeling or calling inclusive education, because it includes populations that have been excluded historically from this kind of education. So there's less competition, there's a lot of preparation for the workplace. We have night shift education.
And so we're talking about urban workers, people from lower classes of the economy, and these people start to have a place in this kind of education, and that's where you start to have a quantitative increase of higher education in Brazil. So this had a very important role in the country, this growth of education. So why did I tell you all of this? Well, Brazilian students today, they look at higher education, and they see different value propositions, and each one geared towards a target market. So there are different paths that can lead people to employability. When we look at exclusive education, we're not talking about only direct paths. Oh, you know, I was trained in a certain profession, and I'm going to work in that profession for employability. No, there are actually different indirect paths to employability. And what do I mean by that?
Well, a diploma that's well valued is seen in a different way by the workplace. You know, people from these diplomas have broad knowledge that allows them to have employability, and it allows them to create new relationships in these spaces. So we're talking about, you know, having access, also contacts with colleagues and teachers that give them access to these job positions. So we're talking about, for example, somebody at IDOMED has an education that's important to their training. But inclusive education, you know how it started, and this demand is very strong. People who access inclusive education, they have a lot of expectation, which is having immediate employability. So these two value propositions, their presence in higher education, and both of them are important.
But because we need to add a new layer to all of this, we need to consider the impact of the revolution of IT in education. I don't need to explain too much here. We know that all of us here are hyperconnected. We're hyperconnected to people, to institutions, and with people all around the world, so we change the way we live, we change the way we move, the way we buy, the way we access health. Information technology today gives us a lot of opportunities, and so obviously this has an impact in the way people learn and in terms of the expectations people have in relation to education. So what have we been observing? Well, this revolution comes from network learning.
So we're talking about edtech, we're talking about ed creators, and we're talking about a world where people can access this learning, micro-certifications and different elements of learning. They can create very specific tracks of learning with training that's very specific related to what they're interested in. So people become lifelong learners. They're always learning. So this learning that's done on the web, that's more flexible and more scalable, this ends up showing up or being a part of people's learning experiences. Of course, this doesn't substitute higher education, but it complements it to some extent, and it complements the ways people learn, and it also changes the expectations that people have. So we created this term called expansive learning because it expands people's learning. Anyone with an internet connection can access lots of different opportunities to learn on the web.
So they can have access to more modular programs, which are scalable and which can be accessed in parallel to the formal training of higher education. Now, what's important for me to say here? All of this coexists today. So we have exclusive education, which has a lot of prestige. We have excellent centers that have direct and indirect routes to employability. Then we have the options of inclusive education, which have a focus on technical training for the workplace, and at the same time, we have a lot of our learning that comes from networks, modular, scalable networks. And one option does not substitute the other option. They can all be complementary, and when they're integrated, they can bring different innovative value propositions for the future. And you're gonna understand what I'm talking about.
We can't deny that expansive education brings a lot of possibilities to people, and this raises people's expectations in relation to formal education. On the other hand, it doesn't substitute formal higher education. So when people are living in these two worlds, then we identified some issues that end up showing up. At the beginning, you know, I talked about how we identifying the tensions that exist in people's lives and how these tensions and how we develop solutions that respond to these tensions. With this, people end up seeing a very relevant value proposition for their lives. So here, I'd like to share with you four of these tensions, which are four innovation paths, which are very powerful for us to work with innovation in higher education in Brazil. So the first one, I'm calling increasing the repertoire versus barriers to act or entry.
So what happens to the network in the on the internet? Well, in your lives, you can see the references that you have from from various areas of life. This is much broader, and this is happening in all the different classes in society, because people have different references, because they're connected to the world. So in the centers of excellence of education in Brazil, and the world, in these places, people know what's happening. People have access to all of this, and they're increasing their repertoire and their knowledge about what happens in the world. Does everybody know everything? No, not really, but they have a larger repertoire. And besides that, there's a strong phenomenon which comes from these educational creators. So these are people that don't live in large urban centers. Sometimes they're further away from cities, or maybe these people come from minority groups.
Maybe these are people from the peripheries, from lower income groups. These are people that end up gaining access to these higher education groups. Because, you know, we have affirmative actions in universities, we have inclusion activities in our excellence centers. Within these places, these people end up telling their networks about what's happening in these places. We did a mapping of all of the people who are doing this. So what's happening? Basically, information is being circulated. People know that Ibmec is an incredible center of training, that it gives access, it trains large, important thinkers in Brazil, and people know that Ibmec gives people employability. People know that it exists. Well, what happens on the other side? Well, the network gives me access to this, but they still have various century.
They may be geographic, because perhaps I live in a faraway place. Perhaps it's a financial barrier to access. It may be technological, maybe it's the fact that I don't know another language. So when people have the repertoire, but they can't access that place, that generates frustration. So to solve this tension, we need to scale the delivery of products, and technology is key to that. We have to give access to things that are present only in these large, exclusive centers. So we have to think about how technology can give people access to these, to these centers. So here we have a large opportunity for innovation in order to meet the demands of this large number of students who are buying the value proposition of inclusive education. The second point is what I call fragmented networks versus known tracks.
So when people start to do tracks in expensive education and on the Internet, they start taking lots of courses. So maybe I can take a programming course if I work in technology, or maybe I can take a management course, or a marketing course, or maybe I can do a little bit of a logistics course. I can do something related to the creative economy. I can do anything. I can do lots of micro-certifications. And then I get all of that, and I start creating a trail or track based on my interests. I put that on LinkedIn, everything that I've completed, all of my micro certificates. But what ends up happening? Well, I don't necessarily... I'm not able to necessarily create a convincing story out of that for the marketplace. Because the marketplace, still, you know, they still require a formal diploma, and they adhere to regulations.
So you have a lot of students who are looking to the Internet, and they're trying to build very specific paths or tracks, but then they're not able to implement that and get jobs as a result of that. So here the opportunity is to create hyper individualized training. So when we talk about individualized, we're talking about curating material. We're curating what's most interesting on the network, on the Internet, things that are increasing access to people, and we need to integrate that to formal education, because being a higher education program that's licensed and that's recognized by the Minister of Education and what's recognized by the marketplace, all of that makes a difference. And it's only institutions that have the credibility, that are able to do this curatorship.
And they're the only ones who can bring all of the interesting material to people, so that they can create these hyper-customized tracks that consider that which they're interested in. So the third tension is new forms of learning versus old ways of teaching. So the issue is that when people learn on the web, basically, you know, the format of teaching is very interesting, because, you know, the creators are mentors, and the material is provided in a streaming fashion, things. It's almost like a game. And unfortunately, you know, that's the way people learn. But then when people go to formal education, they don't have the same type of experience. So here we have an opportunity to innovate the way we teach.
If we teach in a contemporary way and in a more attractive way, and if we're able to create more engagement and attract more people... And again, you know, that doesn't mean not providing in-depth material. It doesn't mean not respecting the scientific premises. We can do all of this in a very serious way that's faithful to the academic program. But again, we can do all of this contemplating technology, so that the way people learn can be more interesting. So again, using technology to scale the experiences of expensive education to formal education is important. So we need to bring the experience that people are having in different fields to formal higher education institutions, because this increases the-... value of these institutions to people.
And finally, you know, we have the issue of many connections on the network versus little conversion of power into workplace spots. On the web, people get to know a lot of people, they can take lots of courses, they can do a lot of training, but that doesn't really necessarily convert into employability. So, how can we expand the connections of these people in higher education? How can we connect them to actual employers and employability? So the opportunity here is to scale employability opportunities to people with access to this type of expansion education. So how can we use technology to scale all of this to these people? So considering these four tensions, I want to leave you with two takeaway messages. So I know I went very fast through this.
I talked about value propositions really fast. Answering these tensions, answering to these tensions are important tracks for innovation. But the first takeaway is the following: those who are able to provide a higher education with a greater focus on employability are more relevant, because employability is the expectation of those who access higher education. So this employability, employability can be direct or indirect, but again, there's this opportunity, which is basically looking at all of these as options of inclusive education. We have to consider things that increase people's chance of employability. We have to consider how we can use innovations to scale all of this to people who are in inclusive education.
So employability in a massive way, in an enhanced way, this is a great opportunity for higher education. The second takeaway is, those who are offering this hyper-individual higher education will be ahead. People can assemble their own tracks, their pathways, so they are going to access regulated, instituted, recognized by the Ministry of Education, which absorbed all this expertise to help people form their individual pathways. The person who is ahead is investing in that, in data science, generative artificial intelligence. Those who are working with that, for education, is ahead in this individualized higher education. These were the messages that I wanted to convey to you. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Gabriel. As Eduardo mentioned in the beginning of this morning, we use technology and innovation in everything we do.
It's the essence of our, our business, and also in terms of results that we generate as a higher education institution, but also for society. We have state-of-the-art technology applied it at every stage in the process, and we have a clear strategy and proposal on this topic. To talk about that, I'm going to call Ricardo Tischer, our Director of Digital Products and Innovation at Yduqs. Good morning. Is it working? We had a technical problem, but now it's working.
Good morning. It's a great pleasure to be here face-to-face, and also we have our online audience with us. It's an honor to be the first from inside Yduqs, bringing more content and delving deeper to know more about this subject. My name is Ricardo Tischer. I'm the Director of Digital Products and Innovation at Yduqs.
It's not by chance that I'm talking after Plano CDE and Breno, Antônio Gois, Box1824, because our team, with Yduqs, technology is not an end in itself. It's just a vehicle for us to get to our destination, which is scaling up the exclusive experiences into the inclusive education. So we are trying to bring Sweden to Brazil as a whole, bringing quality education to all. And we are using the personalization of the student experience and enhancing their careers, work careers, considering their individualities. So if it seems to be a great challenge for higher education institution, to our team, this is an opportunity, something that we've been building up over our history. It's a consistent work we've been doing. It's in our DNA.
We've been doing that as Estácio, which was the first higher education institution offering distance education, 100% asynchronous through the internet, with a hub that enabled students to access our digital materials. During the pandemics, in less than five days, we have hundreds of thousands of students studying online. We have this track record of using technology to transform our business, and that's what we've been doing. In the last years, especially the last five months, we've been moving ahead to transform technology and innovation into the core of our business. I wanted to bring this organized way to show you our content with the main pillars to show our differences in this business today. We are in a privileged position to explore the potential of these new technologies.
I'd like to start with the first point, which is the great differential to us, is our technological scaling. We are increasing our infrastructure with all this microstructure in terms of services, bringing sustainability and evolution, and we have optimized costs. We have speed in evolving our ecosystem, and it is all cloud-based with the main players in the market, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, and we have this multi-cloud approach. Our infrastructure is connected to several players, so we don't rely so much on third parties, and we can balance the offer of the services. We have this factor for success, which is data. We have this single integrated repository, and we have safety following the main market precepts.
We have the governance of access that is very solid with the main benchmark of the market, and we are ahead of competition. We are organizing our information to explore what the new technologies are offering. And we have our command center, a great difference as well. We have 24/7 monitoring of all of our structure, so we don't have instabilities, we prevent system outages, and we are able to manage all of the artificial intelligence models that we are using in our apps today. So we are using GPT, Gemini, Claude, and we're using this process to monitor cost, optimization, performance, response time, bringing flexibility and autonomy when we are applying the artificial intelligence engine. So these are the three main points associated to our infrastructure, and the numbers are showing that.
We have 70 million people circulating in our websites, more than 7 million people studying in our learning platforms, using its resources, 120 million sessions and 700 million questions solved. So in our structure, we spend less than 0.1% with lack of stability or lack of access. So that shows the size of our operation. But it's not enough to have the best infrastructure if you don't have the right team with the right culture and the correct values, who know how to use that to generate results. And this is what we've been doing with our team. We've been attracting more digital talents. We have a team that is able to balance the long-term ambition with the short-term deliveries, with incremental improvements, with this startup mindset, is first time, always experimenting.
And when we talk about innovation, and when we talk with market analysts and investors, we have this very pragmatic approach on innovation. We use innovation as a scientific method. It's innovation and technology to approach the right way, this moment of uncertainty. So we use innovation to raise ideas, to transform ideas into hypothesis, testing hypothesis, proving them, and following up with the implementation, so that we can generate results. So we channel our discipline, we channel our energy. This is a great differential at Yduqs, in hypothesis that are approved and can generate value. And the others, we are going to just, to leave behind, because we have this culture of fast experimentation to generate value fast, and if it's not generating value, we will move on to the next opportunity.
So this is the culture of our team, and this is creating relevant cases in terms of innovation. And this is disseminating the innovational culture in the team, and we are attracting digital talents, and we are now an attractive brand so that this new ecosystem of talents can work with us. We have this great transformation in our teams, and we are increasing and incorporating this mindset. Five years ago, 20% of the people working with us in innovation and technology were in-house. We have, 80% of our team now is in-house. We incorporated this DNA of, innovation and technology, and we value partnerships as well to complement our capabilities so that we can accelerate this, technology adoption.
We have 150 partnerships in the last years, and more than 600 experiences super day with real-life students, with real data, generating decisions that will generate value when we implement them. So it's very cool. I talked about infrastructure, innovation team. That was our first pillar. But what about results? What is it generating in terms of impact and value to the business? I'm going to show you how I can make tangible this relevance. So this is the second differential. We have this complete ecosystem that encompasses all the students' journey. When they think about entering this undergraduate course with all the study phase, exercises, mentorship, renovation, internship, we go from the beginning to the end of the journey with our digital ecosystem.
But better than telling you about that, is showing you this experience that the students are experiencing when they enter Yduqs. Digital ecosystem at Yduqs, a complete journey. So this is bringing accessibility, is scaling up exclusive experiences for these inclusive students, inclusive education students. So it's a multi-brand system. All the institutions from the group, they have access to that, that optimizes our development. All of our students have access to this ecosystem: face-to-face students, distance learning students, we are bringing different attributes. And what's most important, we have autonomies, and we are able to dictate the pace and development route so that we can bring this wow experience in every step of the students' journey. So that brings more satisfaction. The students are studying more, they progress in their learning. So what is it for? Why so much progression?
Because of this. Because we know, and our results show, that the students that are studying more, accessing more the platform, spending more time in the ecosystem, is that one who is paying on time, renewing their steps in the education. And those who are not able to do the exercise and access the platform, they probably will be in debt and will drop out. So we have this, if we improve on this, then we have the student that will complete the program, that will pay his fees, and that will get their diploma, and will go on to a career. So this has been a very positive, consistent result. 90% of our student base is active on our app, so we've had an increase in access of 60%.
The number of people who access our app is similar to the number of people who access Netflix and other apps. So this shows people how we've been able to create a digital platform that is able to compete with larger platforms. And we're able to capture the attention of, you know, our students. We're fighting against these giants to make sure these students will be on our platform to study and advance. So that's why our app is one of the best-ranked apps of our sector, because we're really able to engage people, and people are really satisfied with our-
... ecosystem. And we are able to continue to keep a reduction in cost. We're able to reduce our cost in 40% in the maintenance of our platform, since we began the process of internalization. But the main player of this ecosystem is our pedagogical model, the quality of our education. So as a third pillar, we have our content, which is dynamic, which is adaptable to any device, and which is created by a specialized hub that has a team of curators, that builds these contents, that's connected to the business layer, pedagogical models. So we have a studio where we're able to create this audiovisual content, and this is a digital content that evolves with time. And this connects to what we talked about in the beginning, our strategy.
This evolves in the sense that it's connecting our students with their—with the workplace, and the kinds of challenges that they'll have in their everyday activities. So again—and we have technology incorporated into this to accelerate all this. So we have digital labs that allows us to have flexible education to health. We have gamified tracks, we have simulators of real environments, we have social, emotional skills that we're training people on that are valued by the workplace. So we're really trying to complement students' learning using our content and our teaching model involving technology. But I don't want to talk about only the front of our content.
I want to talk about the back end as well, because behind all of this, there is a well, very well-built structure that we've been evolving the last few years, and this allows our content to be managed in a modular fashion. So our content is like building blocks. We have the video, we have the paragraph. All of each one of those objects are built so that we can have a better optimization of the, the management of the content. It allows us to update content more quicker. So if the legislation changes or if there's a new process in technology, a curator can access the content, update the module, then press play, and all of a sudden, hundreds of thousands or millions of students are able to have access to that new content.
This gives us speed to renew our portfolio and increase the amount of courses that we have, because we're able to update our content. And this also allows us to know the habits and the behavior of our students in their learning. Because we talked about the complete ecosystem, right? So we're able here to monitor each activity, each action of our students in our digital platform, and we're also able to see everything that the student does with that content. Did they watch the whole video? Did they watch the video halfway through? How many pages did they study? So we have all of this information that's available to us in a digital platform, and it's also available in our content. And again, this brings results. So innovation, technology are not ends. They are vehicles to generate value, to generate results, and to impact our business and people.
So we had a large increase in our capacity to build content. We had a decrease in cost with this new model, and we're also able to include AI. We are experimenting and we're incorporating AI in the conception of our products, in the optimization of videos, even the production of videos. So this is already a part of our everyday activities. This we're already doing this in the creation of our content. Now, we talked about data and intelligence. And, you know, we talked about navigating to platforms and consuming content. But then we also have we try to monitor the learning. We try to measure the learning, because we want to see also what we can improve with. So then we have a layer with three different pillars.
So first of all, we have a question database that's very rich, with more than 2 million questions that we are incorporating, and we're using AI with that database, so that we can have better updating of this database. We also have a digital correction of tests, and this allows teachers to actually focus on teaching instead of correcting tests. With photographs, we are able to check the results of tests. Sometimes it would take 5 days for a teacher to correct tests, but now students are able to have access to their development more quickly. And there's also the response item theory. Some of you probably already know about that from SAT or TOEFL. This allows us to really understand the actual performance of students.
This allows us to understand how students are learning, because it's not just a matter of what they get wrong or right in random questions. We need to really understand, you know, difficulty of a question. Is a question, for example, able to differentiate a student that learned from one that didn't? What's what's the probability of a student getting that question right just out of from guessing? This allows us to improve our academic model, our content. This allows us to ensure the students are learning. This allows us to evaluate our teachers better. We can understand what criteria teachers are using to increase learning and deliver to students, you know, what needs to be improved so that the students may reach their learning objectives. So again, I'm always going to talk about results, impact, technology and innovation, reduction of costs.
I'm also going to talk about, you know, the time between when the student takes a test and when they get their grades... But all of these AI solutions, they're not restricted to an environment of learning and teaching. We're focused on teaching and learning because that's the focus of what we do, but we already have that scaled in our business. We talk also about getting new students, we talk about campaigns, and Marcelo later will show you how we use technology, cutting-edge technology, in our program to acquire new students, and how we use that to create new content for teachers. We'll also talk about how we can use that in our units to improve the performance of our partners, and the program to consider evasion, school evasion.
So we have a lot of partners that help us to accelerate all of this, and AI technology really permeates our business, and this generates results. We're able to reduce CAC, we're able to reduce the time to external transfers. We're able to improve performance. So again, the adoption of technology involves incorporating technology that generates results, that's proven. So these are five very important pillars that really do make a difference. But it's not enough to have the best infrastructure and the best team, and generate results and materialize technology in business if you don't have a winning strategy, and if you don't know with clarity where you want to go and how you're going to get there. Because, you know, then you're just going to be using all of this knowledge to execute the wrong plan.
We know where we want to go, we know what we want to do, and what we need to, to get there. This brings a safety into our team that, that we're on the right path, and that this new moment that technology is bringing us will be very, very positive for us. So the first step towards that is involves building this 360 vision of the student, this unique profile of the student. In our talk, I talked about data, and how we're able to follow and monitor our students through a digital system, and how we're able to understand the content that the student is studying. That is, what engages the student and what stimulates them to continue studying.
We're able to evaluate the real learning, we're able to measure the proficiency of the students, and all of that brings us a lot of richness, and allows us to understand the individuality of that student, and allows us to bring them solutions that will accelerate their learning, so that they may reach where they want, that they may get that job that they dream about. So all of this permeates everything we do. We're able to make inferences, and we're able to extract a lot of things from all of this information in our environment. And technology allows us to read and translate all of this information, and we're able to complement all of this, because we see that the market is requiring social, social emotional skills.
Here, we're able to have new contacts with the company ecosystem to give new information to the students, so that, that experience that they had in the real world, or so that they may understand, you know, that business that they created. All of this is a strong point of the student, so that, that may help them get a job. We see this being valued by our students. At the beginning of the year, we did a social, emotional mapping that we did, and that helped students to meet their goals. We already have 200,000 students who did this mapping, and that provided us feedback, which was very positive. We understand the students really want it. They want this repertoire.
They want us to help them to not only get these technical competences, but rather they want new skills, and they understand that that will make them successful. And this allows us to bring more personalized solutions and individualized study plans and customized content, things that will allow the students to complete those steps and reach the end of the course. We have to ask ourselves how we can have more surgical academic content. We have to really think about how we can allow that student to get to where they want to get to. So we're able to really personalize things, we're able to touch students, and we're able to engage them and promote them to get to the end of that stage. And then we have the main player of all of this, which is, you know, where we're taking technology, which is employability.
This is really associated to the fact that our students, they don't study to work, they work to study. Careers are at the center of what we do, and this is what makes a difference in students' lives. We want to understand what students want in terms of employability, we want to help them develop the right skills to get there, and we want to connect our students to opportunities and vacancies, and with the entrepreneurship that will allow the students to reach these results. Because our students have a hard time having visibility and connecting their skills to the marketplace, and they even have a hard time finding job spots. Our work is to leverage all of this and providing these tracks to students. What have we been building to get to this stage, and how will we get to this, drum-
... By the way, video constructed 100% with artificial intelligence.
With artificial intelligence, obviously, just included some of the screens of our system. Those were the only real things in the video, but that's really what we want. We want to deliver to each one of our students the opportunity to work at a place that's compatible with their strengths and with their career plans, so that we can really drive their careers. So this matchmaking between students and work spots and between employer and employee, based on all of this information that we have about students, this is what sets us apart. And we want to continue having that by incorporating experiences and social emotional skills. This is our competitive difference, and this will allow us to scale this driving of the employability of students. And this is what really transforms your business.
Before we talked about how higher education institutions have been transforming themselves to face this new moment and to make use of these technologies, and this is how we transform our business. We're not only an educator and a creator of professionals, we're actually connecting students to their careers, and we end up permeating the student journey, not just when they're in the program, but also afterwards when they're in the workplace. This is where we create value. This is our lifelong learning. This only makes sense if we're building something together with our students, because, you know, students will be in their careers for their whole lives. So we're not just considering training our students and educating our students, but we really want to understand their career journey.
We want to keep recommending spots or vacancies at employers, because, you know, these students will end up reconnecting to our brands, and they will continue their journey with us. So this creates permanence, this creates brand awareness that goes beyond the time when the student is with us. So we generate value to our students. This creates impact, and this really will transform our business. And this means obviously increasing our ecosystem. It's an ecosystem not just of learning, but of careers and the creation of new professionals. This will be able to impact millions of people with the technology that we're building and developing. Okay, so to conclude, I'd like to leave you with two messages. First of all, we'll have a coffee break that will start very soon.
We will talk to Cláudia before that, but in our coffee break, there are some places that you can go to, try out what our students experience. So make sure you make use of the opportunity. We'll be happy to test this experience, experience with you, and those who are online can also go to our portal and try out what our students go through. And we'd like to conclude with basically a summary of what we've been talking about. That is, what are the main messages that we'd like you to leave with here today? Well, my analogy is, innovation and technology are vehicles to generate value. When we think about our team at Yduqs and the people behind our business, you know, these people have a Ferrari. They're piloting a Ferrari. They have great infrastructure that's prepared, that's well structured, that's scalable.
We have an ecosystem that includes the whole student journey. We have a lot of data. So it's a Ferrari that's many kilometers ahead of everyone else, and that's because we've already been testing things, we've been experimenting and generating results. We've been bringing value to the company, and this is a Ferrari that's many kilometers ahead of everyone else, and that's on the right path, that will reach the finish line. It will generate results because we have a winning strategy that's well built and that's aligned to the market. We have specialists, we have consultants, and so this comes from the pain points that we see in our students. This is really a part of our DNA. We really believe in all of this. But behind all of this, it's the people who build this. The people who build this are people.
It's people who are building these technologies, who are developing all of this, making decisions about how innovation can be used in the right way and in a way that may impact more people. And guys, if I can give you one advice, I advise you to really trust in these people, because my team, these people here are really they love this company, they love this culture, and they really like this culture, or culture, which is to transform the lives of millions of people and generating prosperity and wealth to communities, to families, and to many different people, and consequently, generate prosperity and wealth for investors and for all of us who decide to be a part of our journey. Our team is really enthusiastic. Right now, we have great opportunities.
Everyone in our team really wants the company to be prepared, so that we can really make a reality everybody's dreams. So you should really bet on our team.
Thank you, Ricardo. What an important-
... presentation. So we are getting to the end of this morning, and to present the last part of this morning, I'd like to invite our VP of regulating aspects, Cláudia Romano.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. I'd like to highlight the fact that we have our new board member, Bernardo Lobão, with us. Thank you, Nilson Curtolo. And I would like to highlight that we have a new board member, Heloísa Rios, representing women in the board once more. I'm Cláudia Romano, I'm the VP of the company. I work here. I've been working for 25 years in this company. Every day, I choose this company to work, and I believe that this company chooses me as well, because I believe that what we are doing here is incredible.
It's different, and every day, we wake up to bring the best opportunities to our students. It's worth mentioning that I have a great team, and I'd like to talk about their work with me. We work with, at government relations, institutional relations, with employability. This work that Ricardo has talked about a lot concerning technology. We accompany our students in their journey, in their classrooms, so that they can also find opportunities in the market, being interns and working, having this happy career. And that's what we also develop in our team. We also are responsible for Instituto Yduqs. It's a great power for our educational institutions, and we have the ESG agenda, the communication within the company for the faculty, for the collaborators, all the PR. Marcelo, congratulations for this event, for all this work with your team.
We are very proud of our communications team. I don't know if I mentioned that, but it's very important to mention that we are regulated. We are a regulated sector. We have relationship with the Ministry of Education and the regulation bodies every day, and this is part of my team as well. We are going to have this different moment at Yduqs Days. It's the first time for us. Every day, we think about them. They are our reason to exist. In our meeting rooms, in our corridors, at the classrooms, we are in love with them, and we want to give them this world vision, bringing all the skills, competencies, opportunities. I would like you to listen from these incredible people who are coming up to the stage, our students from some of our educational institutions. How are you? Are you comfortable?
Well, would you like to introduce yourselves? Let's start with Júlia.
Hello, everyone. Good morning. My name is Júlia. I am an undergraduate student at Ibmec. I am almost finishing the course. I have this background on innovation and entrepreneurship, and I came from different institutions. It's not my first undergraduate course, and it was a great pleasure to be at Ibmec. I chose the right university. It's been able to give me this spaces, this networking, and I'm finally here to share with you about my experience. Good morning, everyone. It's a great pleasure to be here as well, representing some of the students in our institution.
I'm Clara. I study medicine at IDOMED.
I'm in the eighth term, and I believe that in the institution, I went to other university before studying medicine, but at IDOMED, I'm having unique opportunities, and I'd like to share that with you, bringing the vision of those who are living that. And I identified with a lot of what was mentioned here. I have the opportunity to have this one-year internship at Harvard, so I'd like to thank so much the university for all the support that I'm receiving. So we have a lot to share, build together, and provide value.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Larissa. I also study medicine, but I'm from a different campus. I'm from Barra da Tijuca neighborhood. I'm in the ninth term. I'm in this internship, which is this mandatory internship in the hospital.
I'd like to thank you so much to, for the invitation because I'd like to talk about my experience. I was a ProUni student, and I identified myself when we talked about inclusive and exclusive education. I'm part of this journey about this difference that we see in the undergraduate courses, especially when we talk about medicine. So people like me had opportunities, and I was able to have many more opportunities after entering the university. It's an excellent center. I'm now in the hospital practice, and I'm able to see that every day. We need theoretical teaching, but we also need humanity, especially when we deal with health, and I hope to convey that to you.
Larissa commented that she is a ProUni student, and it's worth mentioning that the students feel very proud when they have ProUni students in their classrooms because they study hard, and it's their... and it's a reason for pride, and I'm sure that Marina and Julio are very happy with that.
Good morning. I'm Hugo. I'm a student at UniToledo Wyden, from Araçatuba in the countryside of São Paulo. It's a great pleasure to have this opportunity to be here. I come from other institutions as well. I started different courses in different institutions, and I wasn't able to finish, and I identified with UniToledo. I'm in the third term, but the structure, both physical and pedagogical, is very cool, very innovative. In my case, I also work.
I have different routines, so technology and everything that is provided by the institution, everything is very helpful. So I will finally be able to finish my undergraduate course. I felt very much supported by the team. We have different programs there within the university, and we are able to interact with the students, and I'm able to participate in everything. So I'm learning a lot, personally speaking, and I have my career path being designed. Dylan. Good morning.
My name is Dylan. I am a gastronomy student at Campus Maracanã, Estácio, and I'm very grateful to be here today. I'd like to share my experience in Estácio, and Estácio offers many things besides classroom. We have a lot of support from the team. We have a lot of infrastructure.
We, we study with different techniques, and it's a great opportunity because we learn how the labor market works. And thanks to the connections that I was able to get in the university, I'm now working in a restaurant at Barra da Tijuca, and I learned a lot from the university. And more and now, more I've been learning, and that's it. Jefferson.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Jefferson Figueiredo. I live in the countryside, in... I'm sorry, in Baixada Fluminense. I am a distance learning student, studying the last year of the history undergraduate course, and Estácio was the only university where I could enter because I come from a low-income family, and it was my dream because my mother always told me that he, she wanted me to be a teacher, and Estácio is giving me this opportunity.
During my undergraduate course, I was able to have this teaching training course. I had this adaptive learning course. I studied with hybrid education, and I'm working now due to the contacts that I was able to establish in Estácio. I'm the second at university in my family, and it's a great honor to be here. Education is my life today, and the connection that I was able to get from this university is that making this distance learning student coming to the university many times in the months with no need, because I like to be in this environment. I was here ever since this building was inaugurated. Always talking to Zeli, my coordinator, always knowing people, participating in the courses and in the events in the university because it's a great...
I'm very proud to be part of that. Estácio was the first university that came to my mind when I was able to separate this part of my income to study so that I could pay for that. I was able to get a very good discount, and with that, I was able to buy my books. Now, I have more than 500 books on history and education, especially concerning Brazilian history, and I'd like to thank you so much for this opportunity. So I think it's an iconic moment for us because we have more than 1 million students in our face-to-face and distance learning classes, and they are representing these students, and it's a great privilege for them as well. Jefferson... is a great example. Efficiency and quality can walk hand in hand, and we know how to do that very well.
Jefferson, I'd like to start with you, because you told me the other day, we were talking, and you told me about your library. You, you're in love with books. So he's studying history, and he now has some opportunities to study abroad. So it's very important to talk about this importance in terms of average ticket that gives access to university. It was mentioning that the face-to-face diploma and the distance learning diploma are not different at all. It's not written that it's a distance learning modality. What it's worth is the graduation diploma. And you commented with me that you replaced your snacks with books. You saved the money that you with snacks to buy more books. So tell me about your daily life in the classroom with the students, with the teachers, and having this university close to your neighborhood.
In the previous speech, I remembered all of that, because when I entered the university, I started to wonder, how could I study teaching virtually? So we had web classes. The site was completely different. Today, the website is complete, intuitive. But at that point, we had that transformation being developed, and I didn't know how it would work. When I entered classroom for the first time, I saw the discipline and the different videos, the explorer, which is the part where we have the different articles. We have texts for us to study more about the class topic, and we had the bibliography as well. The professor was always talking about the authors and so on. And I have this accessible library, I thought to myself, but I need books.
I learned how to read at home because I used to live in the rural area, so I needed a strategy. So with the discount that Estácio gave to me, this difference in amount, I started to save in order to buy books. And then, I stopped eating snacks, I stopped consuming beverages because I thought, I have to buy books. I have this tuition that I have to pay, this tuition fee. This is something sacred to me. I have to pay it every month. So I started to save in snacks. I only went out to hang out with my daughter. I had this virtual credit card to buy books, and that's how I started with my library.
You know, I started creating my library with my little books because of the discount that I got at Estácio. Can we leave anybody behind? No, we can't. Everybody deserves an opportunity. And here, we don't, really don't give up on that. So here we have an important example, and he is an example of millions of our students in distance learning. With technology, we're able to scale education, and we can reach each corner of Brazil. We are present in cities that have less than 20,000 people, and that's very impactful. And it requires a lot of effort. It requires also discipline, because when you're studying, you know, what do you tell your family? Well, that's sacred to me. Look, today, I'm a father, and I...
What I tell people is, "Look, without discipline, you won't be successful," because we need to substitute the physical with the virtual. So at home, you know, I have my studying time from 2:00 P.M. to 6:30 P.M. So during that time, my cell phone is in silent mode, and my dogs, they don't bark. It seems like they know that I'm studying, that I'm busy. My TV is not on during that time. And when I have visitors, you know, my visitors know that I have my study time, so, you know, they're quick. And if there's an emergency, if I need to go to the doctor, you know, I will adapt my routine. The people I know in my family and my work, all of that is adapted to my study program. And this is what I tell, you know, my colleagues.
I tell them, "Look, you need a dedicated study time. That time is very important for you. You have time to read, to watch the videos. You also have to consult the bibliography constantly. And this complement of video, and text, and bibliography, and research on the Internet, all of that is the complement of your lesson. So it's a complete lesson from beginning to end. Then the next day, you start all of that again." And then, you know, I also have days off, holidays, and the weekend, and all of that is part of my schedule, so that when I get to the test time, you know, all I'll be doing is revising my work.
Yeah, and people like him, they don't study, they don't do distance learning all the time, because this program requires students to perform lots of in-person activities, which are extension activities. So he's always, you know, leaving the virtual classroom, and he's doing lots of in-person activities that involves labs.
... And even the internships, you know, are in person. But the most important thing, when we talk about an inclusive world, is the most important thing is to understand the strength of, the, the importance of the strengths of the classroom in, in hard skills. But we also want to call attention to the soft skills, because that's very important to people. When we hire a student in the workplace, and, you know, we hire between 70% and 80% of our students. A lot of these people are our employees because we believe what we do in our classroom. So when we do this, we improve the self-esteem of our students, because sometimes they don't know how much they know and how much experience and how much resilience they have.
All of that is very valuable when the student is working at our companies. This discipline is really important, and we have this experience, you know, because we're there working with them. Thank you very much, Jefferson. Now I'd like to go to Ibmec with Júlia. Júlia has her own business. She understands a lot. She studied business administration. She studied finance. So tell us a little bit about your experience. And I'd also like to understand from you, one thing specifically, because, you know, we talked about technology. So what's your relation with technologies, especially as an entrepreneur? And perhaps you can also tell people here about your relation to... with other people, with your students in the classroom. That is, the exchanges and your networking with students and coordinators. How is that experience in the classroom and also in practice at Ibmec?
What's Ibmec like with you there? Okay, so in terms of accompanying technology, well, before anything else, we need to be humble to understand that we'll never understand all of the technologies 100%. So we need to see what's happening around us. We need to burst the bubble, and we need to see what we can use from each area so that we can grow. So we need to have active listening, and that's something that Ibmec promotes, because we don't want people to be only focused in on their graduation. We don't want people to have a narrow view on, you know, like maybe finances. We want students to understand how they can bring other subjects and other bodies of knowledge to their lives so that they can perhaps, you know, manage their businesses better.
We want students to create partnerships with other students, and I think that's one of the benefits of Ibmec. We're able to open up our minds to these ideas, and the institution allows us to be to make recommendations at the university. That is, we don't just go there and take the lessons. We, we live through all of that, and we propose things for teachers and for coordinators. So, for example, if you're somebody who asks for help, then your teachers will give you their hand, they'll open new doors for you. And based on what I talked about with the other people here, this is something that we see in the Yduqs network. And I think that's one of the advantages of being a part of Yduqs and not be in other institutions from the competitors. And I think it's really cool because everybody that...
Everything they're telling us, I know that you all know this, but it's important to emphasize that, you know, everything they're saying here is really authentic. They go through all this in their everyday lives. So that's why it's great to be here talking to them, and Júlia is a good example of that. Now, in talking about technology, Larissa, I think it's nice to talk about technology at IDOMED. So at IDOMED, in your classrooms, you're dealing with people. You know, we talk about humanizing things. So what's technology like for you there? How do you see technology? Is it a strength for all of you? Tell us a little bit about your everyday activities at IDOMED. You and then Larissa. Well, I'm really happy with that question. First of all, because I really talk about... I like to talk about medical education.
At IDOMED, we're stimulated to think about our education, even with the integrated seminar. You know, we're stimulated to talk about our education. We're stimulated to question things, and I think that's really nice. I'm in the eighth semester, which is the semester where basically we conclude things between our residency. You know, right now I'm studying emergencies, and as you can imagine, it's that's very intense. It's there's a lot of adrenaline involved. You know, it's important for the doctor, when they're dealing with life or death situations, it's important for the doctor to be relaxed and know how to deal with all of that and be able to deal with the information that's provided. Now, one of the things that I liked the most in my training, my education, was the fact that I had the opportunity to learn through simulations.
So in our subject, for example, we have access to Apollo, which is a robot, which is able to simulate with us what things would be like this patient-- with the patient, because this robot, you know, has a pulse-
... astonishing, the difference that you have in the beginning, the first day that you learn to use that instrument, that robot, to accompany and see that the robot is really a person.
It's really great, because once you learn to deal with that robot, you know, you really learn a lot, and, and you start considering that robot as a person. During the simulation, I'm working with my colleagues, and we look at surgeries being done at the Hospital Miguel Couto. And again, we were able to do that because of the instructors at our course. Our surgery doctor is also a preceptor of the surgery area. So we, we really do feel more prepared to deal with patients when we see all of that, because, you know, first of all, in the classroom, we're already doing all of that together, and we have that simulation. And when we make a mistake, which is normal in our training, we have exceptional teachers that show us, you know, what we could have done differently.
So it's a learning experience that really prepares me really well. I see this when I go to Hospital Miguel Couto with my colleagues. When we see a patient, we see very complex cases. So, for example, on Friday, we were there, and there was somebody who got run over, and they had a brain injury, a cranial injury, and we were able to keep the students calm. We were able to divide the strategy, and that was a reflection of the experience that we had in the classroom. So. I'll let Júlia talk about human relations. I really wanted to give my testimonial, because these human relations are really important for us, and we really do feel privileged to be at an institution that's always questioning this.
I know that, for example, they brought us an ambulance so that we could see how things worked in an ambulance, and this was a really great experience. So it's really very gratifying to see that every time, you know, on a different day, there are new things. So one day I got there, and there was telemedicine. So this is great because it prepares us for a workplace that's always changing, that's very dynamic, and we really have to accompany these changes. That's really cool. Whenever I go there, I'm always enchanted because, you know, there's a table where we start seeing the different organisms of the body, and they start playing with the material. So it really is something nice, and our medical program is great. It's impeccable. Our teaching staff is incredible.
The research that we do is as well. There's a relationship that we have with our surroundings, with hospitals, and, and with the single health system. So students are really, you know, experience all of that in practice, the different calamities, the emergencies. All of the work that we do involves students, and we have that incredible teaching staff helping them. So we really invest in technology. I will really stop talking, or else when Silvio presents his part, he'll have nothing to say.
Now, Larissa, tell us about your experience.
Well, I could list several different examples, just like my colleague here, because, you know, you know, I work with medical management. That, that's what I study, and I'll be there until the end of the program next year, and I'm really anxious for this day to come. It's really incredible. I've always said great things about the way how, you know, a private institution like IDOMED is able to create partnerships with the public health system. You know, Claudio was talking about the relationship with SUS, this unified health system. You know, I'm working at the Hospital Miguel Couto, and I chose to do my residency there, and this is an opportunity that Estácio gave me. Sure, there are other options, and there are other great federal hospitals, but this is what I chose.
The learning experience that we have there is something that I can't explain. We, you know, we have the everyday activities, you know, we're dealing with patients, we're also dealing with conflict situations. We have different socioeconomic situations that we're dealing with. And, you know, for me, it's this is like the end of a cycle, because I was a student at CEFET, Maracanã Technical School. And so I come from, you know, a public school background. I was also the first person in my family to get a higher education degree. I'm the daughter of a pharmacist and somebody who takes care of elderly people. And so being able to graduate in an institution of excellence like this one, getting a 100% scholarship, this is something incredible to me. It was great for me to have this opportunity.
Not just this opportunity, but many other ones that I've had because of IDOMED and IDOMED. Last year, I went to Israel, to Tel Aviv University, and all of this was financed by all of you. So it was an incredible experience. It was... And this is a country that has a lot of diversity, and the University of Tel Aviv has incredible technology. They develop a lot of different health apps, and they have different research activities going on there. I also watched talks, listened to talks from researchers that developed the COVID vaccine. I heard from researchers that are developing vaccines for HIV. You know, I was hearing from a lot of international experts. And, you know, I was there representing Brazil and the medical program of IDOMED, and all of this was financed by all of you.
So this was really important for my career, for my academic trajectory. But besides, my story being a story of overcoming challenges, it's also a story of inspiration. When we tell our stories, I think other people are able to see that they, too, can get to where we are, and maybe they can achieve even more. And at our hospital, we realize how important it is to share this experience with patients that are going through difficult situations. All of this, you know, empowers patients, and it makes them more comfortable because these are people that are using the public health services, so they really identify with what we talk and our experiences. So I'd like to, once again, congratulate the teaching staff. They're excellent doctors. We have excellent doctors that really go beyond talking about the academic matters.
They teach us how to talk to people, and so they can, they can really create great professionals for the workplace.
We also have all the technological part. We have this emergency training with Apollo, and we called him Bob at Ceará campus because he was our friend. When I came to the red room at Hospital Souza Aguiar, that was incredible to me because I had all the experience from this emergency simulations, and I was able to save a patient because I saved the robot six months ago. So we are able to save lives based on what we learned at campus. So it's priceless. Larissa is representing all the IDOMED students with fluent English, and we see that we have the exclusive world of Ibmec with our CEO, Marina, with IDOMED world CEO, Silvio, and inclusive world with CEO Aroldo. Of course, we cannot talk about meritocracy because we don't start from the same place.
Some people have more opportunities at the start with this safe haven, which is the family and so on. But here at Yduqs Group, we give them a tool that is able to transform them, because education frees us. The more knowledge we have, the more empowered we are. That's what we taught to our students, that our institution was born in the periphery. Because our students, they worked a lot, and sometimes they dreamt of a new university. But what about time? What about price? And we were restless with that. We looked at them, and we said: "We cannot leave anyone behind. We must bring everyone to this incredible knowledge experience." So before asking about their, their most dear dream, I wanted to listen from Dylan. Dylan, Dylan has this wonderful story. He came from a small town. Tell me about that.
I'm from the countryside of Rio de Janeiro, Paracambi, and I faced some difficulties. I felt... this identification when you talked previously about the different barriers and also low income. I'm a small entrepreneur as well. When I started to have this enterprise in this confectionery, I started to study at Estácio. So after work, I came to Estácio, and it took me two hours to get here, and now I live nearby. And it was something very good to me to have this opportunity because I was able to diminish my commute time. And something very interesting that I observed is that Jefferson comes from Paracambi as well. He lived close to me.
I'm also a monitor to other students, and I talk to the students about the connections that we are able to establish here, because we have many students here. We can establish partnerships, we find future partners, and we can foster connections, and that's what I believe in. My dream is to have a restaurant in the future, adding entrepreneurship and undergraduation, because knowledge is never enough. Dylan, there's something cool you should mention, because his example is reflected in our distance learning students. Dylan was a security guard. When he started to study gastronomy, he had a cool opportunity to work in this undergraduate topic, and now he was able to find a job at Village Mall, a very fancy shopping mall in Rio de Janeiro. He's working now in a restaurant.
He was able to get an achievement in his career. When we have a career, we wake up very happy. We have a mission, and we have a salary; we can pay our bills. Dylan is in this process, and he's representing thousands of the students of ours. He's in this process of entering his career. This networking that he has talked about is very interesting because we have that all the time in our face-to-face classrooms, in our virtual classrooms. Júlia, wouldn't you like to comment on that? Yes. Yesterday, we were getting to know each other to be here today. So at night, I started to wonder about this speech, and I started to notice that in my company, every...
From five workers, three came from Yduqs, educational system, and I work with hotels, and you're doing a great job. This moment of connection that we are experiencing here, that is—this will be always something adding to our experience, because we can—we must consider each other as partners and not competitors. Ibmec, thank you for providing that to me. I see that our dean is here. Thank you so much. I'm very proud to be here with you, representing Ibmec. Well, we are a group that is able to cater to every profile of students. We are representing over 1 million students. Do we have challenges? We have. Do we have fragilities? Yes, we do, but we have an active listening. What we are doing right now, we do all the time with Marcelo, Aroldo, Marina... All the time.
We have a CEO who is obsessed with students. He wants to listen from students, he wants to know more, he wants to contribute. We have this board member team, team that is always concerned about the business, concerning efficiency, quality, and the long term, because we want to leave this legacy to the next generations. I want to leave my post, and I hope to leave my post to another professional who is a woman, and I want to leave this legacy of passion, of mission, seeing this company forming people in the future, people as amazing as they are. I'd like to wrap up with this big dream that you have. Well, nowadays, I dream of finishing the undergraduate course, becoming a, a doctor. This is the dream for my family as well.
I'm the first, and I'd like to be an obstetrician and gynecologist because I'm a woman, and I'd like to empower other women as well, showing them that health can be a different access to them. They can get anywhere they want to be, empowering more and more women. I was reflecting upon that last night. What is my dream? I like the sentence that says: If you can dream big, so dream big. So my dream is to inspire and contribute so that other people can also come, serving as an inspiration. I gave a lecture to the medicine students, and I was able to tell them about my experience, how I was able to get my internship, and how I was able to to be in the US for one year.
And I know that we have tools, we have opportunities, so seeing other people achieving that would be my dream, because I feel that all of us are capable of that. My great dream is... That by acquiring all this knowledge and establishing all these connections, I can empower other people, so that other people can grow, share my knowledge, so that I can show them new pathways. Our workers, our collaborators, can be better people, better people than I am. Ever since, since I started my undergraduate course, my, my professor, who is now the academic dean, she told me: "You're going to enter here with a dream, but you're going to get more dreams after you start." And I, I'm thinking of becoming a personal training, helping people to take care of their bodies, increasing their self-esteem.
This is a dream, but in the classroom, I also had another dream that is also teaching. So I intend to be a personal training in gyms, but I also intend to go on studying to become a teacher, so that I can be a professor or a teacher teaching children and adolescents, so that they can develop passion for sports and increasing their mental health. So imparting this knowledge to people, this is my biggest dream today. Ever since I started this course, I had some doubts, because over time... In reality, over time, we clear out our doubts and we understand what we can expect from the future. One of the doubts was: How can I move on? Estácio promotes entrepreneurship. We have this entrepreneur room here.
So you're in this place where people are empowering you and are pushing you to go ahead. And I'd like to help people to access sustainable gastronomies and also healthy diets, because people have to learn more about that. This is very important. And, I feel that I have this entrepreneur instinct, and I'd like to use that in this instinct. That's it.
I have several dreams. In August 2020-
The historian profession was regulated. So when we start studying history, either to become a teacher or a researcher, you don't have any separation anymore. You may become either a historian or a teacher or a professor. So what should I choose? What would I like to do? These dreams can be united, but in order to be a good teacher, I should be trained. So I studied for over 400 hours with these complementary activities. All of the courses concerning different activities, I was able to study because I wanted to be a good teacher. I wanted to perform a good role, contributing to education. And what about becoming a historian? For that, I needed books. That's why I invested in books. That's why I didn't consume any more snacks, because I wanted my books.
This year, I want to organize myself. I don't know how this is going to work, but I need that. I wish to study this undergraduate course in Brazilian history. I studied French last year at this program called Language and Culture, to have contact with the French language, because my greatest dream as a historian is to have my master course in France, studying French historiography, and I was able to learn about different schools. So today, we teach history and we learn history based on this French school. So they transformed the concept of historian. We have Marc Bloch and other patrons in our contemporary history.
So I thank Estácio for giving me this opportunity of telling about my history, because—about my story, because four years ago, a person who was from a different field, a colleague of mine, I told him that I was going to study history, and he told me, "You're going to starve. And if you enter a school, people will think that you're going to clean the school. Why don't you enter a different field?" And from that day on, I started to study at every course. I started to, to have separate time to study. I started to read books, and I started to do everything I could to become a better person. Not to answer this, this person, but to give an answer to society, because many times people look at us and they believe that we can't, we can't get there.
I dreamt of it, and I'm going to achieve that.
You should tell your friend one thing: when you get to our higher education institutions, we give you our hand, and we never leave you behind, because today you are students, but tomorrow you will do specialization programs, you will do other courses, perhaps even a PhD. The network of support that we have in our institutions, this is something that you will have with you forever, that will be in your CVs. You will always have this safe harbor with our team of collaborators and our teaching staff and Rossano, our CFO, because he really does have his attention geared towards students. I'm absolutely sure that all of you will make all of your dreams come true. What about you guys? Do you have any doubts about it? Of course not. Thank you. Thank you, Cláudia and students.
So with this inspiring panel, we conclude the morning session. Now we'll have a break in our transmissions. We have a 90-minute break. We'll come back here at 1:30 P.M. And outside this room, we'll have some programs, some activations for you to get to know more about our products and activities of in-company. And we can also do a tour of our institution, if you'd like. Thank you.
[Foreign language]... Vamos lá, que o povo do YouTube tá aqui já reconectando. É bom, a gente trouxe umas pessoas pra falar pra vocês. So we had some people here this morning to talk to you. People we admire and people that help us to think about our business and our institution. And that applies to the three people that were giving speeches here today, and the three students, and the students that we had here.
For me, what was the message that we wanted to transmit to all of you? Well, I'm the son of teachers from the exclusive teaching institutions, and it took me some time to understand the importance and the reality of inclusive education.... And, you know, it took me some time to understand because of the distance between the reality that I grew up in and the reality that we saw here today. I think I only understood this when I started giving lessons, when I was in the classroom, and when I started interacting regularly with people. Because I want people to be educated and transformed by our work. And so, you know, this moves me and moves all of us. I saw two people wiping tears off their eyes, but they told me-- they asked me not to tell you who they are.
But anyway, so we changed a lot since the last time we were here together in 2019. Back then, we were an inclusive educational institution that was an analog institution. We had a little bit of digital and a little bit of exclusivity, but I think we changed a lot. We created Ibmec, we created IDOMED, we brought a lot of different technological institutions, technological advances to our institution. And we started working on our distance learning platform, and we took our EAD experience to another level. We became a reference in terms of exclusive education. We're also a reference for the use of technology within and outside education. And we had a lot of evolution in relation to technology. So the morning message... Well, basically everyone has their own interpretation in relation to what you heard.
But besides the reality that I mentioned beforehand, I want you to understand the importance of the service that we provide. That is the importance of what we do, the importance of that to individuals and to society. So that was the aha moment that we wanted to create in the morning. Now, this afternoon, some of my colleagues are gonna come up here, you know, the people that work with me on a daily basis, and they will be telling you why they think that we have the qualities to provide a different kind of service, to make a difference in the lives of people and society. Because with all of this, we can generate a lot of value to all of you, our stakeholders or shareholders.
So we can do good for society, we can do good for you, and generate value for society and shareholders. So today, during this Investors Day, ESG almost comes at the end of our talk, but we want to talk about that, and we want to share a strong message with you. It's a message that Cláudia will share with you better than me. It's a core part of our business. So to talk better about this than me, I want to call the best, the biggest authority of ESG in Brazil, our Vice President, Cláudia Romano.
Yeah, so we were together here this morning. It was a privilege to be with all of you and my students. That's always a joy for me.
This afternoon, I would like to remind all of you that we are basically a granary of research and extension education. So, through our rector, Flávio Murilo, I'd like to greet all of our rectors, and we have quite a few of them in our many institutions in Brazil. I'd like to also greet our teachers. People are watching us on YouTube, and there are some people with visual impairments. So what I want to say is the following: Okay, guys, my name is Cláudia. I'm wearing white. I've got long hair. I'm 1.67 meters tall, and I'm really happy to be here talking about this special agenda with all of you. So as you all saw, we are a group that caters to all students, all types of students from all classes of society. This is something we saw this morning.
But our essence, our DNA, is inclusive. We were born 53 years ago with this inclusive perspective. We are thinking about our students, our student that comes from the periphery, for example. So we started with units close to where our students live or where they work, with night education, at night. That's because we knew that a lot of Brazilians were dreaming about higher education, but they didn't have access to it. So we've been pioneers in this kind of education for 53 years, and we believe that efficiency and quality can be together, walk together. So I only have 10 minutes, so I'm just going to give you a summary of some statistics. And here we have some very important numbers. 600,000 people graduated with us from our institutions in the last 5 years.
7 out of 10 of our students are working with what they studied, and you saw some examples of that. 54% of our students are Black. 74% have a public educational background. And in our first year of education, we really do try to give a reinforcement in terms of Portuguese and math lessons to these students, and Aroldo will talk more about this in his presentation. So in terms of our journey, our ESG journey, well, we have 24 ESG goals, and as Eduardo mentioned, we really focus on the ESG agenda because we deliver our biggest asset, which is time. Eduardo's time, the CEO of the company's time, my time, and the time of my colleagues, the other vice presidents. And so we have a horizontal ESG agenda for the whole company. So we have 24 goals, and we substituted financial goals with ESG goals.
That's how relevant it is, because we really believe that ESG is an investment. And ESG is not related to branding, it's related to best practices. This is related to our governance. We want our institution to be sustainable for many years to come. So ESG for us is basically best practices. It's. This is our investment. So out of these 24 goals, I think we should mention that we have an incredible team. We trained many technicians in our ESG body. And my team left with all of you the picture of our ESG team. These are the people who take care of our indicators in our management system, which is an innovative management system.
So you have there with you a very comprehensive ESG report that gives you an idea of the management work that's done, because, you know, we know that G, that stands for governance, that's what makes ESGBs something sustainable. What also calls our attention here are important numbers in terms of teachers. 35 of our teachers are Black, 56% of the people in leadership position are women. So we've got two women members of the board, just me and Marina, who are vice presidents, and we have a lot of women directors. So this company really is a company that has a lot of women in positions of leadership, and they really do make a difference, and they have a lot of personality. We have 33 trainees. What does that mean?
Well, we were very concerned, and we were very brave to, you know, do something different, because we already had a trainee program, but we decided to do have trainee programs that's catered exclusively to Black people. And this was an important bet, because in our classrooms, we have a lot of diversity. So we are right now going through the third group, third class of trainees. So we've already selected our trainees, we've already actually hired them, and they're reason for us to be proud. And so we have now our third group of trainees, and for sure, we're going to be hiring a lot of these. So this is a continuous program of ours, and that's because we're unstoppable. We're really never going to stop accelerating the careers of people who really do make a difference, and we know that these people deliver results to our company.
I'd also like to call your attention to Instituto Yduqs, because that's our social potent, the power. This is the umbrella group that involves all of the different expansion activities. We also do a lot of work in our surroundings, and that means that we affect the whole of Brazil because we are everywhere in the country. We almost do like public sector work because we teach people in our institutions, and we take people out of the classroom so that they can actually experience things in practice with their teachers and supervisors, and it's really beautiful work that we do. Besides all of that, we have important pillars. The sports pillar is really interesting because we really do believe in sports as an important tool of transformation.
After all, you know, we've got examples of courses such as, you know, things such as resilience and teamwork, which are things that we want to emphasize for our students. So we've already trained 1,500 student athletes, and right now in our classrooms, we have 1,000 athletes. We have a lot of Olympic athletes that, you know, were in the Olympics in 2016, and 10% of the athletes in Japan are our students, and they will be going now to Paris. And we work with a, a career, career transitioning with these athletes, together with the Brazilian Olympic Committee, the Paralympic Committee, and the different federations. We are advisors and ambassadors of the best management and governance practices, such as FIGA and Pact and the Treaty for the Sports, and other organizations that really focus on transparency and best practices.
A program called Literacy is beautiful, and it's very exciting. It's called the Youth and Adult Literacy Program. This brings opportunities to our students who never had the opportunity to become literate in their lives. So we're talking about 70- or 80-year-old students whose lives have transformed. We have our own method, we invested in our own method, and this method allows students to finish our program being able to read and write programs. They are able to do this after 100 days. Then we also have our volunteers, the volunteers from our teaching programs, and we have people from our classrooms working on this program. So this is something that we do beyond. You know, our everyday work that we do at Estácio, IDOMED, and in our other educational institutions.
Rede de Valor or Value Network is another priority program of ours, and this is for our ProUni students. In partnership with IDOMED, the students from ProUni, they come from poor financial backgrounds. And these students, they can't work. They must spend their whole day studying, but sometimes they don't even have money, you know, to take public transportation or to feed themselves. So we were able to create this program called Rede de Valor, which already happens in Rio de Janeiro. It's a very successful program, and we were able to scale this to the northeast of the country. And this program involves. It's fully based on donations. So we started by calling the attention to this program for employees.
So every employee that makes a donation. For every employee that makes a donation, Yduqs doubles that donation amount. Now, it's such a successful program, and it's so transformative in the lives of our ProUni students, that this program was externally recognized. And then we had Santander, Zurich, and Instituto Phi, who recognized this program. And so these are organizations that are very special to us because they are really paying attention to these programs that really do have a gigantic impact on the lives of our students. But I'll give more details about this later on, because there's a lot for us to talk about, and we get very emotional about this. MedDiversidade is also an interesting program because we know that IDOMED is a medical program, and it's a program that's...
We have this program that's very concerned about diversity, and we'll be launching this program tonight. And Silvio will certainly tell you more about this program later on. This institute has impacted more than 1.5 million people, and the evidence for this is in your little booklet that you have on your table.
And all of this work that we have on the environmental side is very much recognized. It's important because we like to give the example, and we inspire more companies for this agenda that is so important to the world, the ESG agenda. So these are our titles that we were able to acquire, and I would like to mention the Global Pact. According to all ESGs, we are part of Educa 2030. We are the exclusive ambassadors in higher education institutions with Rede Globo. We've been to the UN in Geneva. We went to New York. We were awarded many times, and that is bringing value to everything that we do.
We are in this movement called the Women, Elas Lideram, the Women Lead, and we are in the selective group of companies that are recognized with the rating AA, especially in higher education, we are the only ones in Latin America, so it's a great reason for pride. When I talk about the key to success, and this morning we talked to the students, and it was so nice to tell you about our routine with them, and we really hire our students. We have 80% of our collaborators coming from our institutions. We believe what we do in our classrooms with the teaching, the research, extension, the best team of collaborators and best team of teachers. It's an incredible work. Now they are our collaborators, and they are in the corridors working with us.
In terms of engagement, the last survey that we had, 87% of the people who work with us, they are happy. They believe in what they do. They are together in this purpose, with this mission, with the sense of belonging within this network of Educ, being careful with the students. So it's people teaching people. So it's very nice to be able to hire our students and knowing that everyone is working very happy, willing to make a difference. And this is a picture of Wagner, a student of... One of our students who is representing one of our 1 million students. He studied law. He studied his graduate course with us. He's studying the doctoral course with us.
He is our professor at the law school in Cabo Frio, in the city, a city near Rio de Janeiro, and we want to provide him a vision of the world. We want to give him the best skills and competencies and the network that we have, so that he's able to fulfill all of his dream, and we believe in that. That's why we bet on these students. We-- They are incredible, and we know that we are making the difference in their lives. So I wanted to ask you, is that a business or is it ESG? ... There's no difference, right? Here, we have impact and result mixed. So I wanted to tell you about how much ESG is an investment for our Yduqs Educational Group. Thank you so much. Marcel, please come to the stage.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much.
It's a great privilege to talk to you. I'd like to thank you for your presence. I know that you made an effort to be here to watch these important presentations. My mission is to tell you how the sales and marketing approach happens at Yduqs Group. The mission that I have is to tell you about our differences when compared to the competitors, and why we believe that what we do here is bringing competitive edge so that we can have a different positioning at the market, adding value to all of our brands. Before we start talking about our differences, we have to talk about product portfolio. Just to remind you, we have a brand portfolio that is the most privileged in this factor.
On the top, when we talk about undergraduate and graduate courses, we have Estácio, the greatest brand of higher education in Brazil. Wyden, that is consolidating 11 brands below it in different locations with local strength. Ibmec, that we have mentioned before, with exclusive teaching, and IDOMED as well, with the solutions for the future being protagonist in terms of education. And IDOMED, which is a new brand, but which has a lot of history. We have 25 years in this Estácio group, and we have been improving the teaching of medicine in Brazil. And we also have a group of brands. These are new businesses. I won't give spoilers, but we have Qconcursos and also Damásio, HardWork Medicina, and in different segments.
I believe that this composition is bringing what we've been experiencing in Yduqs, catering for every class, from the top of our country to the bottom of our country, everywhere. The portfolio is not only brand, it's also what we deliver. But this is a quick snapshot in terms of products and deliveries. We're talking about more than 840 courses, prices that range from BRL 39-BRL 15,000 per month, when we talk about medicine courses. This is a very extensive range, and we are very resilient in terms of portfolio. I wanted to highlight this point. Even within Estácio, which would be our accessible brand, we have products that go up to BRL 2,000.
We are talking about a different class that we add to this portfolio, and we are talking about flexibility, resilience, and range that we have within these 840 courses being delivered in many modalities. So what's the difference? We've talked over and over about technology, and I won't be different. I think that we have three points in our sales and marketing approach that must be highlighted. First, using state-of-the-art technology, attracting and retaining students. This is very important. Everything that I talk about within this umbrella of marketing and sales, we are, we are, talking about the students from the beginning to the end. We are talking about capturing the students, maintaining them, so this is part of our work. The second point is to have the integrated planning for campaigns to capture students and to maintain them.
We do that by using technology. The third point is that narrative that we have that brings a lot of differences when we go to the market. I'm going to talk about technology now, and we cannot talk about technology without talking about data organization. Our director, Tischer, talked about that in the morning. Here, we had a huge work to organize market positioning, pricing, how we position the offers so that we can have the campaigns. Today, we have this price positioning that is very variable. We have historic, historical prices, we have income data, we have zip code information, and then we go to the market and we test, and we monitor several of different prices every week. This is something automated. We trigger that, and then we monitor.
And a recent change that we had was the implementation of the Salesforce. Today, we are able to have this change of price table in less than one day. So it's market timing, which is completely different in terms of reaction, and we are able to get different outcomes with that. I'm going to comment on that later on. Ricardo said in the morning that we have several types of data being captured during the student journey, from application data, academic data, financial data, moment of payment, engagement in the system, and everything comes to this pool of variables, which we analyze. And we have predictive models. We have 18 of them, and the most iconic one is journey prediction, and we're able to have a good predictability to execute our campaigns.
The prediction of behaviors and the ability to improve the supply is improving us in terms of tickets, supply, and we are fulfilling this mission of having engaged students ending their courses. And these models are being enhanced to also encompass marketing allocation. So we are putting a little bit of science in things that were difficult to be measured before. We always had that doubt. I'm going to put this money in this funnel. What should I do? And in this stressful moment, naturally, we would go to the research side to see where we could find outcomes. And today, we were able to improve. We are able to analyze the synchronicity of the models, and now we have models that suggest investment locations that are totally different. We have now this type of funnel, and we are more exposed to the brand.
That has helped us to have savings in terms of marketing, especially in terms of purchase cost, and also beating the competition, almost all of the players. This is a new tool. This is a firsthand presentation. We've been creating different tools, regardless of media allocation. On the left-hand side, we have the Optimus model, the pricing model that we have, and also lead generation tools. We have an action, more than 5,000 students studying for free on this platform. We are able to capture data on interest, application, and enrollment, interest. This tool generated 200,000 leads last year with very low cost, and brought enrollments for several brands, especially and even the premium brands, which we use in our relationship with high school. We have Experimente seu brilho.
This is a different program that we incorporated in the portal, and the portal itself that I'm going to comment about to you. It, it's worthwhile to know the other tools, so that you are able to see the improvement and how we are present from the beginning to the end of the student's journey. So they have to commit with us for six more months. They have something digital, quick, very transparent. And we have this wish list as well. The student wanted to know what they should study, they wanted to put together their schedule before, beforehand, and they were very much interested in innovation, and that tool was launched one year and a half ago.
It has over 125,000 participants, and we have data on NPS with a huge increase, and we are also increasing the renovations for the users. And so it's improving renovation and tickets. Again, we have here two examples on how we've worked with customer experience, improving variables and giving them more options. Now, speaking about the portal, which is another relevant point in our journey of digitalization, we had a challenge after we purchased Athenas that was the multi-brand management. And the portal was one of the doubts that we had, because are we going to have three portals? Should we integrate them? What should we do?
We decided to have a single portal with the benefits of optimization for all of the brands at the same time, and with this complexity of not missing the specificities of each one of them. An Ibmec site shouldn't be equal to a Wyden site or Estácio site. So we entered the portal last year with this Wyden label, and we are able to have these content building blocks. We have landing pages for different campaigns, and more importantly, we were able to do a portal only in seven days. So we're talking about more than 45 million users, and that shows the scalability. And this shows us how we're able to work with large volumes. We are also able to capture leads. We have more than 1 million.
That's much greater than the volume we had last year, and we had a reduction in lead time. Today, you're able to finalize enrollment in less than 12 minutes. And digitalization was involved in adult interaction, but also in providing service. We have people in sales that also work together with operations. We were able to make a lot of improvements in last year. We were able to digitalize 50% of these services. And all of this brought a reduction in cost, and this is ongoing work. We've been using bots and AI tools that are very well known in order to improve our interaction, not just with our students, but also in our activities, operational activities. Now, in terms of strategic campaign planning, well, I could start talking about capturing clients, but I want to talk about renewals.
We also have a campaign cycle, which is important for students to remain with us. Here we had two challenges. First of all, contacting students, and secondly, what would motivate students to renew their tuition or their enrollment with us? Here we have two points, which are very important. These were very important in the last few months. The first one was the use of AI to perform contacts in a more efficient way. Today, we have a system that tells us what's the best way to talk to students and how to reach them. We also have continued learning based on the students that enroll. We also have personalized campaigns. We have a story, a renewal profile for each student. We also have different metrics, so that we can try to maximize LTV.
We had a reduction of 10% in the median average discount for students. We also have an increase in the contact.
... rate or tax. Now going on to find our position. Well, the model is from the outside to within the company. We're able to capture different prices. We monitor prices within many different municipalities. We have a phase that involves planning campaigns and tests based on SKUs. Today, we have a lot of simultaneous tests that take opportunities to involve the user base or prices. This is something that we measure with time. Then after this, we do the measurement and the monitoring of results versus the variables that we created. Now, it's important to say that we are able to do all of this with updates that are done in less than one day, and this is a different reality from the past. In the past, it used to take a lot of time.
So today, we're able to perform tests, and we're able to react more quickly to the market. This allows us to change not just pricing, but also media allocation. So let me show you how these two things get mixed up. So here we have an example of two advertising pieces where we change the messaging. So one talks about price, the other one talks about scholarships. And you can see that you have changes in the click-through rate. So we launch the campaigns when we're injecting a certain amount of money. When we realize that we have a lower CTR, we end up investing more. Besides that, we're also migrating to the automatic creation of material, promotional material. Today, we're also working on videos.
The last Big Brother session, we were able to have lots of personalizations based on signs that we were able to get from the client, based on physical presence of the course that we're looking for. This public that was in the funnel had 10% better conversion. This is a very important tool for us. It'll be able to be scaled, it will allow us to have personalization, and it will be able to change our metrics. Now, in relation to narratives, in the past, before 2018, everything was very similar. We didn't really have a lot of conversations related to value. Then our first change in terms of communication involved having a spokesperson relaunching our digital platform. This is very important to us in 2019, 2020.
We started to change the way we talked about our offers. In 2021 and 2022, in the post-pandemic period, we changed our tone related to awareness by using two very well-known spokespersons. And now we're talking about creating value and bring the Estácio experience to people. But this logic can be applied to all of our other brands. So here we have a language that's more geared towards Generation Z, and this has been generating results for us. I think that we win when we do this in an integrated fashion. So here we have an example of our Big Brother initiative. This had large reach during an important time of the year. This was before the results of the national college entrance exams.
So we had a dedicated test, and we were sharing with people the experience of studying at Estácio, and this was during peak hours of TV watching. We were amongst the number one trending topics of the show during some time, and people, the numbers of people looking for our brand really went up. We also went on all of the different social media, and we involved the different topics in the search algorithm, and we were incentivizing conversations about us, and we had large reach. We also had the implementation of a game on TikTok. We have 10 different live channels that were happening in parallel, and they allowed us to have 23 million people enrolling from social media. The results of Big Brother Brasil made basically the national entrance exams very jealous of the results that we were able to achieve.
So this is the construction of our brand in the long term. So the interest share of Estácio as an isolated brand. Basically, through this, you can see that we are the biggest brand in Brazil, and we have a distance of 44% to the second brand. At the bottom, we have a brand tracking, where we check recognition by region. We have numbers over 80% in all of these areas, and we still have the opportunity to work in the south of the country. And here you can see that we're able to have large penetration in the market. This is something that we're able to do with our spokespersons. And we do this, you know, being very cognizant of the price and very cognizant of efficiencies.
When we look at our indicators and our advertising indicators, and compare that to the number of clients that we were able to get, we can say that our indicators are very good, even when we compare ourselves to players that are more digital. Because remember, here we have IDOMED, we have Ibmec, we have Estácio, we've got everything in our world... And we look at the percentages, when we look the numbers of the industry, we can see that we have some of the best indices of the sector. So that's the message that I wanted to leave you with. So just to say on marketing, we really have a focus on technology, and we can already see the results of that. There's also a focus on the integration of campaigns.
We have this capacity to perform tests and to take technology to the mass market with a very specific narrative that is able to take higher education to more and more people. So I hope I helped you with my explanation. Now I'd like to call Eduardo Parente back on stage. Thank you.
Okay, so before I start talking about what I was gonna talk about, let me go back to our institute. Breno told me that I am talking to quite an exclusive audience here. So let me give you an example, because Larissa was telling us how she went to Tel Aviv.
When our students went to Tel Aviv, when our students were going to Tel Aviv, one of our directors said: "Look, you have to have a ProUni student there." So, you know, we ended up paying Larissa's trip with resources from our institute. We get donations from natural persons. With this money, all of this money goes to one student. So the money of the institute is not to pay for tuition or anything like that, it's for the students. The ProUni student is a student that was chosen by the government. It's a student that has really high grades, but which has low income, and this is something that was checked by the government. So basically, you know, it's the government that's paying for these scholarships.
So I got a message one time, you know, from one of our colleagues that said that a student stopped working as an Uber driver in order to study with us. Today, at the end of this presentation, after the Q&A session, there will be a QR code up here, and you can access that to make a donation to our institute. And we'll only let you leave here if you actually make a donation. No, but I'm just kidding. Anyway, before we move on to the next section, I want to go back to this here, because we talked about the strength of our portfolio. So what do these numbers mean? Well, this is our legacy here. In 2019, this represented a large part of the total.
We did a calculation, and in 2017, more than, more than 100% of our EBITDA was coming from the public sector. This is something that we knew would end, so that's why we created a completely different portfolio with two businesses that grow-- that keep growing and that have larger margins than that business that grows the least. So we had a great 2023, because the business that grows the least, and that was shrinking, stopped shrinking, and the other two businesses that we have had a great year. So this is important, our portfolio. When we do this analysis every quarter, you know, we have a lot of different breakdowns, different numbers, so that's why we do our analysis more easily.
When our competitors launch their numbers, we're able to get our numbers and compare our numbers to our competitors. So, you know, we do our calculations, and we have somebody that works with us. He's a really smart person, and he spends all night working on these numbers. And basically, there's not one single business where we don't have the best metrics of the market. And that's a result of efficiency, and Aroldo will talk to you about that, and it's also related to price. So... And I'm sure you see this a lot, but I really like this graph here, because this really reflects the moment that we're in.
When we have somebody who's thinking about the long term, and, you know, these are usually foreigners, these are people, you know, that, that go to Brazil and invest in Brazil because, you know, they think about the long term. Here, if we look at 2018, when you look at this graph and you see that we are growing everywhere, and we get to this number of 5.3, you know, we can see that our numbers are improving, and we've been paying dividends every year since 2017. And, you know, a lot of things have happened since then. And in 2017, this number was around 500-something. And this is a conversation that I was having with you in the morning.
We're going back to a moment of a generation of cash flow and what are we going to do with this money? Well, we're known for allocating capital well. We've made great acquisitions in the past, important acquisitions. And sure, there were losses in terms of some acquisitions that we didn't make, but Rossano is going to talk more about this. Let's start by calling our other directors here. Let's start with Marina, CEO of Ibmec, and who's responsible for growth. Thank you.
... Good afternoon, everyone. It's a great pleasure to be here today in this very special day when we are presenting our Yduqs. I'm Marina Fontoura. I'm the VP of Business and Growth at Yduqs. I'm a head of digital products, innovations, new businesses, and M&A, and I'm also the CEO of Ibmec. I'm going to talk about two of our businesses. Vida Toda, which is the expansive education that Gabriel talked about, all the new ways to learn and teach that are according to the recent movements of the market. And then I'm going to talk about Ibmec, one of our exclusive education systems. So let's talk about Vida Toda. I'm going to talk about three main points over this presentation. The first one is that when we talk about Vida Toda, it's a very diverse segment. We have several different opportunities.
This is a very big market, and it's easy to get lost. It's important to have a clear strategy on how to work in this market, and we have this clear strategy, and we've been reaching this history of growth, so we are gaining share and relevance at Yduqs, and we are very excited to the advancement of the different initiatives that we have. This is the world of Vida Toda. We have the well-known world of undergraduate courses, MBAs, master courses, doctoral courses, and we have undergraduate brands that are well-known in this regulated environment. So if you're strong and in education, you're able to see that at Vida Toda. With prep courses, with short-term courses, and we have courses preparing to the medical careers.
We have the prep brands that are a service to unblocking digital services with this ability to obtain a digital offer, so these clients are intermediates in this market. We have this expansive education, where every content creator can become a professor or a teacher. So this is a market where you see many players and several of them with different niches, with specific outlooks, and a giant, and it's a giant market of tens of millions, very polarized, and of course, contemplating many opportunities, but you can also get lost because it's a market that is quite complex as well. So it's very important to us to observe what is the right strategy to surf this wave without getting lost. Basically, after mistakes and successes, we defined two great focus to work with Vida, Vida Toda.
One is connected to regulated teaching, the postgraduate courses. We have two brands that are huge. Estácio, as a non-premium brand, we have to use its strength, and Ibmec with a premium brand, with a lot of success. So how do we couple that? So these are initiatives that we are advancing at Yduqs. The second is: How should I work in the non-regulated universe? And we saw that it was very hard to work with that within Yduqs in a coupled way because this is a different universe. We have undergraduate courses. It's very easy to get lost, not to have an individualized focus on each one of the students. So we decided to have smart acquisitions of approved players with cash, and how should I give them strength to grow?
So I'm with them, promoting them, driving them to obtain strength, and space, and room. And here we have two acquisitions that we had in the last 2 to 3 years, in Medicina and the case of, Damásio. We also tried to bring it to Yduqs, integrating processes, and being honest, the performance was not great. We weren't able to deliver what they were capable of delivering because, you have different niches. It's a small business when you compare to the whole. So we decided to focus on what was working. So they were able to go on with life being dynamic. So we integrated, Damásio, and we have a different dynamics now. So this is very clear that we, in the non-regulated, we should, let them have an independent action, and we should help them improve their, their performance.
B2B is a solid business. We won't invest in 200 startups with no improved results. So this is our strategy, the first point that I wanted to convey to you. This is the pathway that we've been trying to work on. Here, we see some of the results generated, and I'm talking about Vida Toda. Removing everything that is happening, I'm talking about the digital world. And what happened? We've been growing from 2021 to 2023, we grew 18% per year with this relevant margin of 65%, providing synergy to the portfolio with different profiles in terms of results and cash generation. And we've gained share. It was 4% in 2021, and now it's 5% of Yduqs. We have a lot to do, of course, but we believe in both ways.
In our own brands, we have a lot to do, how to extract more value from there, and the invested one. They have a successful trajectory and new potentials that could compose the portfolio so that we can have a more active participation in the non-regulated world. So I'm going to tell you about what is exciting us ahead. Speaking about the digital graduate courses at Estácio. This is a classical example of non-premium market, how we are able to extract value, complementing a strategy that we have, which is very strong in the undergraduate courses, complementing and working in a synergistic way. Marcel was talking about the sheer interest, and this is translated into the graduate courses.
So this is a national survey that we had last year, and the index of consideration to study in a graduate course, 31% consider Estácio. The second player is only 14%. So what does that tell us? Marcelo commented about Big Brother Brasil with this peak of applications. So what was the day that we sold the most graduate courses in this cycle? So you see how it this is generating a positive spillover, and this is very profitable because it's taking advantage in the strength of its Estácio itself. And with this low CAC using synergy with different contents, with technology. So we are able to adapt in a simple way, and we are able to generate cash.
In this last year, we had a growth of 14%, and it's the greatest graduation in the non-premium segment in Brazil. So we have strength, but clearly, we have a very nice operations, operation, and we have in our hands the greatest brand for the non-premium graduation courses. The second case is Ibmec Online, which is a very relevant brand. We are talking about post-premium. This is a very interesting segment, because in the graduate courses, the segment is even greater than in the undergrads. Because at the graduate course, you seek opportunities to improve your CV. So it's very common that you have undergraduate students from non-premium undergraduate courses go into this kind of premium graduate course. So we should improve even more Ibmec Online, because we've been working with partnership. We had XP and then Exame, that was the main line.
We were not the owner, the owners of the journey. They were responsible for capturing the students, and we had this lower share, 30%-40% of the revenue, and we were irresponsible for the academic part. And this post-premium is a different way to capture. You have content marketing, and we were not used to that, to do that in-house. That's why we looked for partnerships with our profile. Since then, we decided to make everything in-house. So we are now working in-house with Ibmec Online, without the partnerships. Our marketing team has a different understanding now of how it works, we are much better prepared now, and we understand that being the owner of the student's journey 100%, that makes a lot of difference to us.
With this know-how that we acquired with the partnerships, we understand that we have a huge potential to grow with this brand. It's not easy to imagine that we could make it double or grow even more, because we have a diamond that must be lapidated, and that's what we are doing now. So that was the first strategy: How can I generate incremental activities to our activities? So now we are talking about the companies we invested in. I would like Caio Moretti to talk about the Grupo Q. Caio is a great partner. He is the Grupo Q's CEO, but much more than that, he's a super partner in terms of digital and technology and new initiatives, AI, AI tasks. And he's improving Yduqs with his team. So I wanted him to tell about his journey with Yduqs.
Thank you, Marina, for the invitation. It's a great honor to represent the the Grupo Q, the Q Group, and you're part of our daily lives, you're part of our, our story. I'm Caio Moretti, I'm the CEO of Grupo Q. We are an edtech, emphasizing in SAT preparations. We are educational company with this strong technological basis. We are more of a technological company than an educational company. So when we talk about Yduqs, we say that we are a great technology company. We have three big brands representing us in the Grupo Q. First is Qconcursos, that originated us, and then Damásio and Prisma. And when we talk about the differences of the Q Group, they come from Qconcursos. That was born in 2010, and that is bringing the great differences in terms of business. And we are digital natives.
We are a company that was founded by developers. I used to work as the director of technology before I took over the operations and then the CEO role, but we are really digital natives. Technology is something that we do efficiently and with a lot of agility. So we have 3,000-4,000 questions answered per minute. We are in very competitive markets. At every minute that we speak here, there are 3,000 questions being answered within Q Concursos, and 15% of our students, they have contact with content that was created by AI. So we deal with that very naturally. And this business of dealing with tech makes us try and find low-cost technology. Our products seek to have ways to diminish tech. Q Concursos is one of the biggest sites in Brazil today.
We have a base with 33 million leads that we've able to acquire in the last few years. These are people who access our site monthly. Last year, we had 10 million unique visitors that visited our site, and this generates organic traffic. This traffic isn't just traffic. We end up converting this traffic into communities, communities of content where people can exchange knowledge. That's another competitive advantage of ours, it's what Isabella talks about, which is our community and our engagement. Our students are stimulated to have exchanges. We have a lot of content that's created by students that's shared on our platforms. This ends up generating operational efficiency, because it's content that's being circulated, it's content that's creating SEO and creating traffic that we don't have to spend money on.
So, you know, maybe you're in a classroom and, you know, maybe you have a question, but instead of asking the professor a question, you ask the question of your classmate. And, you know, the fact that the student doesn't feel that he's alone is basically one of our biggest reasons of retention. And then we also have financial sustainability. So we have a low, low cost of technological operation, we have a low cost of client acquisition, and we have a community that generates retention, and this makes us sustainable. We are a company that never received any investments.
We became shareholders without injecting cash, and since 2010, we've been bootstrapping our operations, and we've been generating cash flows since the very first year, and these cash flows have been reinvested in new solutions, and this has allowed us to continue developing ourselves. And so this took us to 2021. That's when we began to question ourselves. We were thinking about, you know, what could we do with our competitive advantages? When we look at Qconcursos, we don't see content related to public entrance exams, we actually see content related to employability. This creates synergy with our group here. And so we started to look at synergies, and one of the first things that we signed some synergy was high school education, and that's how Prisma came to be.
Prisma is a prep program related to college entrance exams, and in the first quarter of this year, 164,000 students studied through content from Prisma. Last year, we did a partnership with Instituto Yduqs to leverage our content. And again, this is something that involves 0 cost of acquisition, and it involves organic growth.
[Foreign language]...Nós temos também, como já foi dito, o Damásio, que foi recentemente incorporado ao grupo. E nós temos essa missão de trazê-lo pra um mundo mais digital, porque, você sabe, é uma instituição que tem quase 60 anos. E é interessante, porque essa, esse movimento do Damásio, que foi em parceria, de fato, foi em parceria. Agora em julho, nós completamos three anos do M&A, e eu sempre-- eu, eu tenho uma coisa que eu falo, tava até fora do script, que é quando a gente fez o M&A, a gente ficou esperando o curtain cair. Todo o conversa foi muito legal, foi muito bacana, e esse curtain não caiu até hoje, até hoje. O mínimo que a gente falou era que vocês iam ser independentes. Nós vamos estar aqui, com a estrutura nossa, a estrutura auditada, mas vocês vão ser independentes.
[Foreign language]E a gente ficou esperando, depois do M&A, naquele momento, isso não chegou. E desde 2021, foi dia primeiro de julho de 2021-
...We have this challenge of bring Damásio to a more digital world, because, you know, it's an institution that's almost 60 years old. It's interesting because this movement of Damásio, which happened in partnership, involved, you know, partnership work. When we did the M&A, we were expecting, you know, the curtains to fall because we're having great conversations, but basically, things continue to work well. You know, it looks set so that, look, you're going to be independent. We're gonna be here, and you're going to have all of our structure and infrastructure, but you will be an independent company. And-
Desde 2021, foi dia primeiro de julho de 2021.
After the first of July of 2021-
[Foreign language]Nós operamos estrategicamente, de maneira totalmente independente, nossa equipe de administração formada aqui pelos executivos do grupo. Mas nós conseguimos manter a nossa estratégia, manter o nosso modelo de trabalho totalmente independente, e isso tem sido muito rico. Por outro lado, a qualidade do mercado hoje, pros nossos grandes concorrentes, e a gente tem uma diferença de qualidade operacional muito grande, muito grande, pelos conselhos que são dados do conselho de administração, mas pelas sinergias criadas de operação, pelas trocas com toda a operação, pela possibilidade de utilizar operações da Estácio em todo o Brasil, para fazer, digamos, um exame nacional de concurso público, isso é uma experiência que está muito legal.
And we were able to maintain our strategy and our culture, and our model of work. This remained independent, and this is very enriching. Now, we look at the market today, we look at our competitors, and we look at the difference in quality of operation. Not just because of the advice that have been given by the boards, but also because of the synergies. And because of the possibility of using, let's say, operations from Estácio in the whole of Brazil to do, let's say, a mock exam of public interest exams in the whole country. This is only possible because we have this giant of education behind us. So we have the freedom of being a startup, but behind us, we have this large company that's supporting us, so that we may grow.
Falando um pouco agora de resultado e de crescimento do nosso negócio.
Now, in terms of results and growth, the next pages-
[Foreign language]Ah, Qconcursos continua trazendo-
We can say that Qconcursos continues generating growth.
De 22%,
We had 23% growth in ROI in 2023. So this is a company that continues to grow, even despite the fact that it was founded in 2010. We have two avenues of growth.
Qconcursos nasceu como uma solução acessível-
Qconcursos was born as an accessible solution for those wanting to study to public interest exams, and this allows us to get to all these numbers that we generated, you know, with 4 million people using our platform per month.
É um grande negócio.
We have 15,000 subscribers.
A nossa grande estratégia, que começamos a construir no ano passado-
We wanted to increase the products that we sell, so that we can-
Extremamente acessíveis. E agora, a gente começa a trabalhar com produtos mais caros.
sell more expensive products. So now, again, you know, we're working with more expensive products. We have a different team of professors, and we don't want to only increase ticket prices, we want to add value to more expensive products. And this is a strategy that started in 2023, and already brought some results. But-
ainda tem grandes avenidas.
There's still room for growth this year and for next year.
E a segunda alavanca para o Grupo Q, de maneira geral, nós temos o Damásio-
We also have Damásio
-que são tão bacanas, triviais pra gente no Grupo Q.
Which brings-
O Damásio é algo muito importante. Então, essa digitalização que nós temos no Grupo Q-
all these competitive advantages. So this digitalization that we have within Grupo Q.
a trazer pro Damásio
is being taken to Damásio.
Não podemos deixar de falar, é a nossa participação também-
We also need to talk about-
Parceria da Vida Toda com a Marina
our partnership with Vida Toda and Marina. So we've been discussing everything related to specialization programs, and everything that we can do differently. We've been using our platforms, technology, to accelerate all of these businesses that Marina was talking about.
Se você pudesse resumir aqui, né, o que que eu gostaria que vocês-
Now, if I could summarize, something that I'd like to think about when we think about Grupo Q, is that we are building the technology for the future of education. Today, we're building solutions for students and the students of education, and perhaps in the future, we will also be building this platform for other companies. So I'd like to thank Marina to be here and to tell us about what we've been doing. Now, I'd like to give the floor to her.
Esse aí é fera! Obrigada, Caio.
Thank you, Caio.
Então, eu estava aqui fazendo aqui finalizando essa parte aqui do Vida Toda.
Just to conclude this part related to Vida Toda.
É, quando a gente fala que a gente tá animado-
When we say that we're excited, that's kind of a sum, all of these different initiatives that we have.
Todo da Pós-Premium-
We have this whole world of post-premium, post-premium products or specialization program that we want to pursue.
Quando a gente fala da investidas.
When we talk about the different initiatives, we can see that all that we've been done has been contributing to the portfolio of products.
Puxar aí pelo crescimento, no caso do Q, de ticket médio, no caso do Raro-
With this, we can increase ticket prices. We can also increase the amount of products that are being offered, and that's where-
Certamente, nos deixa animado aí, com a perspectiva-
We come along.
É, e quando a gente vê o mundo da educação-
When we look at the world of expensive education, there's a lot of things happening. There's the professionalizing world, there's the certification world.
Quando o Caio fala que,
When Caio talks about that he's a partner of ours. It's true, because we have an educational system that's very well consolidated in terms of technology for bachelor degree programs. And now, the Q platform is giving a lot of flexibility, and we are able to make use of the strength of our brands in all of these different parallel universes. And finally, as I said, acquisition, in this case, is an inherent part of our strategy, and this is always aligned with our strategies for allocating capital. But we know that to be in a specific segment, the best way is to have partnerships with consolidated companies that have a track record of strong results. So to conclude, these are the important messages I want to share with you. This is a very interesting market that will become even more dynamic, and it will become even bigger.
We know how we want to work. We've been successful in making the company grow, and there are different opportunities. So this is a process of construction for the next few years, but we're very excited, and we think all of this will bring more relevance to IDOMED. Now, I'd like to change my role and start talking about exclusive education. So I'd like to say a little bit more about our trajectory at Ibmec. So here we're talking about a world of thousands, and not hundreds of thousands of students. But that doesn't mean, but that doesn't mean that we don't have to have a big impact. We're very committed to training students who create an impact in the future.
We saw the case of Júlia, our student, who is already an entrepreneur, and already has people working with her, and she's already building things. So through a small group of people, we want to be able to amplify the impact of what we do to society. So this is what we're always aiming for. So what did I want to share with you about Ibmec? Well, we're in the premium market, which is a niche market.
Relatively,
Although it's a niche market, it's very attractive and relevant. There are some characteristics that make it very interesting.
The media of education-
Especially in relation to the average educational program in Brazil. And we're doing very well in this market, and I'll tell you about our different value propositions. Since the acquisition, which happened in 2020, we've been delivering consistent results. This is allowing us to gain share every in all of our markets. And when we look at Ibmec's portfolio, which includes business courses and law and engineering and advertising, because we have this multi-market strategy, we are national leaders. And we're very excited about what we have ahead of us in terms of our building of this brand. Okay, so here we have a pyramid of how we classify our different higher education institutions in Brazil. So we have tier three, which is the base of the pyramid. We have Tier 2, which is those local brands, which are stronger.
Then we have Tier 1, which is basically the premium segment. There's even the Tier 1 minus, which is below Tier 1. Tier 1 is basically those institutions that have a ticket of at least BRL 4,000 per month. This is a niche market, but we're still talking about BRL 6 billion in terms of market size when you sum these two here. There are two characteristics that make this very attractive. First of all, there's high resilience because, you know, there was a pandemic, there was the economic crisis. When you look at the trends in the historical data, it's impressive how volatility is almost zero. You always had students enrolling in this segment, so the segment is more immune to all of the hiccups that we go through, so it's very resilient.
Number two, we have the renewal, the rates of renewal, enrollment renewal, and that makes this business more attractive. Finally, this is a business that has real gains, real annual gains, and this happens in a market that's very competitive. I mean, we have a lot of higher education institutions with the same courses that we offer, but few of these courses are really able to have a competitive advantage to the point where they can charge higher prices. Because brand and reputation, this is something that you build with time, and Ibmec has been building this in the last 50 years. Even though it's not very well regulated, it's very competitive. So now we have this more open environment, and we're able to play in this environment, and there are very few private institutions playing in this market.
In this note.
... Now, what's interesting in our 50 years of history, is that we've been evolving and building, and adding pillars for value proposition. What are we proud of? Well, we're very proud of-
Having two important words in our binomial: tradition and innovation. We are not that very square institution, that are very rigorous, that are very standard. We do have academic excellence, we do have excellent teachers and great indicators, so we have rigor. But on the other hand, we have this layer of innovation, entrepreneurship, and seeing the individual holistically. There's this side where we connect students to the labor market, which involves working on CVs and having flexible curricula, because we want the students to work, put things into practice from the very beginning. So having this entrepreneurial environment, and again, Júlia was an example of this, this is very important to us. We have today more than 50 startups that are within the Ibmec campi, and a lot of these startups were created by students from Ibmec.
A lot of students are part of the different leagues. So all of this makes our environment very vibrant and an environment of exchange. And so we believe that we've been able to generate a lot of value, and we've been able to connect our students to different people.
We are constantly evolving. We are seeking more and more, and we are very proud of our deliveries. We have a huge return. It's a premium audience, very critical. They know how to criticize, they know what's good, what's not. We see that the MPS levels that we were able to reach. We've been obtaining 60 points in MPS. It's a quality zone compared to the best institutions in the world. I don't know if you've seen Harvard's MPS, which is 56. We are very proud of this positive feedback. It's a cycle, and we are feedbacking. Having motivated, engaged students who are proud to be here, it's very important to us when we are talking about exclusive education. We are very proud of that.
We believe that this difference, this focus on student, making students find themselves, graduate, and being happy, receiving relevant education for their careers, this is the most important. This combination is making us obtain great results. This is the result when we think about student-based growth. We have been growing in 2021, 2022, 2023, and now we have 6,300 students. So it's like a clock when we think about evolution. The average ticket is growing 3% per year, more than inflation. Then we have this raw evolution, 17% of annual growth over the last years with this large margin. We have 50% of margin, and of course, the average ticket is helping us, and the results speak for themselves.
When you have a round delivery, and when it makes sense to the audience, it's translated into results. Although we are proud to be a national player, this is a local game. We have to be well-positioned in which one of the markets. These are the three main locations where we are. We are also present in Brasília. I can't bring previous data from Brasília because this is new, but this is the incoming students from year one. Basically, we've gained in share over the last two years in all the locations, São Paulo, from 4%-7%. We still didn't have Faria Lima, and Rio has a lot of room to as well. Rio de Janeiro has a stronger position, more consolidated. It's our main location.
We've been working with the turnaround, especially in Barra da Tijuca, we have this very strong presence. In the city center, we have some location issues, but we've been improving that. In Belo Horizonte, we are the market leader, and we are gaining more and more share. We are now with 45% of the incoming students. So basically, this is national level, and we have this multi-location strategy, and that brings strength to our national vision. We are the first at year one and number two in terms of being the player A, so we've been increasing the share in the entire market. And that takes us to the third point. So why are we excited with the future? We have different movements here. This great share that we have, today, we have more students graduating than entering.
So we have a higher growth in the mature units, and we are going to have new units. We have two campuses in their second year of life, with a lot of room for them to grow. And lastly, all the movement that we had with the tech segment, clearly, when we observe our student, even in, in business, which is our flagship, they are focusing in, in strengthening our core. And when we think about the future, about Brazil, forming leaders is our challenge, and we started with the tech segment, especially in Rio, and it's representing 15%-20% of new students in this segment. So we are very excited with that. Lastly, I'd like to talk about São Paulo. It's a different situation. We went back to São Paulo in 2018 with the campus at Paulista. It's a mature campus, totally full.
We opened the second operation at Faria Lima, which is a huge success. We thought that in five to seven years, we would have the complete operation, but nowadays we are growing even faster, and we believe that in 2026, we are going to have a full campus. When we observe the size of São Paulo market, it's very superior. We have 30,000 possible students, those who are leaving the high school and are able to enter Ibmec because they have enough income for that. Some are going to go to the public schools, some are going to go to the Tier 2, but clearly, we have this migration. Here, when there's a different offer, people are willing to invest more. So there's a lot of room in São Paulo.
So Tier 1 could grow with Tier 1 minus and also Tier 2, so that makes us very optimistic. And the way we've been working in São Paulo is the right way from the perspective of expansion. We should really have more operations in São Paulo as an immediate step for growth. And the average ticket of 40% higher than the rest of the Ibmec and 40% of the raw, and we are only in the second year of operation, so we are very optimistic with that. So the future of Ibmec, we are reinforcing our value proposition, and the rest is a consequence. The students that we attract, the average ticket, this is a consequence of this student-centered strategy.
And all the maturation in terms of campi and adjacent segments as well, such as tech and new operations in São Paulo, these are the main drivers I have. And just to finalize, this is the last message. We are in this niche segment, but we've been able to deliver excellent results, with strong results, being the leader in our portfolio with a lot to come. That is bringing this privileged positioning to grow with quality and good margins. So that's it. I'd like to thank you, and I'd like to call to the stage, Aroldo, CEO of Estácio and Wyden.
Thank you, Marina. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Aroldo. I've been with you before. I've been coming to these events ever since we started in 2010, so we've been talking for a good while. So today, I am the CEO of Estácio and Wyden.
You're going to see that, I'm going on with the topic that we showed in the last event. Today, we are going to talk about those we cater for, and it's very important to come after Breno, Gabriel, speaking about technology after Ricardo. We have a lot of value, and we should talk about efficiency. We've been talking about that, Eduardo has talked about that as well. We use efficiency and quality together because efficiency to many is easy, quality for a few is easy, but conciliating both is what makes the difference for us. We have some growth leverages, and we are going to talk about the ones that we tested.... Very briefly, I'd like to bring to you some of our figures, but before that, I wanted to show you some pictures. These are real pictures of our students in different campus.
We teach students who are able to pay BRL 129 per month, and students who pay BRL 2,000 per month. This is very different. An example is this campus. We have 2,000 students of distance learning, paying from BRL 129. As we have in Barra da Tijuca, we have a cinema, a course, a gastronomy course, and that shows our diversity. We are giving access to different fields of knowledge with 40 face-to-face courses. It's a very comprehensive portfolio, and in different country. We have at least one hub of distance learning learner in almost 5,600 municipalities. This is Estácio, this is Wyden. Some figures concerning the students.
I'd like to summarize this part because we talked about that before, but almost half of our students have the family income between 1 and 4 minimum salaries. 72% have this individual income of up to BRL 2,000. Some other numbers. Almost half of our students have up to 29 years old. They are up to 29 years old, almost half of them is black. The right lower side, this is also very important. Our students work to study and not the opposite. These are the figures of the current basis. Almost 3/4 of our students are working today, either in Estácio or Wyden, and this is big. So how can we conciliate the study routine, adding value for this basis? And we don't exclude anything, anyone, and we've been working with 100% of the basis.
So at this corner, we have the market number, an average salary is more than double when you have a complete undergraduate course, and we have numbers from Facio and Wyden, and we have surveys from our students who complete the courses, and almost two-thirds have some progression in terms of income. Sorry, career progression in this first period after graduating. The other number that is quite important is the first job, reminding you that we only 28% in average of students that do not work. It doesn't mean that they never had a job, but they are not working today. So we have a very small basis of those who never worked, and most of them are able to work after a few months after graduating. So this is a very important point, and we have this different audience.
We have this income access audience, but we have a smaller audience not working while studying. So let's talk about the deliveries. This is very important. To teach such a diverse group, we must be diverse in our products as well. So here we are explaining how we have different modalities. When we talk about more face-to-face, we are talking about our campus company, about what we believe in. What we see is that people who are able to have this option, who are able to pay, who have time for that, and in reality, have an accessible institution closer to them, they opt for studying, and they tell us in our service that this is very important to them.
So we already see this reflected in our base of students and in our results. That is, this persistence. This is something that we researched, and we really have the data to show the value of all of this. So here we're leaders in efficiency, and this reflects in the results that we have with better margins. On the right-hand side, where we have less presence, that has a lower ticket, it has a diverse set of diverse types of people. And there, technology has an even more important role, although technology has an important role in all of our products. But in that case, everything that Ricardo talked about is extremely important. We're leaders in technology, in our story. We were the first. Courses with asynchronous content were created by us, so this is part of our DNA, our strategy.
So we're also leaders of income generation when we talk about the product on the right-hand side. And these products are complementary. Marina talked about the importance of understanding brands, and this complementarity of our portfolio is important. And how we entrega isso, aqui é só pra exemplificar. Aqui são os cursos. So we here have the courses. This is something that you can see on the website. We have five products. So the first products we have are the in-person courses. And so here we have professors allocated to courses. So most of these courses are in person, and on the right-hand side, you have the asynchronous courses. And here, we don't choose how the student will learn. It's the student who learns how they will learn, and that depends on the moment that the student is going through in his life.
We're not arrogant to tell students how they will learn. I think it really depends on the students, the moment the student is going through. Here we talk about the several platforms that we have. Nobody's completely on, and nobody's completely off today. This seems very basic, but we have classrooms that are both virtual and physical. The same thing applies to labs. And the virtual environments are not necessarily ours, or they don't necessarily belong to third parties. We basically just deliver what's the best in the market. So if we see something that's better being done by a third party, then we'll go, and we will hire that. And it's, that's very important in how we define what we deliver. We have our own virtual classroom now. Ricardo talked a lot about this. Cirrus is our questions platform.
This is newer than Saba, and this was internalized by us because we thought we could do something better. This is not just a way to evaluate students. Students learn by answering questions, so we thought that it was important to have this as part of our teaching material. So this is. These are our deliverable products. And almost all of this here is in all of our products, whether they're in-person products or virtual products. So these photos give you an idea of how everything looks like. We already talked about exclusive learning, but here we're on the other side. But being on the other side doesn't mean that we can't deliver something beautiful. Now, I studied at a public university. I studied abroad, and there are some things here that are a little bit different.
So, for example, in our secretariats, we have more self-service, and our libraries, they're becoming study spaces instead of just spaces for books. So students can use digital books, and they can meet with their colleagues to study. So are all libraries already like this? No, but they will all be like this. So these libraries are more efficient in terms of space. These are more inviting spaces, and they're spaces that engage students more. And these spaces don't offer anything less. When we ask students, they're actually very pleased with this, and the rest is very similar to everything that you already know. So it's basically just the secretariat and the library that has changed the most, and this is part of our project and what we want to deliver. Now, where are we?
I'm sure you've already seen this, but I just want to highlight some issues. So Estácio is present in person in all the states except Tocantins. We also have distance learning in every single state. Wyden also has remote learning units in all units. It has less representation than Estácio. And Wyden is actually an umbrella of local brands that have important local representation. So Wyden is an umbrella that allows us to have tools which can be scaled because we're using the strength of these local brands. So this umbrella has a single portal, it has a single app, and this allows us to have our own tools, which belong to Estácio, but we don't lose the strength of these local brands. And with this, we're able to launch a second long distance learning brand, and this isn't easy.
So what we see here today is that this umbrella, this Wyden umbrella, allows us to capture the strength of the local brand, and we don't lose the local reference of that brand. But again, this with this umbrella, we're able to digitally expand these local brands. We're able to extend a digital reach of all of these local brands that are part of this Wyden umbrella. So we tried to create different types of positioning with in these two brands, but with Wyden, again, we have this umbrella that allows us to be more efficient with our local brands. Now, I didn't talk a lot about the value that we have for January, because I think in the morning this was talked about. But here we want to talk about the base of students.
Here in green, this is the in-person students, and in red, we have the digital students. We see these numbers growing with a stability between 2021 and 2022. And then increase numbers reach just a stable number between 2022 and 2023. And we're going to see growth in this number. And I'm going to talk more about this when we talk about efficiency and why we believe this is important. So the revenue shows up first. We are able to see the ticket showing up. The strength of our portfolio allows the in-person courses to see real growth in ticket prices, and this is what we're seeing, and we believe this will continue. So we can see that the base is stable in this period, and it'll start to see growth.
We can see a return of revenue through an increase in price and an increase in the results. This happens as a result of the operational efficiency that we've been seeing the last few years. This is a little bit of the summary of everything that we've been talking about. We have an increasing number of students in distance learning. We have revenues that are increasing, especially in digital, but in-person classes are those numbers are increasing and the ticket prices are starting to have a reflection on results. Considering that, we go to the second chapter to talk about efficiency and quality. Let's talk. When we talk about efficiency, we have products that have more presence and less presence.
With the digital, we chose a centralized model, which is an asynchronous model, which allows for greater efficiency. Not just our efficiency, but the efficiency of our products, and this allows us to be more spread out throughout the country. So efficiency is a part of our DNA. So we design products and processes and operations that would allow us to have the greatest amount of revenue. So we start talking about in-person products. So on the top left-hand side of the screen, we have some important numbers. Because of the decrease in in-person classes, we designed our semi programs in such a way that students are within classrooms together with digital students. Now, what's the importance of that?
Well, there's the perception of quality, but this is also important for efficiency, because what we see, especially in the last three years, is stability, even though we had a smaller number of in-person students. So we're able to allocate students within in-person classrooms, and this allowed it to dilute the costs. And this allows us to have growth, and we have operational leverage with the growth of this modality. So this may be an important leverage of ours, and it involves a lot of technology, and this is what allows us to achieve that result in the in-person business units. And this allows us to have a reference cost when we talk about inclusive teaching. But it would be easy to talk about this if we didn't consider quality. I'm going to talk about quality.
Now, so people are asking me: "Well, what's the impact of this? Are you-- Are you firing teachers? Are you decreasing the quality of education?" Well, when we talk about reducing the cost of teaching, that's, that's not an indication of the reduction of quality. I'm talking about here about quality that's perceived by students. We're very granular in our delivery of presence. If students think that presence is an indicator of quality, then they can choose to have in-person classes. We know when we need to deliver presence for each type of student. Now, a practical example of this is that all freshmen have four in-person classes, because that's when they need to be there. And we-- Through time, we reduce this according to the course and according to that student's perception through time.
As Marcelo said, there's also Renova, so that student is able to make changes in relation to what we propose. But today, we're very assertive, based on track records and based on data. We know when the best time is to deliver this. The fact is that we're able to have a limit or regulatory limit, and we're able to give a good perception of presence to the student. Now, what's the perception of the teaching staff, because of this reduction of teachers that we had throughout time. What we see is this year, we see 89% engagement of teachers. So we have 89% engagement, and this is, this is a lot. So we've been doing important restructuring, which allowed us to get to where we are today.
This is something that we had to do, but we did this gradually, with a lot of science, with a lot of data, talking to students, and this allowed us to provide continuity to what we've been doing. So we've got 89% of engagement from our teachers through time, and we have 18% more time that our teachers are spending with us. So this is what's important. So that's why those two numbers are important. And at the bottom, we have the numbers related to students. So the learning journey, when we talk to teachers and we talk to students to understand their perception, and we had an improvement in metrics related to the student journey. So they had a perception of improvement in quality.
In terms of the courses chosen, we meet 78% of students' needs, and this is a large number. So we use all of our operational research tools, and we are able to get a lot of precision and get things right using our prediction tools.
So that's it. When we talk about the faculty cost, we have efficiency and quality, which is perceived by the teacher and the student. Student support. This is also bringing engagement. We have the nucleus of student engagement. These are collaborators. We are able to help with NAI, the freshmen, the distance learning freshmen as well. And we had some old students helping them. They had good performance during the course, and they are going to help and support the new students. And NAPI is providing support to the students and also to the collaborators. And we had the tragedy in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. They've been in contact with them during all of the periods.
And the quality perceived by the Ministry of Education, we are now talking about the regulator perception of quality, and we are comparing only the comparable courses. So, in 2018, we were sixth among the listed players. When we have the same list of courses in 2022, we are now second. So we evolved a lot in this period. We always want to improve, but it's undeniable that we evolved. The Ministry of Education respects us a lot, and these are figures showing our quality according to this evaluation that is sent to everyone, to us and our players. And now, efficiency and quality. When we talk about real estate efficiency, this is another relevant point that we must consider over time.
In the last years, we have given back 124,000 square meters, almost 15% of our total area. We are more and more efficient now. We have reformulated all of the lab projects. The labs are the places where we have more idle time in the campus, and we want to improve the quality perception of students. We want more classes, and we want more occupied spaces. So a lot of what we see in our universities come from that. We want more room, more perception of use quality, and our perception of use must be higher. And then, we are going to inaugurate in the second term, the construction works are happening in our unit of Liberdade, with 2,500 square meters.
So we have a lot of efficiency to inaugurate this unit in the city of São Paulo. Now, we are going to talk about distance learning. These are some figures concerning our capillarity. We are present at least in one distance learning unit in every city with over 100,000 inhabitants. We are present. It's not that that doesn't mean that we are very happy, it that we are in 25% of the cities with 100,000 inhabitants. We could improve capillarity, in fact, but the units are very profitable, and our model enabled us to do that very quickly. In the last Yduqs day, we were running after the competitors, and we were able to advance a lot. At that point, we were quite behind concerning distance learning. And how did we evolve? How do we manage them?
How do we know that our units that are in the middle of the Amazon forest, it will have the same quality that is complying with the regulation, that we are offering the same teaching that we are offering in our unit here at Maracanã? Our teaching is centralized, and we also use a lot of technology to manage the units. We also have a machine learning model that is classifying the management maturity of our partners. So we have 2,400 hubs of distance learning, and we cannot say that this partner is good or bad without information. We have different markets, so we have a model classifying them, and this is very important because all of the visits, all of the talks are based on that.
A hub from a partner that is a self-managed hub, and we are going to talk about growth strategy, and we are going to give priority to them. In this other extreme, in this compromised operation, they might be subject to be exchanged. So if they are not complying to the standards, if they're not obtaining the right results, they're not participating in what we want them to participate, we might change them. This is a model based in engaging variables that define and classify the different hubs, and we've been doing that for two years. So now we are wrapping up our quality on efficiency and quality. All the time, we speak about efficiency and quality at the same time. It's not only about being having quality or having efficiency.
We are doing that at the same time, impacting each other, and technology is helping us to do that at the same time, over many years. And here are the leverages. We are going to talk about products who are clo-- which are closer to the students. And when we talked about being present, we see this growth coming at the middle of this spectrum. We had super efficient units at the digital world, in the synchronous world, and also in the face-to-face modality. And in the middle, we have a catch-up that is very important to be made. We are seeking the best of both worlds. We had 360 meters at Ananindeua, the smallest hub. And how can we get to the middle? Because we have some mid-ground companies who are working very well.
So this is, we have Liberdade Campus being inaugurated in the middle of this year. We have 2,500 square meters. So we see the 3,700 square meters diminishing. So how can we bring semi, or better speaking, hybrid courses to... We have Uberlândia, Caucaia, Londrina, Uberlândia in our pictures. But they are-- We have Wyden Estácio. We have hubs with 600 square meters, who are giving more proximity, bringing the students within the space, a much smaller space, physical campus with autonomy for expansion, and at the same time, something that is profitable to our partners. So this is the model for expanding in face-to-face, always, so we can expand using the partners. So we have been testing with Caucaia, and we have a huge catch-up, and it's a growth opportunity over the months and years.
Some other figures. We've been observing hybrid education. We have more than 50,000 students, and we have streaming and also Wyden distance learning. We asked ourselves if we could have a second distance learning brand, but the answer was yes. We are now seeing almost 20,000 students from the second distance learning brand. We have all the scale tools that we have in Estácio. And some attention points that we face as perspectives. In mid-sized cities with up to 500,000 inhabitants, concerning health, knowledge, engineering, we have 6%-9% in terms of market share.
It's much less than we have in the rest of Brazil, so it's an opportunity for catch-up over the next months, running after the competitors, so we are going to be successful. Por fim, lastly, a new product that was mentioned in the morning, technical schools. We tested that in the past, it's not in our radar. We talked about technical courses as simultaneous courses. We had a test with 3 schools and 8 courses, it was very satisfactory, so we are now scaling up. So this number of 24 is not a future promise, is now 49 schools, bringing more students and with in 23 courses. We have face-to-face courses within the company, taking advantage of the infrastructure is not another course. It's we anticipate our relationship with the students.
What we see is that most probably a great, a great share of these students will have an income during their studies, and that will enable us to move forward to undergraduate courses. So we tested, we scaled, and we are hoping to have future results. So these are the leverages. We also have others that we are testing. As we may see, here we have the future of Estácio and Wyden. And face-to-face, we have stability in supply and demand. After the old FIES, we see things getting more stable, and the prices are increasing again. We see the demand increasing as well. So we are becoming healthier and healthier. We don't count with FIES. That could be a benefit, but we see the growth regardless of FIES.
We see the face-to-face helping us to have the operating leverage within the company, and we are now increasing the mid cities. In terms of healthcare and engineering, we could improve a lot. When we talk about the digital aspect, structurally, the demand is there. Nothing changed drastically. We have 30,000 students in the stock that could be studying there. The distance learning is going to capture that. People who didn't have access, maybe they will be able to access through distance learning with these 30,000 students, and we have more competition here, and it's different from face-to-face. At distance learning, we have this average ticket growing less than inflation in the next years because of technology and so on, and we have this homework.
In the countryside, we have the capillarity; we don't have the productivity that we should have in many places and many courses. So there are possibilities. And people ask me during the break times: What about the number of hubs? Our extension machine is working, but the math that we are doing is not about opening a new hub, a new unit. It's what's worthwhile, a new city or maybe replacing a partner to increase productivity. So that's how we grow, increasing the units, increasing productivity, because we believe that we have a great leverage to capture when we talk about digital. So that's it. That's how we see the future. And why do we believe that Estácio and Wyden is the first option when we talk about inclusive education? First, because what we do has a lot of value. The morning was about that as well.
We are very efficient, we have quality, and one is guaranteeing the future and the other is guaranteeing our routine, and three, because we go on having growth leverages. We always talk about the leverages, and everything that we talked of in the last investor meeting is being implemented, and we are testing more and more, bringing more leverages. I hope that in the next event, we will bring positive results about the new leverages that will enable this future growth. So this is us. This is the inclusive education at Estácio, with Estácio and Wyden. So let's bring Silvio, who is going to talk about exclusive education again with IDOMED.
Thank you, Aroldo. Good afternoon to everyone. So now let's talk about our Institute of Medical Education, Medical School, IDOMED. And first, let me introduce myself. I'm Silvio Passos Neto. I joined the company in 2007, so now in April, I've been here for 17 years, and I'd like to tell you a little bit about the story of the best medical school in the country. This conviction that we have, that we have the management of the best medical school in the country, this is based on a few pillars that we'll be talking to you about in this presentation. But one of the most important things that we need to highlight is that at Yduqs, we see IDOMED as a single school that has offers in 17 different markets. This is a little, little bit different from the growth of other medical schools that happen organically.
We see IDOMED as a single school. We've been talking to you for quite a while, and you know our results, but we will be detailing our results here in this presentation. We want to share with you our exceptional results, and we want to say that medicine is a very well-regulated area. And because it's so well-regulated, this is an area that needs to be aligned with public policies, because this is where we have an expansion in the number of spots in medical schools. New spots need to be aligned to the public policies. And what we've been observing, and this is the third pillar, basically, when we started, we were the Estácio brand. That was the case 25 years ago.
But through all time, as we expanded, we realized that this family had already grown and that it needed a new brand, a brand that could allow us to express excellence in medical education. So we're going to tell you about the importance of the IDOMED brand to the strategy of our business. So when we talk about our results, you know, they're exceptional, but we can't talk about results without talking about our history. So we started 25 years ago with a single course, in a unit where Estácio was founded here in the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, and we had 90 students. This was at the end of the 1990s. We spent 15 years with only two medical courses. In 2000, the founder authorized a medical course in Juazeiro do Norte, in the state of Ceará.
After that, we had a few waves of expansion, which were well-thought-out strategies. Eduardo told you all that we choose the correct market to expand our business, and this is important, and this was important for all expansions. So we had two important waves of expansion. We had the Mais Médicos in 2014 and 2018, that doubled the number of our units. In 2014, we were the best option in four markets, in 2018 in another four markets, and then in 2019, we had a strong expansion linked to some important acquisitions that we made. So in 2019, we changed our organic phase by making acquisitions, and then we ended up adding another four units. UNIFACID doesn't need any introductions.
That course in Teresina is a reference in the region, and that comes from our acquisition of Estácio. And then afterwards, we made some other acquisitions, and this allowed us to, after 2021, to operate under the IDOMED brand. And last year, this allowed us to reach 8,500 students. So we went from 90 students to more than 8,500 students in 25 years of existence. And this reflects, has reflections in our financial results. But here, I'd like to highlight that considering the end of the first quarter of this year, we had more than 1,700 course spots in our courses. And we're talking about six years of study. And based on this, we're able to understand what our full potential is. So today we have 1,726 openings.
This year, we created another 140 openings from the Mais Médicos program, and this allowed those 8,500 students to reach our student base of 9,000 students. This is a picture of the last five years, and you can see that we had a 16.16% growth. Now we're going to talk about these numbers that you've been seeing. So we... Considering our costs, we have more than BRL 407 million of EBITDA. Considering the end of the first quarter, we're operating with the largest margin in the market when we compare ourselves to the other players of the medical field. We have a margin of 51%, and IDOMED is gaining more relevance within our company. It represents more than 27% of our business.
I think it's when we look at this market, it's important for us to understand that some consolidators and some brands have a very advanced maturity level when it comes to openings. We are today the educational group that has the youngest openings. So those 1,700 openings, when they're multiplied by the student base, if we did the calculation, we'd have 12,000 students. So this 9 here represents 70% of maturity. So having said that, we still have 30% of growth, which is organic growth, and which will demand of us doing some homework. We need to ensure an improvement in our processes so that we can have better results every cycle. So by having students renew their enrollment and by growing, we were able to reduce these numbers. Today, we have more than 8,000 doctors graduated that graduated from our programs.
We have 17 units in the country, and they are distributed in all of the regions of our country and in 10 different states. So that's IDOMED. Now, there are some brands that are, we're very proud of. Now, I don't know if you all know, but within IDOMED, we have the medical course of the largest ticket in Brazil, which is in Città América, here in Rio de Janeiro. There we have a ticket price of BRL 15,000. So when we got numbers above this number, we don't see any courses in Brazil that have prices above this. So besides having the biggest ticket in Brazil, when we look at the markets where we are, we either have the biggest ticket or we're well above the local average.
So that's a very important issue, and we're going to talk about how that helps us to ensure even greater growth. So following on, I think that we have to try and identify what these results, where these results come from. All of this comes from our choices of the markets that we decided to penetrate in and the acquisitions that we made. We're going through a turbulent time when it comes to the regulation of medical courses, and all of this needs to be aligned to public policies, because without an alignment with public policies, you can't ensure the best salaries. These students, which are very stringent, which. Because, for example, these the two girls that were up here today, they talked about the experience that they gained in the field. One talked about the hospital, so the GR.
If we're not in each market, and if we're not in the best hospitals in each market, then the student will ask themselves: "Well, why don't I have access to this or that hospital?" This is something that caused a lot of transfer between units. Sometimes you have a student that goes to a cheaper program, but when they go to a cheaper program, they see the difference in experience that they get, and so they end up coming back to the initial program. This is what we are seeing now. We're seeing new openings, reopenings. We have students that stop their studies, but then they restart their studies because they realize the importance of the service that was being offered to them. Now, we talked about public policies, and these relations are very important to us.
But instead of me trying to materialize all of this, and instead of me trying to talk about this alignment, we instead decided to call some mayors and state secretaries, municipal secretaries, to talk about the importance of medical schools when they're well inserted in the areas where they operate. So we've got here some mayors and some state or health municipal secretaries to talk about the importance of.
...
... gradual, com mais médicos distribuídos, já que já formamos uma turma, distribuídos por toda essa região.
Ter os estudantes inseridos nas nossas unidades de saúde, nas nossas policlínicas, nos nossos hospitais, com certeza, estamos tendo aí um ganho fantástico, tá?
Muito feliz em poder estar fazendo parte dessa história do grupo IDOMED aqui na cidade de Açailândia, algo que realmente tem trazido mudanças muito significativas pra nossa rede de saúde. E no final das contas, quem ganha são os próprios estudantes, que estão fazendo hoje seu curso dentro de casa, praticamente, e a população tem ganhado com todos os investimentos aí, que têm sido feitos através dessa parceria IDOMED e Secretaria Municipal de Saúde.
Foi muito clara a diferença antes e depois da Estácio. Antes nós tínhamos, é histórico, a dificuldade que nós tínhamos de contratar médicos, e hoje nós temos a facilidade, a oferta de médicos na cidade. E mais, os professores renomados também, que estão aqui, com os alunos, que participam da experiência, transformando também o nosso cenário de médicos da nossa cidade.
Temos pessoas formadas dentro dos nossos serviços, como também em municípios vizinhos, e isso acaba fortalecendo toda a nossa região, fazendo com que possamos ter cada vez mais uma saúde de qualidade.
A escolha da Estácio e IDOMED como vencedora do edital foi de grande importância. Trata-se de uma instituição sólida e comprometida com a responsabilidade social. Resumo: a parceria da Estácio com a Prefeitura de Imperatriz, com o município de Imperatriz, é uma realidade positiva para o município.
É um relacionamento muito harmonioso, que a gente pode contar com essa grande parceria com o município, com nossos hospitais, com as nossas UPA, com os nossos PSF. Enfim, eu só tenho que agradecer.
Muito bem, e esse alinhamento com o Ministério da Saúde-[Foreign language]
So this alignment with public policy is key. When we observe some of the locations, some of the markets that have a saturation in the practice, considering that half of the medicine field is, is going beyond the university walls. So we have to be sure to insert this course, so that the practice can embrace this project. So each one of these, these mayors, demanded, an intense work for them to understand how this partnership was important. So Roger had been, fostering this relationship with the regulators, and now we are able to have managers, public managers, understanding the importance of having Estácio there. So this is, this reflected in numbers and expansion. And why is that?
You know that Mais Médicos, which is a government program to bring more doctors to different places, is a process that they request doctors from this well-defined public policies. You foresee the these doctors, and you may expand to up to 100 new openings, and it's a cheap acquisition cost because you invested in the campus, so you to be part of the visits, you will have to prevent. So when you go from 50- 150 openings, you're increasing the number of spots, EBITDA, and so on. So Yduqs had 400 potential openings since we had four courses, 100 for each one, and then we had this potential of 400, and we were able to have new, more, 287 openings.
When we remove Yduqs and we observe the rest of the market, so that number is all of the players, Mais Médicos I, X and Yduqs, you had a potential of 12,000 openings, and we had 287 new ones. So the other players had 37% of efficiency in this process, and that is very much aligned with what we brought before. This pillar, which is key, is to have this dedicated team, an expert team, in terms of the expansion of medical openings, and this is key for us to get there. Besides having this previous strategy, selecting the right market in a careful way. Mais Médicos II is not different. Domed has a great potential considering the units that we won of 325 more openings.
We started the year with good news, bringing Quixadá and Açailândia in the, in its greatest potential. But quarenta, 40, I'm sorry, 40, shouldn't we have 100? We had a potential number of hospital beds, and we brought what was possible to bring, the total amount. So it, we are able to get Castanhal with 100 openings close to Belém, in the region of Pará, with this huge field for operating medicine, with a lot of potential, where we've had visits, and we have now procedures to bring these openings to IDOMED. And then, and then we have 100 in Quixadá, and 82 in Iguatu, because this is the maximum capacity in terms of hospital system.
When we add the openings at Mais Médicos I and II, from the 6,727, they are 55% of the opening. So IDOMED has most of the openings coming from Mais Médicos. So when we add those openings, we are 15% of the share among the players operating and exploring Mais Médicos one and two. So we are the greatest player at Mais Médicos, and the day before yesterday, we had exceptional news. We had the results. When you end the Mais Médicos cycle, you have the SINAES cycle, where INEP is going to evaluate the course to see if you delivered what you promised. And we received the maximum score at the Ministry of Education, the first unit of Mais Médicos receiving this visit, and we were scored 5, and this is not trifle.
Only 55 of the courses have this concept five. So it's possible to operate medicine with Mais Médicos in the countryside of the country, and we, we are one of the few with the score 5. We see that many of the collaborators are watching live, so I'd like to congratulate Juazeiro, North and Northeast for this excellent score. And once we get this score 5, this course has the possibility of getting more and more openings. Juazeiro, with 55 vacancy, expanded to 165, and now with the score 5, we have this new window to increase openings. Now, we're going to talk about the importance of having a strong brand.
As we expanded, we came to the conclusion that we have diversity in the medicine offerings, not only with Espacio, but we also had Wyden, FAMEAC, FAMEJIPA, and we understood that it was important to get to this maturity. Over the years, we needed a brand to represent all this excellence, and we started to think about what we wanted to communicate with this brand. First, that we wanted to show that IDOMED, up to then, Espacio, was able to deliver everything that a doctor needs to be trained in a robust manner, being able to provide service to the population. One of the first words that came to mind was dom, the space of the doctor, bringing this reference of home, of house, and the importance of their impact to society.
So we started to discuss this idea about medical identity being identifying with the medical career. We started to hone this idea. This is the idea of the doctor, this is the home of the doctor, and of course, seeking technology as the key to enhance the training of these doctors. And with that, we revamped our curriculum. We are a single school. You visited some of the schools. We have the same spirit, same assets, the same methodology, teaching model, and respecting the diversity and the peculiarities of each one of them. And we were able to rebuild that serpent, which is the medicine icon, the medicine symbol, and we put that on that O, showing this idea of continuity, which is very dear to us.
The idea here is that since we have now this brand that we understand as a protagonist, we see some opportunities of market growth, and these are the opportunities that we commonly talk about to you. We see this potential of growth in Mais Médicos II. When we analyze the schools that have not experienced this growth, we would have 1,000 openings in this cluster. We had that phase III, and then we are going to have Yduqs and IDOMED strategies, but we are well prepared to face this new bid. The openings in mature units have a potential as well. I wanted to remind you that everything that I'm talking about is the ceiling.
Doesn't mean that the market will be able to capture all of the openings, because it depends on the visit performance of the local health system. So these are the ceilings. In Mais Médicos III, we are going to have 95 courses and a prediction of 5,700 openings. But for that to materialize, we need many stages. So this is the maximum estimate. We have the legal actions, the ordinances that came in the period of default, and now we have the trial at the Supreme Court, and we are waiting to understand where this number will be. So considering the potential of hospital beds, most certainly we are observing these numbers, but we believe that the number will be well below what we are presenting here.
So when we emphasize that we are convicted at whatever the growth avenue we are going to take, we are going to be the protagonist, that's because we are based in some important attributes. One of the issues that we've been observing, that are making a difference in the last years, is an operating management and academic management that is dedicated and is specialized. The IDOMED team is working from the vice president until the doorman. So it's a vertical that is observing this business with focus. We've been investing in differentials. We know that many famous doctors, many businessmen, business people, they, they bring their children to our schools, and many times they ask us: What is the difference from a public school? And the sentence that comes to mind is research, publications.
So now we've been investing in research, and we are going to take IDOMED to this international level of publication that may increase our pride. We are able to scale up the education with flexibility in terms of curriculum. We have a lot of technology, again, taking care of bringing quality to the educational process, the high-level practices, and IDOMED, IDOMED Vest that is revolutionizing the way as we raise funds. So our students, they have a choice, and they're able to see themselves in the ranking of the 17 schools. So we are able to use the opening spots, redirecting the spots where we have a lower ratio between candidates and openings. So Marina talked about the importance of quality perception from the students. I'd also mention that. We have been noticing an expressive evolution of NPS.
All this movement at IDOMED bring this possibility of turning this vector from -20 to +20 for 2024. Let's talk about medical residents. If there's an aspect that changed completely our performance when compared to the competitors, that's when we were more careful with our medical residents. We decided to create this team focused on medical residents. We have 148 vacancies that are way higher than the number of openings of our competitors. We have 11 fields of expertise. The Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, one of the best medical schools in the country, was founded in 1808, with over 200 years of history.
When we observe the number of residents opening, they only have 210 openings, considering all of the institutes of the Federal University of Rio. And we are a private school, and we manage a very expressive amount of openings, and that will help us being competitive for Mais Médicos III. We bring a perception on how the brand is perceived, not only by the students, but also by the, the, the market. And then we see this possibility of associating our brand to other great brands. I'm establishing partnerships that are not only simple contracts. They are partners with whom we have partnerships and projects which are regular, ongoing. And I'm going to give you this example on the student from the São Paulo University. They opened the Hospital das Clínicas-...
to some options, celebrating partnerships to be part of the biggest hospital in Latin America. After this complex process, we were accredited as a Harvard site to delve deeper in this clinical study, PPCR. We have teachers there who are becoming multipliers in terms of clinical research.
So there are students who are amazed by our unified health system, and we also end up sending students to Portugal to study. I don't even need to talk about Tel Aviv. We had one student here talking about their experience there. And besides that, we're also site of American Heart Association, which is an American organization that defines the world protocols related to emergencies. Now, I'm in my final two slides, and, you know, here, I just want to say that we're always talking about bachelor programs, but there's also the Vida Toda program. Although this is a very spread out program, with a smaller ticket, I think that there are a lot of opportunities here. Now, we have residency programs that have an important partnership with the Ministry of, Ministry of Education, but there's another alternative.
Which is the case of those doctors that they get a degree, and they don't want to do residency. In those cases, we have fellowships, which are similar to residencies, and we have partnerships with large groups, Hapvida NotreDame Intermédica Group, where we are responsible for the operation of fellowships in the hospital. MedLearning is the biggest ophthalmology platform in Brazil, and we have a partnership with them with a subspecialty in cataracts, and we've been getting a lot of students there. We've got an organization that endorses our program, so these are important partnerships for the growth of Vida Toda, which will also be a focus of Mais Médicos for the next few years. The most theoretical specialization, such as master's and PhD programs, we have the highest ranked graduate program for medicine.
As I've said, we also have an MBA program, a specialization program, that's geared, that focuses on management, and it's for doctors. These are reputable programs. Here we have, you know, a lot of important institutions in partnership with IDOMED. We have opportunities in B2C and B2B with medical services, and also in B2G, where we already operate courses in order to train employees of municipalities and states. I also have to talk about IDOMED Hub, which is our business hub. This is where we link the know-how of professors to market demands. There you can see 10 incubated health techs. Some of them began as ideas. We already have some ongoing contracts. I want to highlight Sallud, which is a startup that does the electronic register of students.
Here we have an advisor that can check the work that's being done by students. So I talked to you about the characteristics of IDOMED, the potential for growth, and I'd like to tell you that there's a lot of opportunity for growth. So how will growth happen? Well, it'll happen organically because of the maturity of the openings that we already have. It will come from the additional openings that will come from Mais Médicos II and also Mais Médicos III. This is a PDS that we are sure that we will win because we will have better results. Pricing is also an important driver for growth. We know that we have the best ticket, the highest ticket in the market, and then we have the Vida Toda program.
We can't make it bigger, but we have to keep an eye on it, because there's a lot of money involved there. And this growth really happens, comes from hard work, and that's something we believe in. I want to leave you with three messages. First of all, we have exceptional results. We are aligned with public policies. That's also one of the things that sets us apart, and we learned how to do that 25 years ago. And we have a brand of excellence that allows us to focus and increase our strengths. So this is the, a medical instruction institution of adults, and I'm available to answer your questions during the Q&A session. And now I'd like to conclude by giving the floor to Rossano Marques, our CFO.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being here. I think I've already had the chance to speak to most of you.
My name is Rossano. I'm the CFO at Yduqs. So we just looked at the different business units. In the morning, we had an important idea about what we're doing. And basically, in the morning, you know, we were talking about the importance of the different issues, and we had some great speakers. And I hope you had a deconstruction of our original understanding of higher education. So we were able to deconstruct our ideas, and we were able to show you what an inclusive experience is. And now in the second half of the day, I hope that you had the opportunity to see how Yduqs is well positioned to capitalize on this scenario, not just with return to shareholders, but also by providing returns to society. That's what moves the 16,000 employees of Yduqs every day.
You know, people were talking about how everybody has so much energy, everybody at Yduqs. I've already worked with mining, I've already worked in banking, and, you know, basically, you know, our mission is, is beautiful, and this is what drives us. And this is something that we do every day. It's our reason of being. And, and that's why, you know, it's important to invest at Yduqs. I think the, the numbers are just some details, but, you know, because that's what I work with, let's go through them. So we're going to talk about the financial horizon of Yduqs based on 3 pillars. So the first pillar is a profit of 3-4 BRL per share. Profit is, an important part of the company. It's something we focus on.
But our second part is also very important to us, which is converting results into cash flow. Cash is the most cited issue in our organization. We want to generate cash to shareholders. We have a projection of BRL 10 billion of cash in the next few years. Now we'll be sharing with you a very transparent framework for allocating capital within our company, so that we can help ensure trust in our management. I talked about net profit. We have some premises of growth. We're talking about ROE and EBITDA in mid- to high-single digits, and this is in line with what people expect in terms of market growth. We're not being aggressive nor conservative, so we're expecting the market to grow along these lines, and this is how we also expect to be growing.
So these are not conservative nor aggressive forecast. But we ended up having growth of more than 250% during this period. So how will we do this? Well, we'll have organic growth. We'll have. It also comes as a result of our efficiency activities, and it will come from an improvement of our financial metrics. It also comes from our portfolio. So we believe that the capacity that we have has already been created. So we'll reach 3 or 4 BRL per share in 2027, 2028, and 2029. So everybody's focused there. Nobody's really concerned about 2024, but I'm going to talk about it anyway. Nobody's concerned about the short term, but in 2024, we've got 1.6-1.9 BRL of net profit per share. So we have confidence in this.
Sure, this is not a very strict or narrow margin. There's still some variability in the short term. We're more comfortable in talking about the long term rather than the short term, because there is some variability, but this is a number that we believe in. The second pillar of our horizon is the generation of cash flow. We expect between BRL 8 billion-BRL 10 billion of operational cash in the next five years. So the next concern is then, what will be your strategy for allocating this capital? This is a concern that came up in some of our conversations. So we'll base ourselves on three pillars. First of all, is the reduction of debt. So we'll be trying to reduce our net debt, and I'll talk more about this in the next few slides.
After that, we'll become a large dividend payer. We already pay dividends. We've been paying dividends every single year, but when we achieve a certain target that we'll mention to you, we will become a very strong payer of dividends to shareholders. The last point is that we are still paying attention to possible acquisitions. We are very conservative in this regard, but we will maintain this strategy. So let's talk a little bit more about this. So the first point is, you know, I talked about reducing debt. Our target, and again, this is focusing on net debt, EBITDA. We are working hard towards this target, and this is where we'll be allocating resources to. After that, we will become a strong payer of dividends. We'll have large payouts after we reach this target.
We will keep paying attention to possible acquisitions during this period, but this will all be based on specific criteria, and it'll be based on things that are very well evaluated based on our conservative point of view. I'd like to highlight two main issues here. We'll be looking at favorable deals. In general, we look to deals that in a short period of time, that is, in the first round of synergies may allow us to reach some lower multiples. This is important for us to do any kind of business. We also look at opportunities for lifelong learning. Caio, the CEO of the Grupo Q group, talked about this, and this is what we think about when we talk about lifelong learning and high technology.
You know, he said that Caio said that, you know, before we got there, they were already generating a lot of cash. So we invest in these high-growth companies, and we invest in these solid companies that generate results consistently. So before you ask me, you know, we still believe in the generation of value. This is probably the message that you saw the most here. There's nothing new about this. We still believe that mergers between great players generates a lot of value in the market for several different reasons. This is still a very not well-consolidated market, so there's a lot of value from acquisitions. The large players have a lot of value to be captured through synergies, especially when you consider technology. Our investments in technology are very well leveraged. We can grow a lot through tech investments that have already been made.
As Eduardo said, we were the only player during the pandemic that increased our investments, believing that these investments in technology would be fundamental for building a definite future for the Yduqs Group. So I'd like to finalize by summarizing our commitments. Our first good result is EPS of more than 250%, reaching between BRL 3 and BRL 4 per share. We don't need super accelerated growth to achieve the results that we're mentioning here. We have a CapEx that reaches 7%-8%. That has been our guidance for some time, and we'll be operating within this range very soon. We'll have generation of cash up to BRL 10 billion in the next few years, so we'll use this to reduce debt, and then to increase our capacity to pay dividends. We'll also be paying attention to acquisition opportunities.
We're still very well-positioned, and we still believe in the value of any kinds of mergers within this market. So now I'd like to call Eduardo on stage to summarize our day for you. Thank you.
Now, I saw you applauding him with more enthusiasm than your applause this morning when we talked about the social aspects of our company. Now, we had to remove a lot of things from our program today because we wanted to do something... We wanted to have some interesting things, and we didn't want to have too much material. Then during lunch, somebody said: "Well, do you have a session related to people?" Yes, we did have such a session, and Cláudia talked a little bit about that, but we removed some people because we didn't have too much time.
I had a boss that used to tell me: "Don't tell me you're funny, tell me a joke." You know, I've been a consultant for some time. I've been a CEO for 15 years, and I don't think I've ever seen a team with so much talent, so much, so much brilliance. Not just the people that came here on stage, but the other people that you were able to interact with today.
I told you that we were going to speak about the importance of our service to society, to people, that we would spend time talking about our confidence and the ability to deliver this service. And then Rossano brought to us our commitment and our vision in terms of where we are going, organically speaking. It doesn't mean that we won't get additional opportunities, including within the framework presented by Rossano. Before I start the Q&A session, I'd like to show you two additional charts. First, a summary of what was said by the CEOs.
I think that in the universe of Estácio and Wyden, we have a great opportunity of working with this inclusive universe, working with the share of the population that needs education the most, that is going to grow the most, that is going to receive the most benefit, and where we find more people that are being catered for. So we are working with quality. We are getting closer to the students. We are working with quality. Silvio from IDOMED, and I just received a message from my daughter saying that we were almost on time, but as Silvio said, we had been growing 25%, 30%. Now we have a different growth, but we have a lot being hired.
We, we didn't have the first class graduated, and we have companies, we have other perspectives, and the graduation, courses, they have this, their perspective. But when compared to undergrad. There's a wow factor coming from undergrad. Ibmec, I think that we had an incredible work coming from São Paulo. Marina showed us that we still have a lot to do, and we have this turnaround in Rio concerning the brand, and now we are growing ticket, and we are growing even more in Belo Horizonte. We are a reference, and we have this national brand with Ibmec, as we have with IDOMED.
The Justice Fux, he teaches here, as he teaches in all of Ibmec, and he's speaking to all of IDOMEDs, and we have this great leverage, and this is very much appreciated by the students. And at Yduqs, that we are huge, and we've been working with that in a peripheral way, but we are now focusing on that with Estácio and Ibmec, the traditional brands that are coming, and others that will come ahead, and so we have a lot to do. So this is a great summary of the day, and we ended with Rossano bringing to us how we want to allocate this money. This is a comment from different shareholders, they see that it's very clear how this cash flow is being generated, so they are asking: What is the plan?
So we brought this journey to you, this route, that is going to be helpful in terms of reference. And then, this is this table concerning this strategic horizon. If you had to tell people what you said, what you saw today, if you're going to tell people why you're with us as a portfolio manager or a client, this is the summary. So... the basis, we have everything concerning technology, concerning the academic quality, which is very good, close to reference groups, and we are growing and challenging ourselves to be even better. We have this ESG reference, which is huge. We have three to four investors who are ESG, only investing with us, so people are observing us differently. Marcelo talked about the brands, the national brands, and the scale we have to work with the brands.
So this is the basis, this is our daily lives, what makes us strong, and also people, that is in the middle, square. And then, when people observe what, what's been done in education, in terms of sustainability, who is working efficiently in a profitable way, we are always used as a reference in any kind of conversation like that. We are the leaders generating cash. It's interesting because we see the different analysts' reports. When we observed Annex Three with the projection of cash, it's very good. You know how to do that, but you don't talk about that, right? And we should talk about that. I was joking the other day, saying that we should drag to 2024 to the right, and we have to talk about that.
The E is going to advance, and the relationships will change with that as well. And we are going to have different triggers ahead. I'm going to show that to you. Market itself, we have a good 2023 in terms of people trusting us, people willing to study again in 2024 as well. But if we have this great stock of people who need and will benefit from being with us, so one or two more years for us to so that we can have two more years, like 2023, and most certainly, we are going to have a different view. When we observe this government, we have a government that is very sensitive to the less privileged. So when we talk about FIES, and, and when we talk about savings, when we have more people graduating, we have more people also coming back.
So this government is very sensitive to this issue, and FIES is a promising start. You don't have to have that huge leverage that unbalanced the market in 2013, 2014, that it took us 10 years to rebalance the supply and demand here because of that. Brazil is cheap, educational sector is cheap within Brazil, and Yduqs is cheap within this educational market. So the foreign investors, they are observing Petrobras, and sometimes they forget about us. And the educational market is very polarized. Observe health, observe retail, there's not such a relevant market that is oversized, polarized. So we have four triggers here, that they are not mutually exclusive. They could happen over time, and Yduqs is the best positioned in each one of them. When we observe 32 million people, we're talking about Class C, we're talking about B2, D.
Who is working well with these classes? Us. When we talk about a government which is sensitive to the less privileged, we work with the less privileged. When we see the foreign investors who want to know about liquidity, about our history, they are going to observe us in a different way. In terms of consolidation, we have these degrees of freedom, and we also have our balance sheet showing that we are well positioned. We talked about portfolio, I won't mention that again. We have the compounder chart with the growth history, margin, capital location, this liquidity different from the competition, this transparent management. We are very disciplined with what we do. We talk a lot about what we got right, and we don't talk about the low-profile parts. We cut our own financing before the competitors.
We left high school, we abandoned that greenfield. Some things we do, we test, we fail, well, we don't want to take it ahead, and this is normal. So the degrees of freedom, we had 1,300 of EBIT and 1,700 last year. All of the, the, the leverage is growing. When we think about the impact on net income, we have less leverage, depreciation falling, interest rates dropping as well, and an EBIT that is diminishing. So this growth in 10% in terms of EBIT, when you don't have taxes, it's almost all net income. So we have the capital allocation that we mentioned before. So leaders, cash generation, and triggers ahead. We are very well positioned to get profits from that. Good reasons for you to be with us. Let's bring everyone together.
Where's Ju? Thank you. We are going to start with the Q&A session, and over the day, we received many questions, and we tried to group them to avoid repetitions. I'd like to invite to the stage the company's VPs.
I'm going to start with some questions, but feel free to add with more information. We have a recurring question in our conference that is related to distance learning. I'm going to direct that to Aroldo. What is the expectation of the company concerning distance learning regulation? How is the company preparing for this scenario? This is a recurring question indeed. We don't have all of the answers because the scenario is not entirely defined. We have regulation changes in terms of teaching courses and health courses. Concerning teaching courses, we have a scenario being defined. We have a proposal to change the regulation.
We have studied that, and the greatest issues were that, would that make infeasible the footprint that we have today? The answer is no. Does that change the profitability of the product? The answer was no. So these were the main questions, and what we see today is this full distance learning course. The licensing does not allow that, the regulation does not allow that. We have some factors that must be present in all the teaching courses. The extension, 10% of the course hours, and also the internships. So what we saw is that we must adapt the curriculum for this new proposition that is not concrete, but it's written. So we have to change, but this is something small.
It won't have a great impact in terms of profits, not for us and not for the partners. If it comes as it, as is proposed, we won't have bigger changes. Ever since this document was issued, we have been working with that to understand it better. Concerning teaching courses, we don't have a defined scenario. We have a proposal coming from the government, and we've been discussing with the government, and the government has been listening to us. Concerning health, this is another discussion. We had this work group, and the government has heard society concerning that. Maybe teaching courses are a step ahead when we are talking about this future proposal for regulation. About health, we don't know much. Because health, differently from teaching courses, they have different associations, the courses have different features.
They are grouped into health, but they have different characteristics with less similarities when we talk about teaching courses as a whole. So that's it. Concerning teaching courses, we have a scenario proposed that was not defined, and we are able to operate with this profitable profit level in similar ways. Health, we don't know. We don't know. We don't have a proposal from the government. What we believe in is that the government will be open. They've been listening concerning the capillarity of supply, so they won't have this huge change. So we see this increase in capillarity. Silvio has commented about that concerning medicine, and we don't believe that we'll have this opposite movement when we talk about nursing courses, biomedicine, and other health courses.
So it's not enough to increase capillarity in medicine and reduce in other courses. So we've been listening. We don't have a document proposal, and we believe that the government is sensitive to this possible reduction of capillarity in terms of supply. So that's it. Different stages, what we have concerning regulation is restricted to these two fields.
Next question is about the guidance for net profit. So the guidance that Rossano presented for 2024 in his presentation, considering what has been presented in some of the results of the first quarter for 2024, this guidance foresees a strong expansion in the, the rest of the year. So what are the main drivers for margin and for driving this acceleration? And what makes you so confident about the numbers? Well, in the release of the first quarter, we said that we saw a second quarter that would be similar to last year's, and that there would be a strong acceleration in the second quarter. So this guidance shows this strong acceleration in terms of net profit that we see in the, in the second quarter.
The main drivers, as we said, were that in the second quarter, in the first quarter of last year, in the first quarter of this year, we saw a peak because of the large amounts of acquisition, because of digital. So then there was the sending of revenue to the different units, but then the results end up going back to normal. Now, in the first quarter, there are some numbers that continue the same until the end of the year. But we had some comparisons that end up zeroing out throughout the year. So that will improve some of the things I already talked about, and it will also improve EBITDA. And then you have operational leverage. So things like administration and S&G, they will benefit from this growth, and these costs will end up being diluted.
Below EBITDA, you have relevant improvement. This doesn't show so much in the third quarter because of our restructuring, but in the second semester, this is very strong, and this is a result of the decrease in interest rates and also because of a decrease of our debts. The net profit are leveraged, because these small gains that look small at the top, they generate solid profit. This is why we're very confident about the increase in profits at the end of the year. Okay, the next question is related to the medical program. We saw in the results of the first quarter an increase in the ticket of medical programs, but how does the company see the competitive environment in this segment? And what should we expect in terms of medium-term ticket prices for medical courses?
Okay, well, in terms of ticket prices, I think it's very clear to us that the premium segment is very resilient. And what will influence decision-making is how much this institution is becoming different, and how much they're ensuring that the target market is choosing this program. So we- if you look at the evolution of the ticket from 2023 to 2024... We had an increase in numbers in the past with price pressure, and there was a larger transfer to the students. And we're preparing for decision making so that we can have all markets above average. And once the students join the program, they understand the value, and we are able to have a strategy. And so at the end of the day, we don't see this concern with tickets.
Sure, some newer educational institutions have some level of challenge in terms of acquisition, but it's not about ticket price or the level of the ticket. It's rather an issue of credibility of the institution and how long they've been teaching medicine for. Then a concrete example of that is Ceará. Ceará had a ticket of 5,000 BRL below what it is today. Then once we modified things, and once we showed the quality of the program, and once we showed the different opportunities of the program, this allowed us to elevate the ticket price to the level that it is today.
Now, in talking to our colleagues, we do realize that, you know, if you didn't work on your trajectory very well, if you don't consolidate, then you need to work on a ticket price that's slightly lower, so that you can acquire students. Now, those schools that have a competitive advantage will always be everyone's first choice in all of the different regions, and they'll be able to transfer the inflation of the ticket price with a certain amount of efficiency, and they'll be able to do that in a healthy manner. Now, we're not really concerned about the ticket price. I've already talked about that, this expansion in the number of openings, which we thought that would be out of control and unstructured, that certainly will not happen.
This will allow this market to remain healthy, especially for those institutions that will always be top of mind, and that will become different with time. So there isn't a real concern in relation to tickets. You know, during lunch, people were asking us: "Well, is this for everyone?" I think on average, yes, but there are some institutions that have been working on becoming different, and they'll be able to do these transfers above inflation. This is something that we see in the historical series, and with the pandemic, this decreased a little bit. But we always see this happening with a few points above inflation, and this will continue this year. Even with this transfer, 3.5 points above inflation, we are seeing the best renewals, the largest number of renewals in our history.
So we reached a ticket price, but didn't lead to any more evasion. Rather, we have more people renewing their enrollments. And in terms of acquisition, we see acquisition above inflation. Of course, it depends on the market. In some markets, we were a little bit lower, in others, we were a little bit higher. And in our process of acquiring students, I think we can say that we had adequate demand. So we're not really, we have a real concern in relation to tickets, especially for those institutions that were able to develop a competitive advantage with time. Okay, so next question that we received was related to marketing expenses. The market has seen different players in the segment showing higher costs related to marketing in this first quarter of 2024.
What should these people expect to be the behavior of Yduqs during the year? And was it change in the competitive behavior that gives rise to this change? Well, in terms of our positioning and in terms of our expense with marketing, since the closing of the last quarter last year, we reached a point of performance where we reached a floor, and our expectation this year is that we'll be 1 percentage point above the closing of the last quarter of last year in terms of ROI. And so this is our expectations since last quarter of last year. In the first quarter, we did things exactly according to the plan. We didn't have any change in behavior.
What we've seen in terms of the competitive environment is that although we're more behaved in terms of pricing, everybody is working more with traditional media and also in digital media. So this is something we see very clearly when we look at the reports of the different companies. We have this challenge of maintaining our commitment and continuing that throughout the year. We are still testing. We can't be sure about everything, so we continue testing our publicity in the media. But so far, you know, we've been following our plan, and we haven't seen any drastic changes according to—in relation to what we planned for this year.
Okay, so let's now talk about Ibmec. What are the company's plans for new units? And do we consider a premium brand for other locations outside of the Rio, São Paulo axis?
Well, I think in my presentation, I said that future plans, the short-term future plans includes increasing relevance in São Paulo. That's certainly the biggest premium market in Brazil. Although Ibmec has an imprint representation, we still have low penetration rate and low market rate in that market. That's a market that's 10 or 15 times the size. We believe we have a lot of potential to grow there. Now, we've already looked at, and we will continue to look at the idea of diversifying to different markets, but that's not a priority right now, because we are really focusing on increasing our presence in São Paulo.
You know, but if we do that, it's important for us to do that with Ibmec, because building brands, building a brand is very expensive, and there are a lot of synergies involved in having your own brand and having a presence online. So we need to embrace this movement of embracing new markets would not make a lot of sense for a new premium product. It would make sense for Ibmec. So we want to strengthen the national brand, especially through our online programs. The next question is about the composition of semi-in-person classes and distance classes. So how does the company plan on increasing the share of semi-in-person classes? Well, part of this has been defined, part of that hasn't yet been defined. We've already tested some things, and we've seen some positive results.
We started our test with three different units. We started expansion last year. In this first quarter, we worked with 16 different units, and now we're studying an expansion to other areas. The criteria for us to test this future model involves ensuring academic quality wherever we are, although things will not be centralized anymore. The second issue is the profitability of our partner, and the third point is the velocity and our ability to scale this initiative. So we are happy right now, but we need a model that's quicker to scale. So we're making some adaptations to scale in the second quarter. We're going to have 16 units working in this model. Three of them are wholly owned. Three units are partner units. We already ensured profitability.
We're making some adaptations in order to accelerate the speed, whether that's for small cities or medium, or medium cities. The only thing that we're sure of is that we will not have a single model, but this model that we're defining will have a higher expansion velocity, and it'll be profitable for us and our partner, and we'll be able to ensure its academic quality. So we already have 16 units. We have three wholly owned units, and you can visit these, and we have 13 other ones that belong to our partners, and we will be able to ensure that this business will be expanded. So that's what we mean, you know, when we talk about this, and this expansion will involve partner units, because that's one of the channels that will ensure our ability to expand this quickly at the national level.
So part of this has already been done, part of it is being tested, but this will happen in the way the same way that we're doing with these 16 units, where we're working on this student acquisition. So we have one in-person class per week. We have some synchronous classes. We have streamlined content with a lot of practical activities. And if you'd like to visit some of these units, you may. We have some units that are already operational. Okay, so we got one last question here. So we talk a lot about how we have more than 30 million students that don't have access to higher education, and we know that historically this number is large and continues growing.
Taking this into consideration, what does the company believe we can do to turn the key and really attract this target market to higher education? And do you think that this can have-- Do you think this can affect ticket prices?
Well, it's a good question. It's great to end the session. Now, when you ask people what's the ideal teaching program, well, the idea, the ideal would be for the person to leave school when they're 18 years ago and then have in-person education and create that network. That's the best for most people. Of course, everybody has their own experience, life story, but I think that we need to, as a society, think about how we can do this in a more structured way. So when people ask me: Oh, you know, I'm really concerned because life, business education, you know, for teaching...
Well, look, I think it's a great solution for teaching, because a lot of people are already giving classes, and they have no experience in that. It's just that they actually, you know, they went after their own opportunities. So business learning is good for certain things. Yeah. And I think when we want more education, and when we want more people in person, then I think that we as a society need to reexamine this. We need to look at this with a little bit of sensitivity. We need to do something similar to what was done with FIES back in 2013 or 2014. And, you know, you have a lot of openings in teaching that are not being filled.
The question is, you know, can people, can people find work after that, or can they access the material? I think we have to think of the system as a whole, and this involves us having a serious discussion about public financing.
I think that the other aspect is less sensitive. Aroldo has presented it very well. We see face-to-face bouncing back ever since 2021, with this rebalance of supply and demand that was crooked ever since 2014. When we observe distance learning, and when we have this strong growth, and we believe that, and we are going to have, tickets increasing according to the inflation, and we don't see that happening ahead. In this moment of market saturation, maybe we are going to have a greater competition concerning students. But on the other hand, we are going to have more money.
We are going to be able to invest more in education, either due to the income increase in the population or society raising its awareness to invest more in education as a whole. So that's it.
We are going to wrap up the Q&A session now. My team and I are available to address any additional questions, and I would give the floor now to Eduardo to the final comments.
It's over, everyone. Thank you so much. It was very cool to be here today. We had moving moments. We were talking about so many different things. We look at you, and we see people here who have been with us for five and six years, walking hand in hand through a desert to critical situations, but this is over.
If we were able to go on with the structure that we had, if we were able to face everything that we experienced, now with a better structure, with this deleveraging process, from now on, we have a lot of good things to come. When we discussed among ourselves how this agenda would be, it was interesting because we had the content. It was within us. It was a matter of putting on slides and having some sessions that we try to align with each other. So we are not bringing something new. We are structuring something that we had within, we had in our institution, and we have been talking about that with you. Some of you are very generous in terms of feedback, saying that that wasn't good, not speaking about guidance in the first quarter was not good.
So we see it, and we reflect upon what you said. Sometimes we have new mistakes, and sometimes we repeat some of the mistakes, but we are always improving in terms of institution, shareholder bases, students, service provided, and we wanted to show that to you, that we had a very important part of our frustration when we talked about you, talked to you, was this little comprehension of the things that we do based on the individual biases. So we brought people to talk about that. We've been talking a lot about that. You may complain about several different things, concerning us, but we always speak our minds. We always talk about what is good, what is bad. I remember that Aroldo just said that this is not good, but it was 5%-6% in 500,000 inhabitants cities.
So we are very transparent, and the results are very good in terms of relationship, in terms of deliveries for society, and in terms of operations. And we have external recognition, but it's also a matter of time. We have this issue of time that is valid to us, to the sector, to the country, but this is going to happen. So thank you so much for trusting us, for the feedbacks, for all the love that you give us, for your time, for listening to us, and for all of your support. You've been giving us support in several ways. Thank you so much. Within four years, we are going to have a different one, or maybe next year. So next year, we are going to see each other again.