Good day. My name is Savannah, and I will be your conference operator for today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the APEI Reports First 2022 Results Call. Today's call is being recorded. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise, and after the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ryan Koren. Please go ahead.
Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to APEI's conference call to discs Q1 2022 financial and operating results. Joining me on the call today are Angela Selden, President and Chief Executive Officer, Rick Sunderland, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Steve Somers, Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer. Materials for the conference call today are available under the Events and Presentation section of the APEI website.
Please note that statements made during this conference call and any accompanying presentation materials regarding APEI and its subsidiaries that are not historical facts may be forward-looking statements based on current expectations, assumptions, estimates, and projections about APEI and the industry. In some cases, forward-looking statements may be identified by words such as anticipate, believe, seek, could, estimate, expect, can, may, plan, should, will, would, and similar words or their opposites.
Forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements regarding expected growth, registrations and enrollments, revenue, net income, earnings per share, and adjusted EBITDA, as well as other earnings guidance, expected benefits of the acquisition of Rasmussen University, plans with respect to recent, current, and future initiatives, and future demand or expectations for online enrollment and nursing education. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainty that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements.
These risks and uncertainties include, among others, risks related to the effects of and the company's responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, changing market demand, actions taken by the Department of Defense or branches of the U.S. Armed Forces, including actions related to the disruption and suspension of Tuition Assistance Program, challenges with integrating acquisitions, regulatory matters, competitive pressures, and those described in our presentation, today's press release, the company's Form 10-Q filed with the SEC today, and other SEC filings. The company undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reason unless required by law, even if new information becomes available or other events occur in the future. This presentation contains references to non-GAAP financial information that we use to measure our business.
A reconciliation between the non-GAAP financial measures we use and the most directly comparable GAAP measures is located in the appendix to our presentation and in our earnings release. Management believes that our presentation of non-GAAP financial information provides useful supplemental information to investors regarding our results of operations and should only be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or superior to any measure of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. I would now like to turn the call over to our CEO, Angela Selden. Angela, please go ahead.
Thank you, Ryan. Thank you all for joining us today and for your interest in American Public Education. APEI's Q1 results reflect our commitment to continued momentum in our core businesses. As we have shared in prior quarters, we have defined our APEI enterprise priority as educating the service-minded, with roughly 1/3 of our revenue resulting from educating active duty military and veterans, 1/3 through the education of nurses, and 1/3 educating other service-minded students, including federal workers, teachers, social workers, fire safety providers, public health, and many other providers. Overall, APEI's Q1 2022 revenue was in line with expectations, particularly in comparison to the broader higher education marketplace.
We believe that APEI's positioning with a strong foundation of stable military registrations coupled with the growing need for nurses in the U.S. have contributed to this performance, and our business mix positions us well for the future.
In Q1 2022, we saw a strengthening of certain trends, starting first with the enrollment momentum at APUS from all branches of the armed services, and notably from the Army, where the registration portal difficulties from the transition to ArmyIgnitED have subsided. While approximately one-third of Army registrations are still processed through the Exception to Policy, Army new and returning registrations overall at APEI have increased 11% year-over-year. Overall, active-duty military increased approximately 7% year-over-year. Rasmussen's total nursing enrollment continued to grow in the Q1 , up 2% compared to a difficult positive 23% comparison prior year in 2021, and up 12% on a two-year CAGR basis versus 2020.
Hondros nursing enrollment represented an 8% growth in the Q1 of 2022, also as compared to a very difficult +45% prior year comp and represents a 25% two-year CAGR growth over the 2020 period. We are generating interest from large healthcare organizations in developing innovative solutions to address their unique nursing shortages. These include direct sponsorship and workforce upskilling. As the number one educator of pre-licensure nurses, we are well-positioned to address these opportunities. In future calls, we will provide more details on our progress with these discussions as the prospect of operationalizing these opportunities are transformative. As for our most recent acquisition, Graduate School USA, a major repositioning is underway, and we are actively integrating the business into our shared services operations, which will enable it to operate more efficiently and deliver a better experience to its customers.
We'll have more to share about our plans and expectations for GSUSA as our platform for career learning in the coming quarters. At APEI, we are continuing the integration efforts of both Rasmussen and Graduate School USA with a focus on realizing our planned cost synergies while implementing our expanded, more efficient shared services model to support future organic and inorganic growth. While this has had a muted impact on margin improvement so far, we look to accelerate our shared services integration efforts with the operations of Rasmussen and Graduate School USA and are confident in our ability to deliver long-term value.
One of our notable Q1 2022 accomplishments was the creation of the Student Experience Office and the hiring of our first Chief Experience Officer, Jeff Tognola, who comes to APEI with more than 25 years of marketing, customer experience, and leadership, most recently from Walden University and Laureate and from global companies such as AT&T, Prudential Financial, and Medco Health Solutions. Jeff led Walden's product management, marketing, enrollment, business development, analytics, and operations teams to ensure an outstanding end-to-end customer experience and improved outcomes for students. During his tenure at Laureate Education, Jeff built and led the digital and organizational transformation around how digital marketing, recruitment of new students, and the overall measurement capabilities operated across 12 institutions for over 500 products in 100+ countries.
At APEI, Jeff's team will focus on overall marketing optimization and enrollment momentum, digital transformation of the student experience across each of APEI's education units. Some additional positive news comes from APUS, as we have already in 2022 collected nearly $27 million against a large outstanding receivable with the Army, which continues to be reduced. We are confident in the Army's commitment to return the receivable to normal course levels. Also in 2021, APUS graduated a record number of underrepresented students, with 35% representing diverse backgrounds, including 16% identifying as African American and 14% identifying as Hispanic. We are pleased with how the repositioning of APEI in the past two years has created this momentum.
APUS registrations have grown by 5% on a two-year CAGR basis, and enormous progress has been made in improving the student experience, from streamlining the enrollment process to transitioning to a more modern learning delivery system. At Hondros, a remarkable turnaround was engineered, not only are enrollments up by nearly 1,000 students or approximately 50% in the Q1 of 2022 compared to the Q1 of 2020, but we also expanded our footprint from 5 campuses in Ohio to 6 and now include 2 new states in Indiana and with a campus opening later this year in Michigan.
That improvement at Hondros provided the blueprint and runway for our transformational acquisition of Rasmussen University, which nearly doubled the size of APEI's revenue base and added an additional 8,000-plus nursing students and 23 campuses to make APEI the largest educator of pre-licensure nurses in the country. That acquisition also helped us transform our capital structure by deploying much of our large non-earning cash to an area with long-term, strong secular growth trends. We reintroduced APEI to the capital markets via an equity offering a year ago and syndicated a $175 million debt transaction. Finally, we acquired Graduate School USA and welcomed a new family of career learners to APEI in the form of the federal employees and agencies.
As we turn our attention to Q2 2022, our nursing enrollment momentum in the northern region for Rasmussen has been primarily affected by the lack of available adjunct faculty to support in-person clinicals. These part-time resources have seen significant earning opportunities with their current employers through overtime opportunities or increased base compensation. As such, cohort enrollment was sized to align with available faculty. These faculty shortfalls are our number one priority and are being given significant attention. The near-term challenges of the external market for overall higher education enrollments due to the availability of higher-paying jobs for prospective students and the pressures to faculty and staff wages has caused by inflation are real and in some cases have masked the good work that we've accomplished over the past two years.
Despite that, we have held the line on tuition at APUS and Hondros and at Rasmussen, have even reduced tuition for all master's degree programs and some early childhood education programs. We continue to deliver an extraordinary value proposition of high-quality, career-focused education at affordable prices for our students, while providing new career opportunities across our education units for our employees and ensuring a laser focus on the commitment to delivering great outcomes for shareholders. As we turn our attention to slide 5, APU has total nursing enrollment of approximately 10,900 that are predominantly pre-licensure. Rasmussen's nursing enrollment continued to grow in the Q1 of 2022, up 2% as compared to a very difficult positive comp in 2021, and up 12% on a two-year CAGR basis.
Nursing enrollment continues to be over 50% of total Rasmussen enrollment, and nursing revenue is over 60% of total Rasmussen revenue. At Hondros, we have approximately 2,500 nursing students, which represent an 8% growth in the Q1 of 2022 versus the prior year period, and a 22% two-year CAGR growth over the 2020 period. As a reminder, we look forward to welcoming our first students at Hondros Detroit, Michigan campus later this year, which remains on track.
For the Q2 of 2022, we have seen some enrollment challenges in the northern region due to the limited student enrollment as a result of this in-person adjunct clinical faculty availability and some broad student interest levels tapering off, which we believe is temporary and tied more to the economic environment over the last several months, including the tight labor market with high wage levels and low unemployment. In the Q2 of 2022, we anticipate total nursing enrollment to decrease marginally by roughly 1% compared to the same period of 2021. Notably, this small decline is against steep comparable positives in 2021 when the programs are exhibiting very strong enrollment growth with 30% and 33% increases at Rasmussen and Hondros, respectively. The two-year CAGR for Rasmussen Nursing is still a robust 13%, resulting in 8,200 current student enrollments.
The two-year CAGR for Hondros Nursing is 15%, resulting in 2,400 enrollments. Additionally, we are more confident than ever that we can work with community partners to become a solution to workforce shortages, and we look forward to providing more updates in the coming quarters. As we turn to slide six, APUS saw strong net course registrations from active duty military, particularly within Army, which was up 11% in the current quarter compared to the prior year period and is our largest active duty military branch. These results are an indication that the ArmyIgnitED issues are mostly behind us. Additionally, Army has made headway in reducing the net accounts receivable that has been building over the majority of 2021.
Overall, APUS experienced increased net course registrations from all the major active duty branches in the Q1 of 2022 compared to 2021, and overall, active duty military increased approximately 7% year-over-year. Our veteran net course registrations were up sequentially Q4 2021 by approximately 9%, though down versus a strong comparable Q1 2021 period by 4%. APUS' other online educational learners that only represent 15% of our registrations saw a pullback in net course registrations of roughly 11% in the Q1 2022 as compared to 2021 due to the broader macro environment. Overall, our significant market share in the military provides some insulation against the broader online education market trends.
As nursing has accelerated at Rasmussen over the past several years, Rasmussen non-nursing enrollments declined 14% in the Q1 of 2022 as compared to the Q1 of 2021 and in line with the broader private for-profit general education sector. We believe continued tight labor markets and substantial growth in nominal wages has muted the general population's focus on continuing educational pursuits. In addition, prior to the pandemic, Rasmussen had a sizable early education enrollment but was significantly reduced due to the closure of daycare centers and ultimately businesses, which represented about 25% of the total decline in non-nursing over that period. Looking ahead, we expect the tight labor market to continue to put pressure on non-military registrations in the coming months, which we anticipate will lead to decreases in year-over-year registrations and enrollments.
For the Q2 of 2022, we anticipate net course registrations at APUS to be -2% to +1% when compared to the Q2 of 2021. This translates to a range of 80,900-83,400 net course registrations in the Q2 of 2022 and is primarily driven by an expected decline in non-military registrations along with a slight impact on military registrations. For the month of April, APUS saw a small decline due to the Ukraine conflict that resulted in increased training requirements for the military, followed by strong expected growth in military registrations for May and June. At Rasmussen, non-nursing enrollment is expected to decrease by roughly 11% in the Q2 of 2022 compared to the prior year due to the general student behavioral trends in the United States.
I would now like to turn the call over to Rick to review our Q1 results and Q2 outlook in further detail.
Thank you, Angie. On slide eight, we present our financial highlights for the Q1 of 2022. Total revenue was $155 million, up approximately $66 million from the comparable prior period due to the addition of Rasmussen and Graduate School USA results in the 2022 period. At APUS, although total net course registrations were up 1% in 2022 compared to the 2021 quarter, APUS Q1 2022 revenue decreased approximately 6% to $73 million. The decrease in revenue was a result of the timing of registrations within the quarter and lower revenue per net course registration. The increase in net course registrations in the current quarter was driven by active-duty military registration growth. These students utilize Tuition Assistance, or TA, and have a lower revenue per net course registration than other funding sources.
Hondros revenue increased approximately 4% to $12 million in the Q1 of 2022 versus the comparable prior period, driven by the year-over-year enrollment growth that Angie touched on earlier. Q1 2022 Rasmussen revenue was $67 million, and the consolidated results include approximately $3 million of Graduate School revenue within corporate and other. Total costs and expenses for the Q1 2022 were $150 million, an increase of approximately $72 million compared to the prior period, due primarily to the inclusion of Rasmussen and Graduate School results in the current year period.
Expenses for the quarter include $2 million of non-cash stock compensation expense, $900 thousand of professional fees and integration costs, primarily related to the integration of Graduate School and Rasmussen, $800 thousand related to loss on disposal of long-lived assets, and approximately $8 million of depreciation and amortization, all on a pre-tax basis. As a reminder, we completed a reduction in force at Rasmussen in mid-January 2022 that we estimate will result in pre-tax labor and benefit savings in the range of $2.5 million-$3.5 million in 2022, which excludes $400 thousand in severance costs associated with these actions. On a consolidated basis, APEI adjusted EBITDA was $17.4 million for the current year quarter compared to $16 million in the prior year period.
Net income per diluted share for the current quarter was $0.28 versus $0.49 in the prior year period. Total cash and cash equivalents at the end of the Q1 were $171 million, an increase of approximately $21 million from year-end 2021. Cash provided by operating activities was $25 million in the 2022 quarter compared to $11 million in the prior year period. The increase in cash flow from operations was primarily due to payments received from Army that totaled approximately $21 million in the quarter. Accounts receivable from the Army was $19 million at March 31, with approximately $11 million older than 60 days from course start date. We continue to work with the Army to address the past due accounts receivable.
Since quarter end, we have received an additional $6 million in payments, with another $6.8 million approved by Army for payment but not yet paid. Restricted cash as of March 31 was approximately $26 million and continues to be almost entirely comprised of a restricted certificate of deposit that secures a letter of credit for Rasmussen with the Department of Education. Additionally, there were no borrowings under APEI's $20 million revolving credit facility, which remains fully available at this time. Turning to slide 9, Q2 2022 outlook. APEI's outlook for the Q2 of 2022 is as follows. APUS net course registrations are expected to be in the range of -2% to +1% year-over-year. At Rasmussen and Hondros, Q2 student enrollment is actual because of the quarterly starts of these schools.
At Rasmussen, Q2 total nursing student enrollment decreased 2% year-over-year to approximately 8,200 students. Non-nursing total enrollment declined 10% for an aggregate Rasmussen enrollment decline of approximately 6% year-over-year to approximately 15,900 students. At Hondros, Q2 total student enrollment increased by 3% year-over-year to approximately 2,400 students. In the Q2 of 2022, consolidated revenue is expected to increase 92%-97% year-over-year, given the addition of Rasmussen and Graduate School. The company expects net income to be between $0.1 million and $1.4 million, and earnings per diluted share of between $0.00 and $0.07 per diluted share. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $14.3 million and $16.2 million for the Q2 of 2022.
With that, I would like to turn it back to Angie for final comments.
Thank you, Rick. In summary, we remain confident as we continue to transform and diversify APEI's portfolio of career learning assets and fulfill our mission of educating the service-minded. Demand for nursing graduates is expected to remain strong for the foreseeable future as employers are clamoring for new nurses to supply the national shortage, and we believe we are well-positioned to fulfill these needs. APUS continues to strengthen its number one position in education to the U.S. military and veterans. Overall, APEI continues to represent an exceptional return on educational investment for working adults by keeping tuition rates in check while providing books and materials at no cost and being one of the most friendly transfer credit institutions. We now ask the operator to open the line for questions.
Thank you. As a reminder that is star one to ask a question. We will pause for a moment to compile the Q&A roster.
Our first question will come from Tobey Sommer with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.
Hey, good afternoon. This is Jasper Bibb for Tobey. Marketing expenses came in a bit higher than we were expecting in the Q1 . I was just hoping you could update us on what you're seeing with respect to student interest levels and managing the marketing yield there.
Jasper, let me comment on the numbers, and then Angie can comment on student interest. You're right. Marketing numbers were up at Rasmussen, we saw approximately $1 million higher than what we were actually expecting when we gave guidance as they invest in student momentum. At Hondros, when you look at the quarter, was up about $400,000 year-over-year. Investing both the nursing related businesses.
Sure. What we're seeing in the conversion of those marketing dollars is very promising, but hasn't necessarily led to the number of enrollments that would be equivalent to prior year periods. We've seen double-digit increases in applications. What we are seeing is a slower application to enrollment pace with a handful of students primarily focused in the northern territory of Rasmussen's business. We are keenly focused on adding to our admissions reps to help support the questions and the curiosity that those prospective students have, certainly because they've taken the time to fill out an application. We will continue to lean in and convert those students to enrolled students.
The other thing that we are seeing is the, as we mentioned in the script, that we have had to increase the wages of our adjuncts and full-time faculty, specifically, because the state of Minnesota has required Rasmussen to go back to in-person clinicals, whereas in the last two years since the beginning of COVID, Rasmussen had been given the opportunity to do clinical rotations virtually. That's creating some scheduling and availability conflicts.
We are looking at different kinds of incentives to ensure that we can fulfill the clinical placements that we need with our students with the appropriate adjunct faculty support.
Thanks. That makes sense. You know, I understand you aren't guiding by Q1, 2Q yet, but with some of the trends you cited, do you think the Q2 would represent the low point for margins in 2022? Or how should we think about the cadence of margins over the balance of the year here?
I don't think inflation is gonna subside that quickly, nor will the pressure on wages, particularly related to nursing faculty, subside. That ongoing inflationary environment with a particular focus on wage inflation and nursing faculty costs is gonna have an impact on our nursing businesses through the remainder of this year.
We do believe it's an environment where it's our obligation to tighten our belt, and so we'll be looking for opportunities for cost savings across all of our education units in the coming quarters, to really improve the margin profile, in spite of inflation.
Okay. Got it. With the APUS enrollments being down pretty significantly from Q1 in the Q2 guidance, could you give a bit more color on what's driving that enrollment trend? You know, is that primarily the impact of the troop movements you cited in response to Russia-Ukraine, or is there anything else we should think about there?
Jasper, it's Rick. No, that's just seasonality. Year-over-year, we're seeing it was a 1% increase in the Q1 against prior year. Given our guidance, and if you go to the midpoint, it'd be about a 1% increase in the Q2 . Both quarters are tracking on a relative basis, very consistent with the prior year. You're just observing seasonality.
I would add, we did, as we mentioned in the script, see a slight decline in the first month of the quarter in April because of the Ukraine conflict. We are seeing momentum building again as the troops get deployed, and they are waiting for their instructions and so able to kind of reengage in their education. The other thing that we do know about the Q2 is that we do have one less week of registration enrollment, as compared to the prior year. That will be factored into the Q2 as well.
All right, last one for me. There have been a couple other service providers talking about students maybe taking less courses than they have in previous semesters. Is that something you're seeing at any of your portfolio of institutions?
Right. Jasper, you got to break down the different units. In the nursing schools, it's a prescribed curriculum, right? You sign up on a term or quarter basis, and the curriculum is prescribed based upon the program that you're in. When you look at APUS, the military students have historically taken fewer courses. On average, we may see a very slight decline in average courses taken over the entirety of the university simply because of that mix shift. I don't think we've observed any change in average course load at APUS by core customer segment.
I would put some numbers behind that. At Rasmussen, the retention rates for students, so once they've defined a cohort and you're taking four classes each quarter, the retention is at an all-time high at Rasmussen. Once students have begun their educational journey, they're completing at an all-time high pace. We're also very pleased to report that retention, meaning the concentration of courses at APUS is up 8% year-over-year in the Q1 .
Appreciate the color. Thanks for taking the questions.
Our next question will come from Stephen Sheldon with William Blair. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. This is Matt Filek on for Stephen Sheldon. Thank you for taking my questions. I was wondering what impact are enrollment caps having on the business, and are there any campuses that are struggling to grow because of those enrollment caps?
Matt, thanks for the question. As we mentioned, we aren't seeing any growth restrictions because of enrollment caps across the Rasmussen campuses. We have no enrollment caps , among the other education units. We have a, what I would call a self-imposed limit on the number of students who are enrolling in the northern region of Rasmussen presently because of the lack of availability of the clinical faculty. That is not anything other than our own obligation to make sure the students are getting a high-quality education and we have the right mix of faculty to students.
This is Rick. The limit there is based upon the availability of faculty, particularly in the clinical area. When we think about the physical space, the campuses, we have plenty of room to continue to grow enrollment within those. Once we solve the availability of faculty challenge, we have capacity within the physical spaces to continue to grow enrollments.
Great. Thank you. That's helpful. On the nursing faculty front, could you maybe just talk a little more about what actions you're specifically taking to address that, and how do you generally feel about your ability to build nursing faculty capacity to meet student demand over the remaining part of 2022?
Great question. We have a variety of basically financial as well as flex schedule levers that we're using right now. Certainly, I think the financial situation is the most acute. But as we mentioned, it was this very swift shift from a virtual clinical in the state of Minnesota back to in-person clinicals that has created a lack of availability of some of the adjunct faculty that we had been relying on in a virtual environment in the past. We will see an increase, further increase in some wages, either because of state bonuses or increased prices that we will pay for adjunct faculty to now do these clinicals in person in hospitals rather than being able to do those virtually from the comfort of their home or their office.
We do believe that we will see a , continued pressure on our faculty wages in the coming quarter or two.
Thank you for that, Angie. I'll jump back in the queue.
Our next question will come from Raj Sharma with B. Riley. Please go ahead. Raj?
Hi. Sorry about that. Thank you for taking my question. I wanted to understand the Rasmussen University marketing spend. Is that on non-nursing not working as well? Wanted to understand the enrollment declines a little bit more. Also, just the big picture on the non-nursing side. You talked about the early education accounting for a quarter of the decline. Could you please talk about that and the longer-term sort of picture with non-nursing?
Hi, Raj. This is Angie.
Yeah.
Oh. Sorry, I'll let you finish your question.
No, sorry. No, I'm done. Go ahead, please.
Okay, sure. We'll start by saying that there is positive news coming from some of the non-nursing segments in Rasmussen in quarter two, where we are seeing flat to growing enrollments there. We believe that that's a return of interest of students wanting to take education benefits and continue their education. We do believe that there is momentum in several of those, including the business school, health sciences, and in the justice studies program. We have also, as we noted in the 10-Q, terminated the media buying relationship that Rasmussen had with Collegis, which is allowing APEI to have more control over the choices being made about how we're going to generate leads and where we're going to invest those dollars.
That will be fully terminated, and APEI will be responsible for media buying, direct-to-consumer media channel buying, effective July 1, 2022. We have confidence that we, with the ability to direct those efforts, will be able to create a balance around nursing, pre-licensure nursing leads and the key non-nursing businesses to generate more momentum across both of those segments.
Has the decline in enrollment largely been because of the economic tight labor markets, they're keeping students away from enrolling? Or have marketing dollars not been spent, or they have been spent and is not efficient?
Yeah, great question, Raj Sharma.
In-house, right.
Yeah. There's been a meaningful shift, as we've discussed on prior calls, of marketing dollars investing in pre-licensure nursing leads, and kind of being redirected away from the non-nursing businesses. We intend to try and create an AM strategy with control over the media buying now for Rasmussen effective July 1, 2022, and have a high degree of confidence that we'll be able to drive leads in both of those segments going forward. What I will reinforce, again, as we mentioned in the script, is that it is really almost exclusively a northern region issue. We're not seeing the same dilemmas in our markets in Florida or Illinois.
That's also related to the faculty, right? Availability.
That's right.
of the adjunct faculty.
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Okay. My next question is on just an observation. Are Hondros' enrollment trends different from the nursing Rasmussen? How does that Q2 , and it seemed a little different. Hondros seems to be doing a little better.
Hey, Raj, it's Rick. Yes, I think that's a market-based view, right? It's what's going on in the Ohio market where they have their largest concentration.
Right.
versus the impacts we see in the North Central region at Rasmussen.
Right.
Yeah. Fewer problems with access to faculty, I think is primarily one of the things that isn't clouding the Hondros picture, like it is in Rasmussen.
Got it. Then on the APUS enrollment, it's essentially flat Q2 guidance. Is that despite the military enrollment sort of picking up, Army portal? I just wanna understand that a little better, the components of it. The Army portal issues, are kind of behind us. That is being helped. There was a lull because of Ukraine, but you saw a pickup in interest, but the enrollment trends are guided to flat.
I think you got it right. Yeah, I think you got it right, Raj. Angie, in her comments, noted that we continue to see strength in the military. Some softness in May because of Eastern Europe, recovery from that. The other elements of the APUS business, military affiliated and non-military, remain soft.
What I will say, Raj, is that we, as we mentioned on our prior call, have completed a significant portion of our CRM upgrade, and we are seeing a meaningful increase in the number of applicants at APUS. Much like the situation at Rasmussen, where we wanna make sure we have the right number of admissions reps able to process the interested student applications. We're also trying to work to appropriately size the APUS admissions team as well, to make sure that we are converting every single one of those applications that we can into enrolled students. At APUS in particular, on the non-military side, we don't really see it being as much a top-of-the-funnel issue as it is really being able to take those interested prospects and converting them into enrolled students.
Yeah.
Jeff Tognola, our new CXO, is, laser focused on this in conjunction with the APUS management team.
Right. That's exciting. That's exciting. Thank you for answering my questions. I'll take it offline for me. Thank you.
Sure.
With no further questions, that will conclude today's conference. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.