Let me get started. The best presentation for last, and the best presentation slot of the day. So thank you all for sticking around. This is actually a great company. It's, again, another kind of really good example of kind of how we fit. We meet companies. We met Scott this year. I don't know if we had done our conference before or after, but.
I did Chicago, and also I was in New York.
Yeah, yeah, so we came through maybe March or something. We went through New York, saw them in your offices, saw your facilities. It was a great tour, and it was a suggestion of one of our sponsors. We really like this theme, and I'm going to let Scott take it away, so.
Thanks. So either your flights all got canceled or you are interested.
We're just going to watch.
Yeah. I don't know, hopefully. But hopefully you'll enjoy my presentation. So this is all on our website. So if you want to get copies of it, feel free to get them. But what excites me is that we're in a really unique time. And as everyone knows, you just read in the paper, there's a huge skills gap out there. And especially now with The Wall Street Journal calling it the Tool belt Generation and other people kind of building on that theme, it really shows to me, and given our results, that there's some fundamental change that has taken place.
And we sit right there in the middle of where that change is taking place as a leader in this space. And so we really do expect to see some really good times going forward.
We've been in this space for 75 years, actually 78 years, doing exactly what we're doing today, providing people with an opportunity to change their lives, get into the workforce in one-year programs, in programs that will provide them with a living wage, if not more. I'm very proud to say that maybe his shareholders aren't so proud, but the CEO of Intel is a graduate of ours, went through our program.
We actually gave him a scholarship, of all things, to go through our program. But we have lots of very successful people that have risen up in the ranks, even though they started off as tradespeople, as many of you know. Certainly, a lot of the young new millionaires aren't just all in the IT world, but a lot of them are also in the trades, HVAC, electrical, things of this nature. Lots of growth that's taking place.
As that growth takes place, we're kind of like an airplane, just as if we filled up some more seats here in this room and everyone was paying me, the margins on those extra people drop to the bottom line. That's basically the premise of what we're offering here. We're growing our population, both geographically, but also within our campuses. As those populations grow in the campus, our margins expand, and we're experiencing that. We have projections for what that will look like. To get the growth, we have a nice balance sheet. We have no debt out there.
We have about $90 million worth of liquidity with our bank facility. We're putting that money to work in the form of opening up new campuses and replicating our most successful campus sorry, replicating our most successful programs into additional campuses to get more growth.
And as I'll talk about later, but I'll just jump into it. On our third quarter, we experienced about 15% organic growth. And then when you add our new campus that we opened, we had 21% growth of new students coming into our school in the third quarter, which sets us up well for next year. We're also, though, looking to create greater efficiencies in our operations. Our business was created back in the early 2000s through a lot of acquisitions.
We've had to pare down some of those properties. And we're now finally have gone through the process of streamlining our organization to have more consistency across all of our campuses. We used to have starts, meaning new enrollments of students, basically happening almost every day of the year. Now we've consolidated that to 10 days of the year. So basically, students can start and change their lives. Every month, we have new classes starting.
So our growth strategy has certainly been on the organic side, but we also do look at acquisitions. I'll start on that first, probably look at six properties a year. But we haven't pulled the trigger on any of them as of yet. It's a really buy versus build type of strategy. But if the right thing comes across our desk, I'm definitely willing and able and anxious to make an acquisition. It really would be to expand what we're doing today. We're not looking to necessarily buy something and get to something totally new.
It's really to be more of a geographic play. How can we get to more markets with what we're offering in a bigger way? Organically, as I said, we're trying to become more efficient to drive profitability up at each campus.
We're also doing that by replicating, as I said, our most successful programs. And those would be our automotive, HVAC, electrical, and welding programs, and populating those into other campuses. Not every campus, we're not like McDonald's, is offering the exact same curriculum. So we basically serve the local market, as well as depending on what capacity we have in that facility to add more programs. We look at it and evaluate it. For example, in Chicago, we have a collision repair program, not a great program, frankly, overall, and takes up a lot of space.
So we shut that program down. And in the same space where we had collision, we're expanding our welding program, which is very popular. We're adding an HVAC program, which we haven't had in that marketplace, which will do quite well. And we're also building out our third Tesla training center there.
So we're going to get a lot more productivity from that space. And we're looking to do that kind of across the board. We're also opening up new campuses, which we hadn't done in a long period of time. And we opened up the East Point, Atlanta campus in March. And by June, we already had achieved our population goals that we had for the year. And we expect we'll end the year with around 550-600 students, which is twice what we thought it would be.
So we definitely picked the right market with the right programs. And it's giving us a lot of confidence that our methodology that we employed to select that location for Houston and other markets is the right one and should be very productive for us.
We've put this plan out there that by end of 2027, we should be at about $550 million in revenue and about a 16% Adjusted EBITDA margin. That's based off of all the replications that we've announced and are doing this year and next year, as well as the opening of the relocation of our Nashville campus, our Philadelphia campus, and our Houston campus, which all take place next year.
Just looking at those assets and what their productivity will be, as well as the year-over-year organic growth, we feel very comfortable that we'll be able to achieve these types of numbers three years from now. Part of our efficiencies is coming from our Lincoln Hybrid Model. Obviously, during COVID, everyone had to do work and schooling from home.
We learned that our students, even though they're hands-on students, did enjoy some of the flexibility that online learning provides. So we changed our curriculum to be about 30% online and 70% at the campus. So the students are getting just as much, if not more hands-on training as they did before. But this builds in greater efficiencies for the students and for us. Students like it.
Now they come to our schools just four days a week, four hours a day, and it frees them up and gives them at least three-day weekends, which, since most of our students work, is very advantageous for them for their jobs. Also, since they only come four hours a day, we now have three equal sessions between a morning, afternoon, and evening.
What that did was accelerate the revenues that we could earn in our evening session because in the past, our one-year programs in the evening were two-year programs. By having part of it now online, they're able to be at the same length as our day and afternoon. That helps us with our efficiencies because sometimes students' jobs and lives change, and now they can seamlessly transfer from one session to another session, which makes it very easy for them to continue their education, as well as operationally for us, it's much more efficient and effective.
Finally, on the hybrid model, one of the big things why we did it is it'll enable us to allow one instructor instead of teaching one class of students to teach two classes of students.
Since our students are on campus for four hours in a day, a morning, afternoon, or evening, we can now have one instructor teach two classes, a morning and afternoon or an afternoon and evening class, because we've condensed the amount of time that the students are on campus and push some of that work offline. That should help us reduce our faculty count, as well as therefore our faculty costs, which should help drive up our margins. This is the model that we've laid out for any kind of new campus. The new campuses that we're building today are somewhere between 60,000 sq ft and 80,000 sq ft.
They'll have four programs: automotive, electrical, HVAC, and welding. They should have about a good steady, let's say, 700 students in them with capacity to go up to 1,100 to 1,200 students.
These campuses, unfortunately, cost us a great deal of money: $20 million to open up, and we anticipate that they should generate about $6.5 million-$7 million of EBITDA about 36 months after opening. Certainly, the Atlanta campus that we opened will definitely achieve, if not exceed, these numbers. Probably, yeah, we could be there. Well, I won't make any great predictions, but it's definitely doing better than what's projected here.
As I mentioned, we have another new campus that will be opening up in Houston in the fourth quarter of next year, and we announced, even though we haven't quite signed the lease, but we're just about to sign a lease for another new school that will be in Long Island, and then, again, the same research we used to pick Atlanta and Houston picked Long Island.
And in Long Island, compared to, let's say, Houston, we're a well-known brand. We're in the tri-state region for 75 years. Our campus in New York City is bursting at the seams. So I'm very confident that that campus out in Long Island will do very well as well. We do have a very disciplined acquisition strategy since we haven't acquired anything yet. So it could be very disciplined. But as I mentioned, we do look at about six different properties a year. And it's a real trade-off.
What's the capital that's going to be required to make that acquisition versus how can we deploy that capital in replicating programs or opening up another new campus? What's going to give us the greater return? Obviously, there could be other advantages to making an acquisition, and that's much more instantaneous, the profits that you get. But we're constantly evaluating that.
I would anticipate that certainly in the not too distant future, who knows, we'll find the right property for us. Another benefit of COVID is that we came up with a new term, or at least a new term became much more popular in the press, and that is essential workers. Our students worked during COVID. We needed people to be delivering Amazon goods to keep the trucks running. We needed people's cars to be running. We needed electricity to be operating. We needed nurses in the hospitals.
So the government came up with a number of programs that have to be essential workers. And frankly, this is where we're focused on, is offering essential workers' careers. We announced in our third quarter that we found a buyer for our cosmetology school. Good program, but just by nature, cosmetologists don't get paid a lot of money.
It's not the greatest return on investment program. We want to make sure that we are offering only really strong, high ROI programs, so we'll probably also be exiting our two culinary programs over the next 12 to 18 months, and again, just focusing on things that basically could earn someone one and a half times whatever the cost of the education is, so if we have a program that's going to cost someone, let's say, $27,000, we wanted them to make $40,000 or roughly $20 an hour when they come out, if not higher. A lot of this stuff I've touched on, but we do have 22 campuses in 13 states.
Most of the markets that we operate in, if we're not number one for the programs we offer, we're the second largest provider. We have really strong outcomes, and that's critical. We're a highly regulated industry.
We have to have strong outcomes to remain compliant, as well as it's just good business sense to have strong outcomes from a marketing perspective. To give you some idea, our graduation rates are, let's say, around 67%. Our competition is a community colleges. Our programs are one year to one and a half. The graduation rates, as you may know, at community colleges, including those that transfer to a four-year school, is around 32%, 33% nationally. Just as a point of reference, graduation rates for college students over a six-year period is around 63%.
So we're even better than traditional schools as well. As well as our placement rates are in the low 80s. And again, that means that these are students placed into a job that they've been trained for.
If they go to us and then go work in an Amazon warehouse, that doesn't count as a placement for us. These are where our campuses are today. The one that's there in Las Vegas will go away come January 1st. That's our Euphoria Cosmetology School. You can see the green dot there in Houston. Atlanta, we had a school in northern Atlanta. Now we're in southern Atlanta, and obviously, as an organization that started in Newark, New Jersey, we have a strong presence in the northeast, which is going to get stronger with the new Long Island campus.
We are looking at a lot of the places that pop up on our map are naturally in the south and in the west. That's where the population growth is, so we will be opening up more campuses in that area. But whenever I see an opportunity, we see marketing advantages by building campuses in existing markets. Like I could foresee another campus in Dallas. Anyone who's been in Dallas knows getting from one part of Dallas to another could take a lot of time. So there's a huge growing population there.
So we're looking at potentially expanding in the Dallas market, as well as there's still more markets within the northeast region to kind of fill out our footprint that would, again, leverage our marketing and brand already, but give greater access to students. The segment of the workplace that we serve is the largest segment of the workforce, and that's the middle skills. Middle skills being defined as anything over high school, but less than a four-year degree. The lower skill, those are people just with a high school education.
Those are jobs that are going away because of automation. And then you have the high skills, which are skills for bachelor's and above. And those are jobs that could go away because of artificial intelligence. What we offer are skills that aren't going to go away and be outsourced or replaced by robots or replaced by AI. AI will probably assist our students in better diagnosing cars or seeing what the situation is in a building like this that's not getting grid ventilation. But you're still going to need someone with hands-on capabilities to go fix the problem.
And so I think that that was also another reason that's helping drive more students to us. People look at these careers as really solid skills that are good for their entire lives. Also, there's this huge imbalance that's out there.
The problem is starting in the 1980s, we decided everyone should go to college. We took vocational programs, shop classes, things like that, out of the schools so that students would have more time for academics, out of this desire to push everyone to go to college, and as a result, there's this gap that's formed, especially as people like myself, baby boomers are retiring. There hasn't been enough young people entering the workforce in the trades to replenish the need that's out there, so you have the silver tsunami taking place.
You have millions of dollars, if not, well, not millions, billions of dollars wanting to go into infrastructure. We have billions of dollars looking to rebuild our defense systems, our ships, our submarines, and we don't have the welders, electricians, engineers to do all this work, so that all speaks to the dire need that's out there.
And we serve that dire need with a product that's been around for 75 years in an industry-leading position. Give you another look at the picture. This is what the BLS data says. There's how many new people need to be employed in each of the businesses or programs that we offer. And then we look at how many graduates we have. So on the transportation skilled trade side, we have only 2.5% market share. And on the healthcare and other side, even less. So it's a highly fragmented market. It's also a very local market.
There's lots of opportunity, white space for us to fill in and grow going forward. We offer a very different product than what a traditional school is. And this is really mostly comparison to community colleges. First of all, all of our programs are designed with industry.
Twice a year, we invite employers to come in and critique what our students can do and what they can't do. We also ask them, tell us, where's your industry going? What skills do they need going forward? We're also seeing all the employers want soft skills, which can mean a lot of different things. But one thing that we do that a lot of traditional schools don't do is we take attendance, and your attendance does show up in your transcript.
We have many employers that simply look at who's attended the most, regardless of what their, frankly, their grade is, because they just want people that they can depend on. We also have our students wear uniforms so they look professional while they're in the school, because that's what they're going to have to work and usually wear when they're out of school.
We try to help them speak in a professional way and carry themselves in a professional way. Employers appreciate that very much. What I like to say is that compared to community college, community college is like a department store. It's a community college. It has to serve the community, which means it has to have a broad array of offerings. They offer a lot of programs, but we're more like a specialty retailer. We only offer five or six, sometimes only four programs at a campus, which means we can go much deeper into what we offer.
We offer a much more robust, richer environment, a lot more training aids. A typical community college might have 25, 40, maybe 50 automotive students. We'll have 250 or 300 automotive students.
So it's just a much different environment with a lot more resources to bring to bear, as well as we attract much more employers to come to us. Our students do come to us. They're not looking to discover who they are. They know what they want to do. They want to get the skills, get in and get out, and get to work as quickly as possible. We definitely have to keep up, keep pace. We've obviously made our programs blended. We've also, in our automotive program, partnered with a Dutch company called Electude.
It's the largest provider of automotive and diesel training in the world. And they have training aids which have been designed specifically for the current generation, especially males looking for a gaming experience. And so the offering that we have is more like a gaming discovery experience.
Just like young people don't read the manuals, they just somehow figure out how all this technology works by playing with it. That's how this education is delivered in a similar way. There's lots of discovery, and it relates very well to the students, and it's getting a really good reception, and so we're looking for other ways to do that with all of our different programs. How do we make it as engaging as possible so the students do become as successful as possible when they leave us?
As I mentioned, we do have superior graduation and placement rates, and I mentioned the employability standards, and also, I didn't, maybe I didn't mention this. I apologize. I've had so many conversations. All of our faculty members come from industry. They're not academics. They've actually done the job.
And then we have to give them the skills of how to handle and manage a classroom and how to engage students. How do you notice when students are slipping? And that's a real difference. There's nothing. You know what students want. They want that real skill. They want to understand really what does it take to be successful. And that's what our faculty members can share with our students. So, as I mentioned, in most of our markets, we're number one.
So if you look, this is a little bit west of the Mississippi, but if you draw a line in the United States there and you look at how many people are graduating with an automotive and skilled trades post-secondary certification, we're the largest provider there. Eventually, I'd like to be number one in the whole country, but I'll take, you know, two-thirds of the country right now.
We do partner with major corporations, and we get, we see very many benefits from this. First of all, it provides great job opportunities for our students. It also helps validate what we do. As you probably know, highly regulated, lots of negativity can be around the proprietary education space. But, you know, these companies are coming to us because they value what we do. They value our students. We are now the largest provider of Tesla technicians.
Tesla had a program only with community colleges, but they could not meet their needs. And then they decided to come and look at other alternatives that came to us. And, you know, this is what we do. This is what we live and breathe. And we've been doing it for 75 years. We started with one campus. They liked that. We went to a second campus.
And as I mentioned, we're doing a third campus now in Chicago. Johnson Controls, we just had a graduation ceremony with them last week in Denver. Again, they're desperate for technicians. They probably could use over a thousand technicians a year. We're giving them up to about 200 technicians now. They love the partnership. What this is, is basically students go through our basic electrical or HVAC program, and then they get selected into Johnson Controls program for about a 12-week period. Johnson Controls pays for all of that.
So the students have nothing. It doesn't cost them anything. They get enhanced skills, and then they can walk right into Johnson Controls already prepped and primed as a Johnson Controls employee. And we do that with a lot of these companies that are here.
Also, I'll just add, on the bottom is CMC, and that's a new business whereby none of our students are involved, and it's not at our campuses, and that's a side of the business I'm looking to grow in the future. It's basically training existing people in the workforce, upskilling them at their employer, being paid. The employer is paying us to train their employees to bring their skill level up. Since it's not at our campus, it's not with our students, we can do that anywhere in the country, and so it's a much more scalable model for us. It's tiny.
It's like $3 million-$4 million of revenue today, but there's no reason why that can't be $50 million in five years or so. We are highly regulated, and so these are some of the compliance stats.
Depending on how familiar you are, there's something called 90/10. No more than 90% of your revenue can come from the federal government. We get 81% of our revenue from the federal government. It's been pretty steady at that level. The CDRs are Cohort Default Rates, unfortunately or fortunately. We've always been well, very frankly, equal to traditional schools, below 10%. During COVID, the government didn't collect from anyone, so those rates went to zero, but I'm not worried about that rate.
There's something called the Financial Responsibility Score, which is a score the government gives you for your financial health. The highest score you can have is a three. We are a three. So, and I've already mentioned our graduation and placement rates. This is my management team. We have an average age at Lincoln of 18 years, which is very unusual.
It will go down when Susan English retires at the end of next month. She's been with the company 40 years, but still a lot of depth and breadth, and to me, that's great because, as I mentioned, we're a highly regulated industry. Knowing people that know the industry and have operated in, frankly, multiple cycles is very beneficial. Obviously, there on the upper right side, Chad Nyce is our newest employee with us now, coming up on five years. This is my board, and I've had the good fortune of really almost turning over.
I turned over probably 90% of my board in the last five years, which has been really exciting, bringing a new fresh face. In that transition, I lowered the average age of my board.
I increased the diversity of skills that my board members have, as well as I increased the diversity of my board to be far more representative of our student body, and they've come up with a lot of great ideas and a lot of fresh energy, and the one thing, regardless of what their skill set is, the one thing that really attracts them to Lincoln is the fact that we're changing people's lives and changing a lot of, frankly, disadvantaged people's lives into something better.
One of my board members right there in the middle, Carlton Rose, is a graduate of ours, and he is a clear example of someone who struggled at, yeah, in school.
He struggled a little bit, frankly, at Lincoln, as he says, but he graduated from Lincoln and went to work for UPS, and his first job was putting boxes in the back of UPS, and when he retired from UPS last year, he was in charge of every single plane, car, truck, boat, whatever UPS had around the world. He was in the top 20 of the leadership at UPS, and so this is the transformation that education provides and also just speaks to the quality of what we do and where students can go. This is the third quarter results. We had a really strong quarter.
Starts, as I mentioned before, 15% organic once you had the new campus up, 21% for the quarter. Revenue up. EBITDA was up 60%. Net income was up. Strong balance sheet.
We were, you know, as a result of all this, we did raise our guidance. Again, you can see our performance here, how we've done quarter over quarter. Again, everything's moving, frankly, ahead of what we laid out at the beginning of the year, and things are looking very strong and carrying into next year. Again, the similar trend there. And that did result in us raising our guidance again in the third quarter. So, as you can see here, we're well on our way, we believe, to get through those numbers that I laid out for in 2027.
We'll be going into 2025 with probably, you know, close to maybe a thousand more students, which is kind of like strong backlog, depending on what kind of business you're in, that will help drive business. We continue to see very strong interest from, you know, frankly, every month.
I'm waiting for it to subside, and we just haven't seen it happen yet. People are waking up to the fact that there are alternatives to college, and as long as people keep reiterating the positives of going into the trades, I feel very confident we'll do quite well. We are a little bit cyclical, seasonal, I should say, in the quarters, just the way it works. Naturally, we do have about 20% of our students are right out of high school. The average age of our students is 25, but about 20% are coming in those typical June, July, August, September months, and so our population peaks basically in October, November.
Our cost structure doesn't change much. So if you look at the EBITDA, all of our profits are really earned in the third and fourth quarter, and you can see this year's trend over last year.
And I imagine the fourth quarter is going to have a similar type of trend, which puts us right onto in the middle of where our guidance is. We have been trying to maximize the value of our real estate. We used to own a number of our campuses. We did sale lease backs. That's what enabled us to put the $100 million of cash onto our balance sheet. We've now been deploying that cash and opening up new campuses and replicating.
Starting in 2026, we'll be starting to regenerate cash again and start rebuilding our reserves. But our CapEx in 2024, we lowered it from the initial number simply because of timing of construction. We're spending $55 million this year. We haven't given projections for next year, but I can tell you it's going to be more than $55 million in CapEx when it comes out.
But then starting in 2026, the number will start dropping down. So we won't have all the, you know, we basically have three real estate plays taking place next year. The years after, we'll have maybe one or two. We're also looking at, you know, how do we, some of our properties probably have excess square footage. So we're looking at how do we make that more productive. Just as I mentioned in Melrose, we got rid of a program that took up a lot of square footage to basically put one and a half new programs in.
They'll be far more productive. And then this is just a summary. National leader hands-on training. The market is ripe for what we do. We are definitely in the right place at the right time. And we have all the experience.
We have a strong balance sheet that's going to enable us to continue to grow. We continue to have strong outcomes, which protects us, whether it's a Democratic or a Republican administration, and we're really, frankly, excited by a lot of new opportunities that are coming our way. We've, for example, there's about 20% of the students in community colleges are in dual enrollment programs, meaning they're in high school while they're going to community colleges. We're starting to see high schools reach out to us looking for a similar type of opportunity.
If we can grow that, it's a real win-win. The high schools would pay us to train the students while they're with them. Then when the students, if they came, if they did a junior-senior year, they basically would complete half of our program.
They could then matriculate into our campus, therefore graduate in half the time at half the cost, and therefore have half the debt, if not maybe no debt. It's kind of a win-win situation, and I think there's going to be more and more opportunities like that coming down the road, as well as we are also trying to encourage more employers, frankly, to contribute more to the students' education.
You either try to sign them up sooner, even while they're still enrolled with us, looking to help maybe supplement some of their tuition, certainly giving them tuition reimbursement programs once employed, basically as a retention tool for the employer and as a reward for the student, but you know, people are given the shortage that's out there. People are becoming more and more creative, which is exciting. That's my presentation. Questions? Yes.
I'll address a lot of these issues, but higher educational offerings. [audio distortion]
Yep. Yep. Yes, yes. Yeah.
Do you have any plumbing?
No. I'll address the plumbing. Plumbing is something which puzzles me. If you look to see how many graduates come out of post-secondary schools in plumbing, I think the number is less than like 1,200 in the whole country. Yeah, there's something about plumbing. I don't know exactly what. I've asked a lot of people why that is. It still seems like it should work. People come to do welding. They're coming in droves to do electrical and HVAC. I'm not sure about why plumbing is different, but it seems to be different. Doesn't mean we're not going to try it somewhere to see what we can do.
Obviously, most of our HVAC techs go to companies that offer plumbing as well, yet none of them have asked us to offer plumbing. So somehow they're able to get the skills needed without going to school. But to your bigger question, you know, first of all, I'll say not that this is a defense. Every industry has bad actors out there. It doesn't mean you should shut down the industry. When Wells Fargo was, whatever, signing people up for credit cards left and right, should you have shut down Wells Fargo?
I don't know. People might differ on that, but you punish the people that did something wrong and you try to move on. We are different than most schools. So we're a traditional career school. We're kind of what, frankly, proprietary education was.
Proprietary education just kind of expanded up into the food chain and offering a lot of online bachelor's and higher level degrees. You know, we ourselves, not that we're lily white, used to have certain programs that were in high demand. Let's say criminal justice. Everyone watched CSI and thought they were going to become a forensic, you know, cop. It looks exciting. The reality is 90% of our students ended up being, you know, security guards. You don't need to go to school to become a security guard.
So just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something. And so we are very much focused on everything that is, as I mentioned earlier, going to give you a good ROI. Our Euphoria is a really high-end cosmetology school. But given where the rules are and everything, I'm not going to fight that battle.
I'd rather just get out of it and stick to these other programs that I know the government can look at the data and see that it's a high-quality program. And so by sticking to things like that and making sure that you're serving our students well, we will not fall into the same trap that maybe some others have fallen into. Sure. Yes, Raj.
You say that in the past, you rationalized our real estate, sold the VAD company. Do you think that there's more opportunity there?
Yeah, well, there's no opportunity to raise capital through that exercise, but there's probably opportunity to reduce costs through downsizing some of our locations. You know, our Denver facility is a beautiful facility. We call it the Taj Mahal, unfortunately. It's just, you know, could be half the size and still deliver what it delivers to us.
So looking for ways to try to do that. It's not always as easy as one would think how to split up a building to be still productive for you. But we probably have one or two that are like that, as well as maybe some smaller older facilities. I mean, for example, Philadelphia has been screaming to do something. It's one program in a facility that's 60 years old. We're going to move to a brand new program, not only to enhance it for the existing students, but then we can add other programs that we know are in desperate need in that market. So that's going to be a win-win type of situation. Yes.
Was it a national expansion or was the opportunity in the U.S. so great that the country expanded for years? [audio distortion]
Yeah. We've been to China, but I wouldn't work with the Chinese after being to China. They just want to take everything we have and, you know, not pay us for it. We've had Indonesian representatives come in. Long story short, there's enough domestically for us to tackle for now. Eventually, we could go international, but on this other side of the business that I mentioned that doesn't involve our students or our campuses, there's no reason why an international player wouldn't come to us to offer the same type of training to their U.S. workforce as to their workforce anywhere in the world.
So we certainly would be open to that. Yes, I think you had a question.
Property venture with high schools. [audio distortion]
Yes.
Is that a process where the school board and your board would need to work together? How do you make that happen? [audio distortion]
Yeah, it's a challenging one because especially like in New Jersey, where we're based, every district has its own school board. So it's a very, can be a very slow process, difficult process. But I'm working with an individual that has experience in doing that for another publicly traded company that offered training to high schools around the United States. So we're leveraging his experience and relationships to hopefully accelerate that process. But it's a much slower process. And it's in school district by school district for the most part.
I suppose there could be a concern about stepping on each other's toes, so to speak. Is that an issue or can you really work together?
Oh, yeah, well, usually we're not stepping on anyone's toes. It's usually what we're offering isn't offered at that school. And so that's why they are, that's why it's appealing to them is even they're thinking, well, everyone's not going to go to college. Another example is, let's say the KIPP Charter School designed specifically to help disadvantaged youth get into college. Well, after they've been doing that for a number of years, they realize that a number of their students don't want to go to college and aren't even ready to go to college. And a number of them were coming to our Union, New Jersey campus.
So now they're saying, well, they're already coming to you. How can we work more closely with you? Again, that just speaks to the greater awakening and opportunity as more and more people realize that we need to get people into college that are ready and want to go to college, but then find other exciting opportunities for those that might not be ready or want to go to college. Anything else? Yes.
It looks like you had announced a buyback program in 2022. [audio distortion]
Yep.
$30 million. Is that still active?[ audio distortion]
We had bought back, I think, $6 million or $7 million when our stock was down at $5 or $6. Today, our stock's, you know, three times that, at least around $15, $16. So I'm not interested in doing it as of right now, but it's out there so that if, you know, so what happens sometimes in our sector is things get blown out of proportion or things get in the press and people, you know, run for the hills. If that were to happen, we'd take advantage of it because I know who we are and what our, you know, what our strengths are and it'll turn around eventually.
But as of right now, capital is being deployed really into opening up new campuses and replicating programs. But the program is still active. Yes. Yeah. Anything else? I guess you all can catch your flights now. Thank you all for your attention.