Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Yduqs' video conference to discuss the results for the fourth quarter and full year of 2021. This video conference is being recorded, and the replay will be available at the company's website at www.yduqs.com.br. The presentation will also be available for download. We would like to inform that all attendees will be only watching the video conference during the presentation. Then we will start the Q&A session when further instructions will be provided. Before proceeding, we would like to clarify that any statement that may be made during this conference regarding the company's business prospects, operational and financial projections and goals are the beliefs and assumptions of Yduqs' executive board and the current information available to the company. These statements may involve risks and uncertainties as they relate to future events, and therefore, depends on circumstances that may or may not occur.
Investors, analysts, and journalists should be aware of events related to the macroeconomic scenario, the industry, and other factors that may cause results to differ materially from those expressed in the respective forward-looking statements. Present at this video conference, we have Mr. Eduardo Parente, CEO of Yduqs, and Mr. Eduardo Haiama, CFO and Investor Relation Officer. I would like to hand over the floor to Mr. Eduardo Parente, who will begin the presentation. Please, Mr. Eduardo, you may proceed.
Thank you very much. Morning, ladies and gentlemen. We are doing this session in English as an experiment. We got some feedback in the recent past that sometimes the translation is not the best or I speak too fast. So we decided to make two sessions, the first one being held in Portuguese and translated to make sure that if anyone is curious enough to watch both or feels more at ease with the Portuguese version. The second one being in English, and we will leave this recorded. I think for someone starting to study the case, it might be interesting to listen directly from us without a translator in between what is going on. So the idea here is to go through the same content that we just went in Portuguese, perhaps a little slower, so people not familiar with the case can understand better what it means.
We would appreciate it if you can give our investor relations some feedback on what you believe on this initiative, so that we can evaluate if we continue or not doing this on the upcoming quarters. So, my name is Eduardo Parente. I am the CEO of the company. I would like to start on this page here with the highlights of the previous year and the previous quarter. All in all, when we look into 2021, we see a second pandemic year. In many ways roug her on us because on the first pandemic year, we had had a very strong intake on the onsite on the first half of 2020 before the pandemic hit us. So that did not happen in 2021. When we look at the year as a whole, we had a bad intake of on-site on the first and the second quarter.
Which would have hit us hard had we not provided an evolution in the other businesses, that when you take a look at the overall year result, we had a 2021 result very close to the last pre-pandemic year with very little adjustments on our recurring versus the first year of the pandemic. When we take a look at the highlights here on the left-hand side, top left-hand side of the page, we see average tickets either flattish or moving well versus the previous year. We had strong renewal rates on the digital side. It is the first time we hit 80%. An important evolutions on NPS. I think a lot of that credited to us not only improving a lot of the infrastructure that we have on our campi, but also adding a lot of technology to everything that we do here and to the whole student experience.
But also to the behavior we had during the pandemic and on this comeback. There is a lot of appreciation from the students on how fast we came back. We actually came back a year ago on the onsite with 20% of the capacity, always thinking about safety and the best solution for everybody to keep healthy. We came back 20% one year ago, 50% in the middle of the year, and we are back full speed now. So there is a lot of appreciation of this set of things that we have been able to provide in the past years for the students. When we look into the middle of the page on the top, we see our netting of our revenues. There is a 14% growth versus the previous year, the reported revenues.
We have been saying for quite a while that on last year, the two high growth business would total half of our revenues, and that happened. Those business, when you look to the right-hand side, they totaled 70% of our EBITDA, which all in all, when we look at the reported numbers, is a 37% growth versus the previous year. When you look at this dark blue square here in the middle of the page, the rectangle, is about us being able to hold on to the financial position that we had before and during, now after the pandemic. 91% cash conversion is more than what we had before the pandemic. We have almost BRL 2 billion in cash and less than 2x net debt EBITDA, which we think is, on this moment, after pandemic, a war going on, it is on the safe side to be in.
I think this is one of the strength sides versus the rest of the sector here. On the table on the left-hand side, on the bottom left-hand side, we see that the results, both Q4 and all full year, the adjusted EBITDA are very much in line with the previous year, which I think there are two things here. One, it was all in all a rougher year, especially in terms of the on-site, and we were able to sustain results and also near the pre-pandemic numbers. But also that the adjustments that we made to the EBITDA on 2020, they were accurate, reflecting the medium term perspective. The adjustments that we had this year, 2021, and you can see the non-recurring items line there, they were a fraction of what they were in the previous year. The adjustments here, most of them are not related.
More, we are talking more layoffs that we made in the fourth quarter in order to keep on reducing our costs and becoming more competitive. The reported numbers, obviously, they are much higher than they were the previous year and the previous quarter. But when we see adjusted EBITDA, which I think is a way to look at this, numbers in line with the previous year and better than they were pre-pandemic. And again, in a year that the on-site suffered a lot and we are very glad that we had such a strong portfolio with growth avenues. The right-hand side here, we are moving even further on the digital side.
We have been working, the first phase of digital side was a lot on the experience of what we call the client experience or the customer experience, which is the payment experience or how he navigates to see his grades. We moved on to the student experience, which is the whole pedagogical side, the way they learn, the way they experience the whole learning system and how we support professors in the classroom with the greatest technology. Now we are moving towards using artificial intelligence to understand who is learning what. We are getting the 260 million questions that our students answer every semester.
And we are understanding who is who is teaching what is the best method to teach what. So this is feedback into the system and it will evolving a lot on the way we see our learning system and who is the best professor. We can incentivize professors moving forward, the best guy, not only based on the student perception, but also on the learning. We can compare distance learning to on-site and see what is working, what is not working over there. On the far right-hand side, we have the medical students. Medicine is important for any institution in Brazil. It is a course that has way more demand than supply and a very steep cost curve. So, if you know how to operate this, you are going to have very interesting margins.
If you do not, you are going to be flat on your margins. We are, as in every business that we are, on the left-hand side of the cost curve. We had given last year a guidance of between 6,100 and 6,500 students, grad students, undergrad students finishing the year. We finished the year with 6,400. We have given the guidance for 7,100, between 7,100 and 7,500 for this year. A lot of the growth coming from the maturation of our courses, which means a lot of our courses are in the first or the second year of the classes. So we have either four, five, or six more years to grow just based on the intakes, but also on the authorization by the Ministry of Education of another 200 seats, completely in line with our plan.
No surprises here, but this was good news that came out in February, March this year. Okay. So, moving on to the premium business. Premium business we call what is the high-end business education that we have. It is not only business, a lot of other stuff, but started as business, we call it Ibmec. And on the medicine side, which I just described to you. Medicine is something that has been growing more than 30% year-after-year for quite some time now. Ibmec is something that we acquired in 2020, so you see a very high growth of revenues between the gray area on the second bar chart here. You see high growth there.
This is because in 2020, we were not accounting for the full year. 2021, that came for the full year. All in all, this unit grows substantially. When you see on the adjusted EBITDA, there is a high growth versus 2020 of 28%. If you look at the report, it will be even more, but the adjusted is the right number to look at. When we see the margins on the right-hand side, the margin in 2021 was smaller than the margin in 2020. This is something we had already advanced to the market because, as medicine courses, they mature. The classes become more expensive. We have very high costs at the beginning, the installation of the class, and then as of the first year, the courses go up as well.
What we see, this 46%, is more or less what we think is going to be for what we believe and what we project is going to be for the future. Minor variations around this number. On the bottom left-hand side, what we have is a student base. Here we account for the full base. It is only undergrad and grad students. You will see the medicine base growing, and that 6,800 is both grad and postgrad, undergrad and grad, sorry. When you see the postgrad was a very bad year, this pandemic year. On the gray side, you will see the total number of Ibmec students shrinking, but actually when you see the undergrad, that number is growing. When you see the middle of the page, the 6,400 to the 10,800 there, this is the growth that we have just by maturing the courses that we already have.
Our undergrad base finished 2021 at 6,400. This is the number I just told you on the previous page. It is going to be between 7,100 and 7,500 at the end of 2022. That growth until 10,800 is the growth that is already contracted based on the allowance of seats that we have, the authorizing seats that we already have. There is a 70% growth contracted with us without any additional license from the government, and we expect additional licenses to come. If you want to deep dive on that, I am not going to cover it, but on the backup of this presentation, you can see school by school what we have and what is expected to happen when. Moving forward to the right-hand side, we have rough, flattish prices, both on medicine and the Ibmec side. Of course, in the report, there is a very big increase.
That is what at the end of the day enters our pocket. But when you want to understand market trends, now we have a 4% increase versus the previous year. Last week, we announced the acquisition of Hardwork Medicina, which is a lifelong education for doctors. It is a startup founded by two guys three years ago. We enjoy very much this model of, we do not think we can be the venture capitalists, but once people have a certain number of students and already cash flow generation, we understand that we are a good platform for these kind of businesses to grow because of our technology, the student base that we have, the market capabilities that we have. This is the second one we do in a year. The first one is Qconcursos. I am going to speak about it in a little while.
Hardwork was founded by two guys three years ago, and it is a fantastic growth business that we brought in last week to add to our portfolio. This is premium. Let us go over to digital. On digital, we have two very different behavior on business in the digital learning. One is what we call lifelong, which is a lot of postgrad and free courses. The other one is the undergraduate, the regular digital learning. The undergraduate digital is always presenting high growth since many years. We have already a substantial base, very strong cash generation, fully asset-light business. This year, we reported 34% growth on revenues that you are seeing there. Lifelong, again, suffered more during the pandemic. When you see the far right-hand side there, this is why the margin dropped from 45%- 39%. There are two factors here.
One of them being lifelong living a very tough year. People during the pandemic went more to the regular undergrad courses. The second one being that the growth is coming a lot from the new sites. The new sites, we pay higher commissions to the new sites. Average commissions roughly around 30% here. On the new sites, we pay up to 50%. This has an impact on this growth that we have. We see, unlike on the premium side that I told you, margins should be around 46% for the future. We see these margins going up a little bit on the near future. Again, a very important growth in EBITDA, 17%. This unit already represents 39% of our EBITDA as a whole. The bottom left-hand side, what you see the growth in student base. There is a very important growth on the lifelong learning.
This is because the acquisition of Qconcursos. You see that on the base. You do not see that on the net revenues. The average ticket on Qconcursos is much, much lower than what we charge. We are talking on the digital side, around BRL 200. The Qconcursos, talk about BRL 20, the average ticket. So you will see a very important growth on traffic. You will see effects in the medium term on our CAC. You will see effects on the way we see technology as well. But on revenues, it is a very healthy business, strong cash generation, but smaller than what we have as a whole on our distance learning unit. Business. What we see on the units on the distance learning centers in the middle of the chart, we had given the guidance of 2,000 distance learning centers by the end of 2021. We fulfilled that.
We are talking about 2,500 by the end of 2022. Important here, as I said before, most of the centers are still maturing and all our growth comes from new centers. The old centers, they hold their base mostly on the big towns. Most of the growth from the distance learning centers, they are coming from small towns. The smallest town that we have a distance learning center in Brazil has 2,600 inhabitants. We were able, under the leadership of Aroldo here, to move our break even on a distance learning center from roughly 150 students to 32. This is why we are being able to grow on the country side so much.
These guys, especially the 678 that you see on the bottom of the chart there, they are getting a higher commission than the average that we pay so that we can speed up their payback and attract more investors. They are more entrepreneurs to open the sites with us. Average ticket, again, this is an average, so they are moving sideways. I think that when you see the same course year-over-year, that ticket is probably lower. We are being benefited by the mix of courses that we have, by the mix of distance learning. If we are going to the countryside, you can charge a little more there because you have less competition. So, when you take a look at the same course, same site two years in a row, that ticket is going down.
We have the benefit of the mix that is favoring us to move sideways on the average ticket. Qconcursos is an edtech that we bought early last year, probably around March or April. They are a fantastic machine of engaging classes C and D on studying. Basically, they work on a freemium model. On average, they have 1.4 million users every month. Roughly a third of those pay us. 1 million people use them for free. There are more, almost 20 million people on their base there. It is growing very fast. Their CAC is very close to zero because the engagement they are able to generate, they are very low cost operation, very young guys, again generating substantial cash flow on this revenue that you see. More important than all, they are having a very big impact on the way the whole Yduqs group see technology.
They think of simpler solutions than we think. They are very used to analyzing tests and answers, and this has been very helpful for the journey that I described to you earlier of us analyzing the 260 million questions that our students answer every semester. Not only this is a sound financial business that we think has a very strong potential to grow and to create its own independent avenues. When you see the kind of money inflow that some of the competitors have, we think that we could position this as an independent business in a very healthy scenario. All in all, it is having a very big impact on the way we see things. Okay? They have an independent office. There is none of us working there.
Sometimes they come here and help us with specific initiatives that we need, and then they come back to their world. A very independent operation, very sound. We are very excited about this acquisition that we made. Moving on to the on-site operation, the on-campus operation. As I said in the introduction, it was a tough year for us. We had two bad intake seasons that has hit us hard on all the numbers that you see on this page, from stud ent base, on the revenues, on the adjusted EBITDA, on the margins that we have. I think they are very important on this page. Yes, this was highly compensated by the other businesses that we have, the high growth business and high margin business that we have.
And B, you will see towards the end of the presentation that the intake season this year is being completely different than the past year. I think whereas the past year we had a strong shrink versus the year before, what we have seen here is a high growth versus the year before. We are very positive that the impact on these numbers are going to be very different than what you see here towards the other end of. We have been investing on the bottom and middle of the page. We have been investing a lot on the shift towards the courses towards the health side, which is more expensive courses with a higher margin. And this being proved a good strategy. When you see the right-hand side bottom here, you see prices evolving. They have stopped shrinking since 18 or 24 months.
Now we see some movement towards a positive direction here. Okay. With all that said, I am going to hand over to Haiama. He is going to talk a little bit about the numbers, and I will come back with a broader perspective of the business in a little while. Thank you.
Thank you, Parente. Moving to net revenues, I believe the main highlight here is the return to growth mode. Compared to 2020, even adjusted figures, we grew by 9%. And the segment that are growing a lot continues to be premium and digital. But for this year, probably, you are going to see an important growth coming from the on-campus given the intake cycle. So that by the end of 2021, about 50% of the total revenues are represented by digital and premium segments, and the remaining ones by the on-campus. Another highlight is the severe reduction in recurring effects. In 2020 it represented more than BRL 200 million. This year was about BRL 35 million. And for 2022, this number should be much lower than that. We are talking about maybe in the first semester, BRL 1 million per quarter.
So that overall, the numbers we posted are much cleaner than it was last year, that we can see on the chart on the right-hand side, on the bottom. Moving to the cost. What are the main highlights in terms of cost? You have first the way we are able to manage costs in line or below inflation. You can see in the chart below, quarter-over-quarter of 2020- 2021, we are able to increase by only 5%. And the main highlight here is on advertising that we mentioned in the first quarter of last year, after some of the market participants, they got confused about the level of spending that we had in the first quarter. And then we mentioned from the second quarter until the end of the year, the absolute investment will be the same that we had in 2020.
That is exactly what happened. That is why you had a drop of 24% in this line in this quarter. The third highlight here is the bad debt/financial discounts. That has been kind of stable for quite a while. That shows our collection rate is still robust. We are still converting a lot of cash in terms of the total revenue that we have. When you look at the EBITDA, what do we have? First, much cleaner numbers. The reported EBITDA grew by almost 80%. The adjusted EBITDA kind of flat, BRL 276 million- BRL 275 million. You look at for the full year, it is the same pattern. You have a growth of 40%, a reported growth. In terms of adjusted one, it is kind of stable, 1%. Moving on to the net profit slide. There are some things that I want to call attention.
First, 2020, it was the year that we acquired Adtalem, when we had almost BRL 2 billion of net debt. We conclude this acquisition in May. Until then, we were net cash, now we have a net debt position. On top of that, this year was the year that the Central Bank in Brazil started to increase interest rates. That is what are being translated here in the numbers comparing 2020- 2021, the increase in net debt and the increase in interest rates. Another highlight here is the gap between reported income to net income if we look at IFRS. Why it is important that? Because IFRS consider that all the leasing payments should be a debt. It is a rental. I mean, that we can extinguish most of the rentals that we have. It is short-term, or that we can adjust almost immediately.
If you compare to what we had, in terms of net debt considered rentals as a rental, not like a debt, our reported income would grow from BRL 160 million- BRL 200 million. This gap should reduce over time and even revert, right? That reported income should be bigger than the IFRS income when the interest rates adjust over time in this cash flow. Finally, regarding this slide is the dividends that we are proposing to pay. We are proposing to pay the minimum one, BRL 38 million. We believe there are some good potential opportunities in the near term, either for a potential position or to do our share buyback. That is why we are recommending to pay the minimum dividend at this time. On the next slide, we talk about the cash flow.
When we look at the cash flow, all the EBITDA, how they translated into free cash flow from operations. This year, we convert about 91%. In 2020, it was 102%. Why we had a drop, basically because in 2020, given the drop in net revenues, we actually benefited from the working capital that was a positive impact last year in 2020. This year, given the growth, of course, it consumed some working capital, hence the cash convert to 91%. More important than that, when you compare 2019 is not here. In 2019, it was a pre-pandemic year, we had a cash convert of 87%. To show that our collection rates and everything else has been very robust since mid of 2020. Finally, in terms of CapEx, we continue to invest heavily on this transformation, IT.
2022 should be the last year, big year of these investments. 2023 should be smaller than that when we conclude most of the investments, especially in IT part of the business. For 2022, the absolute investments, in terms of CapEx overall, should be more or less the same what we have invested in 2021. With that, I conclude my part and folks, Parente again.
Thank you, Haiama . Guys, I think that, for someone coming to the business now, I think this is probably the most important chart. It talks a little bit about past and how we see the future. We put here the journey that we've been, and we separated it into lines here. One of them about business optimization, the other one about building the future. We started the journey in 2017 because we had a failed merger attempt with another company and we had to reconstruct a lot of the business here. When you see 2017 and 2018, the focus on business optimization was on cost. So you see the number that we chose to illustrate the effort that we made was this faculty cost over net revenue. We reduced that from 29%- 18%. We don't see anybody else in the market with numbers similar to those.
I think that there's a lot of technology involved in this, both on the digital side of us, giving very good digital content for the student, which in many ways replace hours in front of a professor to hours him learning by himself. Then on the analogic side of us understanding that if you have a class that's with five students in the first semester, five students second semester, you're going to offer that class once a year for 10 students, and you're going to optimize the cost as a whole. When you look at the bottom of 2017 and 2018, we invest a lot of time on making sure that we got Medical's license for additional medical seats.
You can see that our medical base went from 3,300 to 6,400 at the end of last year, and I showed you a few charts ago that we're going to grow to 10-ish without doing anything, just for natural growth of the business. So that was a very good investment that we made in 2017 and 2018. In 2019, on the business optimization, we basically reversed some decisions that were made that were bad decisions, including self-financing, entering K-12 and opening greenfields. We chose to illustrate that our student per campus is pretty much the same or slightly below what it was on the on-site business in 2017.
Despite the base being much smaller, especially due to the end of the FIES program, which was this government financing program that was very favorable to the students and for us, that ended in 2015 and started strong drops in the number of students in the base and the revenues and EBITDA it generated as of 2017. On building the future, 2019, we hit the gas on opening new distance learning centers. We had 2,282-2,284 in 2017. We finished last year with 2,000.
We are going to finish this year with 2,500. So this also is something, decision made in the past that is paying off big time now. 2020 and 2021 was a lot about fighting the COVID effects and cash preservation. Already mentioned these numbers on the beginning of the presentation. We are seeing that we are second to none or first by far in terms of financial health in the sector.
On the bottom about building the future, we created this independent company called EnsineMe, which creates white label content for all our units. We invested a lot of digital transformation. We bought Qconcursos. The number we chose to illustrate this path is on the NPS variation, but we could have chosen as well a retention and satisfaction with professors and the engagement we have with professors. Everything is being very positive, and I think we are creating very solid base for the future years. The bar chart on the right-hand side is the so what of all this five-year journey that we just described to you. When you look into our business in 2017, BRL 1.3 million and virtually all of our EBITDA came from the FIES program. So this financing from the government was very favorable to us. It increased a lot the demand that we had.
When you increase demand, you increase the overall prices of the market, you reduce the sensitivity to costs of a student, so he tends to choose higher ticket courses. Above all, it did not have any delinquency. All the delinquency was absorbed by the state. So this was something that was very good for all education institutions, including ourselves. Between 2017 and 2021, that number went from BRL 1.3 million- BRL 300,000. Those BRL 300,000 in revenue, I am sorry, BRL 300 million.
You change the charts, Mateus. Those BRL 300 million in revenues from FIES, it is not the same as it was before because, it is a new FIES program, so it does not have the same base as the delinquencies ours. It is the same as a regular student. So it is not an overstatement to say that we lost BRL 1.3 billion in revenues in a very high margin.
We estimated around 75% margin that we had in 2017. But what we see on the right-hand side of this bar chart is that distance learning became a BRL 1.3 billion business for us. When you see the 0.7 on the premium side there, it will naturally, with the seats that we already have, just a maturation of those seats like I explained before, we are going to reach that BRL 1.3 billion very soon. So it is not wrong to say that we created two FIES business that are very asset light, totally independent from government policies, high growth with a lot of market to grow in place of that BRL 1.3 billion business of FIES. So when you look into the 2021 numbers, you will see two very healthy businesses, BRL 1.3 billion.
One is going to be about. Anytime soon, it is going to reach that BRL 1.3 billion as well, instead of one. People who follow us know that we have been, for the past two, three years, saying, "Okay, on-site is shrinking, but these two businesses are holding us together," which is actually what is happening. But we see the on-site business moving forward in a totally different way. You are going to see soon, three charts from now, the intake numbers that we are seeing for everything, including on-site. We are very positive about the trends that we are going to be talking about already in the first quarter, but more and more on the next quarters and next years about three very healthy businesses. Three very healthy growing business. I think that when you look at us versus the competition, this chart also illustrates how different we are.
Competition either is not growing distance learning or have medical courses that are already mature or are not in the position that we are to capture the on-site growth that we see coming on the on-site business. Moving on to the closing remarks here. What we see is that we are recovering from the pandemic, showing better results, and we have a change in our revenue composition that is very healthy. We are reinventing the business with a lot of financial health and improving efficiency and investments that are ensuring the future sustainable growth for us. The investments that we have made in technology since a long time and now specifically on digital transformation is paying off big time for us as well. Some of the details here on the right top side, 61% of our students are already in the new base.
In the new educational system created by EnsineMe, the company that I mentioned to you. There is a lot of quality perception improvement, both on the student and the professor side, which is very important to us. Campus intake coming in very strong, which is what we are showing on the next chart for you. Professor? What we see here is a guidance that we used to give on the even quarters. We are always talking about now and in August how the intakes are coming. Let me just spend some time here because I think it is very important that you understand one by one here. Premium is a two times a year intake. It is now in. Premium is two times a year, March and August. What we see now, this increase in intake between 10% and 20% is very close to its end.
It is a fairly precise number here. When we report that average ticket is increasing versus previous years, basically for two reasons. Medical courses are pulling this up. Also when you see on the premium, the number of freshmen compared to the whole base is a smaller proportion than you see on the other business. Premium is always growing steadily based on the number of seats that we have. The number of freshmen does have an impact on the average ticket, but it is not as big as in the other business. Digital learning is a quarterly business. We have intakes every quarter. We are finishing one intake now. We are going to finish another one in June. We are going to finish another one in October, and we will finish another one in December. These numbers are growing immensely now in this quarter between 50% and more than 60%.
We're looking to numbers perhaps even higher than that. Take that with a grain of cautious because the base of comparison that we had last year, in March, we're pushing a lot of students to start only in April. When you see on a semester base, which is the right comparison to make here, the increased numbers are going to be smaller than that. We're going to be talking about roughly talking to apples to apples, we're talking roughly 20% less than we got here. We don't want you guys to have big excitement about the first quarter and the second quarter, which is likely to show a decrease. You have a disappointment there. All in all, the first quarter is going to be coming very strong, maybe even above 60% growth.
When you talk apples to apples, think about 20 less of about 40% or 50% growth there. Tickets. There is a dynamic that when you bring in sourcing so many we have big discounts on the first semester for everyone. When you saw the average ticket of BRL 200 for the digital learning. When people are coming in, they're coming at BRL 129. Now, in some examples, even less than that. That's what they pay on the first semester. When we think about what's happening to our tickets, we think a lot about the second month of payment. Second month of payment is coming very much in line with what we had in the past. We have a huge base of freshmen coming in at very big discounts for the first semester. That pushes our average prices down.
You're going to see in the first quarter and on the second quarter, lower prices than in the past year because of this massive amount of people coming in at bigger discounts. When these people reach the seventh month, you're going to see prices coming back to the normal as they were before. Natural question that will come to that, doesn't that phenomena repeats on the second half? No. On the second half, what happens is our intake is much smaller than in the first semester. You don't have that relationship freshmen to base as big as we're seeing now. We're likely to see numbers close to zero or around that on the second semester. Same thought applies to the on-campus. On-campus is another semester business, so it's now in August.
When you see this number growing 30%- 50% versus last year, we're looking into of course, this is quarter numbers, but semester numbers that don't change much from that. This is what I was mentioning before. This is a very important number for us. We have idle capacity to absorb these extra students coming in, which means that it's going to be a lot of additional revenue without a lot of additional costs coming in. The price effect is the same as described on digital learning. This massive amount of freshmen will bring our average ticket for the first quarter and the second quarter down. This estimate here is for the first quarter. But the effect that we see on bottom line on EBITDA of these numbers here for the first quarter are very, very positive.
We're looking into an important increase of EBITDA on the first quarter compared to last year. Of course, the first quarter has impact of this massive intake, has impact of our DIS program. That's discounts that we give to people, that we charge them back over the course of their course here. We're expecting a very healthy first quarter that we're going to be announcing mid-May. I hope that was clear. Happy to entertain any questions on that. Last but not least, page, maybe if it can change. Haiama gave me the news on Friday that he's leaving us. He got this offer that he cannot turn down, an opportunity of his lifetime. He didn't tell me what it is, so people are asking me. If anyone knows, please tell me. He's going to be announcing that in a couple of weeks.
The board decided yesterday or this morning to replace him with Rossano Marques. Rossano Marques, the guy in the picture there, has been with us since 2018. He joined us from Atento. He was a CFO of Atento before joining us. In these four years he's been with us, actually, the whole group has been here for around four years together. Haiama is the first important loss that we have on this group. Since he joined here, Rossano's taking care of a lot of things very close to the financial area, noteworthy the IT department and the shared services, which is a lot of finance and payments. So he's been sitting beside Haiama here for the past two and a half years that Haiama has been with us, exchanging a lot of ideas.
He's a guy who graduated from a top school here in Brazil, did his MBA in MIT, and his whole career before joining us was on the finance area. Haiama, you want to talk a little bit about—
Thank you very much.
The past year?
First, I would like to thank a lot for the company and everyone else that I met throughout these two and a half years, very intense ones, especially during the pandemic period. To say that I am very comfortable to leave the company at a very good moment after these years that I have been here. Like financial information, like the two slides before, the company almost, I will not say completed, because there is so many front that we want to grow. The big transformation is over. I believe, in 2022, with the pandemic almost over, we can now unleash, let us say, our plan that it was supposed to be unleashed in 2020, then came the pandemic. Rossano, I believe, probably is the most prepared for that job, given that a lot of part of this transformation that we have been implementing was under his umbrella.
With that, I believe, I will not say goodbye now, but it is still going to be a month, so that we have a very smooth transition. Again, very thankful for all the experience that I had at Yduqs. Thank you.
Having said that, I would like to close this presentation with an overview of what I believe was a year. I think that we were able to create two businesses the size of FIES here that are very profitable and high growth, that have showed a lot of resilience during these tough times. When we see what is coming up, there is an important intake coming that will change the dynamics of the profitability of the onsite. Having a strong impact on the first quarter and having a stronger impact on the medium and long term. We expect to resume profitability on the on-site.
Again, we think that the tide that we had, either end of years, financial crisis, COVID, pandemic, are behind us. We expect to come back to you in mid-May with very strong results for the first quarter. Thank you very much for your trust, for the guys that were with us. Thank you for being with us during these tough times. I hope that when I come back with Rossano here mid-May, we are looking forward to have very good news for you.
Thank you. We'll begin now the question and answer session for investors and analysts. If you wish to ask a question, please press the button, raise hand. If your question has already been answered, please click on lower hand to exit the queue. Hold on while we gather the questions. Our first question come from Vitor Tomita from Goldman Sachs. Please, Vitor, your mic is open.
Hello. Good morning, y'all, and thanks for taking our questions. Two questions from our side. The first one is on lifelong learning. Following the acquisition of Qconcursos and Hardwork, some volatility in graduates and lifelong learning results in the fourth quarter. Could you elaborate a bit more on your strategy for the lifelong learning segments in 2022? Also on what we imagine Yduqs' lifelong learning could look like in a longer timeframe? That would be our first question. Our second question would be on medical schools and tickets.
Following up on that discussion on tickets, on the sliders, and given the below inflation increase in premium tickets, could you give us some more color on how you think about pricing decisions and price readjustments in medical schools more generally, given that there is more demand for seats than there are seats available, but I imagine there are also some intake quality considerations that are made. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Vitor. Good to hear from you again. Excellent questions. Lifelong learning. We are huge in lifelong learning. When you compare us to the competition and to even people who are not in the graduate business, we're likely the biggest lifelong learning player in Brazil. Though we have an issue that a lot that we do is tied to the path, very analogic. The coming of Qconcursos and of Hardwork, and others that we're looking into have this intent that we find the right platform to be very competitive. When we talk about lifelong learning, there are a whole spectrum of things from BRL 20- BRL 20,000. I think that we're good in everything that's analogic and very well-recognized for that. But if you want to be a big player on that, you have to find the right platform to deliver those results.
I don't think that we're thinking about either creating that from scratch or buying somebody that's trading at a very high multiple of revenues of students or whatever. So we went into the medium-sized, and we've made some interesting financial deals to bring people that will help us move in that direction. I see this as the fourth growth avenues. This is the reason we report it separately, because we want it, when we see this skyrocket, you're already used to that business and not coming with a surprise one year down the road saying, "Oh, my God, I have this business. Let me tell you about it." The expectation is that. That we can still this year
We will launch some very interesting things that we're going to bring back to you in a little while. We don't want to address our movements to the competition. We expect this to be a new source of growth for us in the near future. Regarding medical school tickets, we had this pandemic time that it was a little rough to get aggressive there. What I can tell you is we've been moving towards the premium within the premium on the medical side. Taking, for example, Rio de Janeiro, where we have our biggest operation. Three years ago, we used to charge a freshman BRL 8,000 , and the competition charged BRL 8,000 . Today, we're charging BRL 13,500 and the competition charges the same BRL 8,000 .
The movement of making this a premium unit, having a different brand, investing a lot in the equipment, in the facilities, and professors is paying off big time. Of course, when you see tickets on the big cities like Rio or Ribeirão Preto or Jaboatão dos Guararapes, it's completely different when you see on the smaller towns in the northeast. It's why the average is not BRL 13,000, the average is closer to BRL 9,000 . Of course, we have these two types of school strategy where we can offer something in the range of BRL 8,500-BRL 9,000 to somebody with less means, and offer a very premium experience at BRL 13,500.
We see tickets to the future moving at inflation or above that, perhaps not in the same pace that we've been moving on the first years, that we changed a lot the quality and the perception of the course, like I mentioned before. Did I answer your question?
Yes. Very clear. Thank you.
Thank you, Vitor.
The question and answer session is over. I would like to hand over the floor back to Mr. Eduardo Parente for the company's final remarks.
Again, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your trust. I think that th roughout 2021 was a year that proved our resilience. 2022 is the first year of the rest of our lives. If I can ask you one more thing, if you can give us or our investor relations department feedback on if you think that this session was, either you've seen it live or recorded afterwards, if you think it was worth it for us to evaluate if we continue this or not. Thank you very much. I would like to thank Haiama for his services. Two and a half years here, he made a lot of difference in the way we organize things and the way we view acquisitions and debt in our costs. Again, thank you. You all in 2022 year for all of us.
I am looking forward to coming back with Rossano in May with great news for all of you. Thank you.
Yduqs video conference is now closed. We thank you for participation and wish a very good day.