It's on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol LINC. Speaking on behalf of the company today is their CEO and President, Scott Shaw. Scott?
Great, thank you. I know some of you in the audience are familiar with the story, but do others know who we are? Just curious. Yes, no?
I know a little bit.
Okay. Just curious just so I have a feel. Obviously, Safe Harbor, you've all read those before. This is a really exciting time for us here at Lincoln, and Lincoln is really well positioned to take advantage of a market that has moved in our direction. I think everyone's aware, you see it in the newspaper all the time, that there's a big skills gap out there. In this case, the skills I'm talking about are hands-on trade skills. People such as welders, electricians, mechanics, nurses, people that have now become labeled essential workers because even during COVID, they all remained employed and needed, and they were needed to keep our daily lives in order. Next year, Lincoln will be celebrating our 80th year in existence. We are definitely the largest and oldest organization within the United States focused on the trades.
It's something we love to do, and we do exceedingly well. We've proven, and this is probably the most exciting part about our opportunity, is our growth. Typically, we've been considered a countercyclical organization as a career school. Periods of time of high unemployment is when we usually see the highest enrollment into our campuses. Since COVID, we're seeing a highly accelerated growth pattern due to the fundamental shift that's taken place, which I'll talk about more going forward, but it's a very sustainable shift and something that is going to drive long-term growth and profitability for us. From a profitability standpoint, just as this room continues to fill up over time, as I fill up our classrooms with more full-paying students, our profitability increases.
Our model is based off of driving more students into our existing campuses and existing programs to drive up that profitability, as well as expanding our footprint to leverage our corporate overhead over a larger base. Today, we remain debt-free. There is debt on our balance sheet, but that is all due to leases. We have no bank debt or other forms of debt out there. We have a shelf if we were to need that. We have about $60 million of availability. We have lots of opportunities to grow and the capital to make that happen. We are becoming more efficient as an organization. Since COVID, we became more of a hybrid operation. Before, we were 100% online. Now we are 30% online and 70% on ground. We are an on-ground training institution.
The hybrid component is great for us, builds in some efficiencies, both from a faculty management standpoint as well as increases capacity at our campuses to help allow us to grow. It is also very attractive to the students. It gives them greater flexibility. Most of our students, the average age is 25. A lot of them have families. A lot of them are working. The hybrid model allows them to serve their families as well as their jobs much more effectively. Our growth strategy is pretty simple and pretty basic. Organic growth. We are going to continue to drive more students into our schools through better and more effective marketing. We are also replicating our most successful and in-demand programs into as many campuses as we can. Last year, we replicated five programs. This year, we are replicating seven programs.
Probably over the coming years, there'll be a smaller number, about three programs, as we just don't have the capacity from a floor space to replicate additional programs. But it's a way for us—we constantly look and assess what are we offering, how much square footage is being offered, and is there a more effective utilization of that square footage. We'll either maybe, for example, in Chicago, we took out a collision program that was taking up square footage that was at that point supplying maybe 65 students. We've added more welding booths into that space, adding an HVAC program, and adding our third Tesla training facility. We will accommodate probably maybe closer to 300 students in that same square footage where we had 65. That helps drive up efficiency. We will continue to start opening up new campuses.
We opened up our first new campus last March. That was our first new campus in 18 years. We have a new campus opening up in Houston in November. We just moved our Nashville campus into a new, bright, shiny, more efficient, and effective facility where we can offer new campuses. Next month, we'll be moving our Philadelphia campus, which today is our only solo discipline campus. It just offers Automotive. Come July, we'll be able to offer Automotive, Welding, Electrical, and HVAC in a market where we've existed for more than 60 years, and we know there's great demand. At the same time, we do look at acquisitions. There are a lot of properties out there for sale that could enable us to grow, but we're taking a much more disciplined approach at acquisitions.
When I first joined Lincoln over 20 years ago, we bought a lot of things. As long as it was for-profit, as long as it was in healthcare or trades, and whatever it was offering, we bought it. We grew. Then you have to manage all these things. You have to integrate them. You do not always have the most efficient platform to grow from there. We have learned from that, and we are now a 22-campus organization with streamlined properties whereby we are offering similar programs across our network, delivering them in a similar way. Making an acquisition that does not really fit into that would be more challenging. We are being very selective as to what we add. We could add other disciplines, but they would be disciplines aligned with who we are and what we do, something that involves one's hands. As we all know, AI is growing.
AI is designed to take away your mind. It does not take away your hands and your use of your hands. Our students, their jobs are not in jeopardy because of AI. It may assist the nurses in doing their job better. It may assist the mechanics in analyzing what is wrong with the car, but you are still going to need someone who has hand and eye skills to do the work. Those are the types of programs we are looking into, as well as making acquisitions that could speed up our entrance into a market that we want to go to and expand our footprint. As you will see, we are very much concentrated on the East Coast, and we do want to become a national player. The value there is really to our employers. Lots of them want to hire students around the country.
It's a lot easier to come deal with one Lincoln Tech serving 15, hopefully eventually 30 markets versus going to 15 different or 30 different community colleges. This is some numbers we've put together. Some people would say this is stale. A couple of years ago, maybe. This is the trajectory we're on. We're saying that by 2027, at least we were saying, we'd be $550 million of revenue and $90 million of EBITDA. Given some of the growth we're seeing, if it continues, we'll certainly be making adjustments to this, probably come this November after we see where this year falls out and where we see our margins. But we're basically projecting about 11% growth in the top line for the next couple of years and 200 basis points improvement in our margin each of those years.
In the first quarter of this year, our margin improved by about 280 basis points, just one point. Who knows if it's going to continue or not, but I have confidence that we're certainly moving in that direction much more so. When it comes to November, we'll be looking at these numbers again and making an assessment, but I feel really good about what's happening in the organization in our marketplace. As I mentioned, we did move to a hybrid model after COVID. It's added a lot of advantages, as I said, for our students and for ourselves. Today, all of our programs, except for our nursing program, are hybrid. The goal and objective is to start making our nursing program hybrid, but that will probably take about 24 months to do so.
Otherwise, all our core programs have moved to this hybrid model and is giving us greater capacity to grow as we're seeing strong double-digit demand out there, as well as it's creating more efficiencies and higher margins in our business. This is the model that we've laid out for what a new campus will generate. They're costing more than we originally thought, maybe 18 months ago. It's probably a $20 million-$25 million investment. This is showing $6 million of EBITDA. I think that these campuses will be generating closer to $7 million, if not more, of EBITDA. It takes us about two years to open a campus. This has us not becoming profitable or so for, let's say, 18-24 months and getting good returns. I can tell you that our Atlanta campus certainly exceeded our expectations.
It was, as I said, the first campus that we had opened in 18 years. Within six months, it was profitable. By the end of this month, in June, they will be over 700 students, which is what we thought it would take them 36 months. That is about 15 months, half the time. All of our assumptions, though, are based more on how this model rolls out and to the extent we overperform. That is just good for all of us. I did mention we are looking at acquisitions. It is very much focused. It is to gain either expand our footprint in a more rapid way. It could be to expand our product offerings. The two advantages there could be just to increase the scale of our opportunity, as well as give us new programs to replicate into some of our campuses.
Things have, needless to say, I probably look at 10- 12 acquisitions a year, and we have not made one in quite some time. We are either too cheap or too picky or both. So far, our business is doing well, and we will continue to go down this path, look for the best opportunities possible. As I mentioned, today, our workers, our students, are essential workers. We have exited certain disciplines where they would not be considered essential workers. We might have a good product and good students and good graduates, but they also would not necessarily possibly pass gainful employment rules. As you may know, there are lots of regulations out there. Long story short, I think it is quite evident by the fact that so many people cannot repay their student loans that something has got to change in our educational system. It is unsustainable as it is.
The way that things seem to be all moving in one direction or another is how do you assure that students are taking programs that will earn them an income to repay the debt that they've taken out to learn those programs. We exited the culinary programs we were in. We exited the cosmetology programs. Years ago, we got out of criminal justice. We exited massage therapy. All these programs could have good outcomes from the standpoint that students get solid skills, but these are all just careers and jobs that you just aren't going to earn that much. Why be in them? We're just focused on careers such as Welding, such as Electrician, HVAC techs, Automotive techs, where you really can, within three to six years of graduation, earn potentially six figures if you're a really diligent person.
It's not uncommon for a master-certified technician to make $125,000 or $150,000. These opportunities exist. We're going to be focused on opportunities that give students the opportunity to repay their loans. We're also going to focus on things that are considered essential workers. Nothing new here. I'll just highlight there on the $52 stock price range there. This was as of March, and our stock is a little bit higher than that. Things are all continuing to move in the right direction. We do have a good amount of inside ownership between our people like myself and others in the management team. We're all on the same page and ship for where we want the stock price to go. As I mentioned, we're very much concentrated in the Northeast. We were founded over the river in Newark in 1946.
We have six campuses in New Jersey. We have a lot of campuses between Washington and the Boston corridor. We also have campuses in other markets. We are in Texas as far west as Denver, Chicago, Indianapolis. Basically, any market that has an NFL team would be a good market for us, given the scale of what we're doing. We opened up the second campus in Atlanta. There you can see in green, we'll be opening up Houston. In the fall of 2026, we'll be opening up a campus in Long Island. Even though we have a high concentration within the Northeast, there's still pockets of opportunity in Long Island. For those that are from this area, trying to get into the city takes a long period of time. We have a campus in Queens right near the Whitestone Bridge. It's bursting at the seams.
By having another campus a little bit further east, we'll be able to further expand our opportunities in the New York market. We've been advertising in this market for almost 80 years. We have brand recognition. It's a good way to leverage that. Even though there are good opportunities in states like Florida where we're looking and in Arizona and in the South, in the Carolinas and in Virginia, there's still opportunities in some of these more established markets as well for us. The marketplace we serve in serving the workforce is the largest marketplace, and that's the middle skills. AI potentially takes away some of the high-skill jobs that are out there. Automation potentially takes away some of the low-skill jobs out there. Middle skills will obviously be affected by both of those.
As I mentioned, I think our focus on hands-on trades is very much safe. It will remain, at least as of today, it's about 50% of the jobs out there. That means it's more than a high school education, but less than a four-year degree. Given the way technology is advancing, it's very understandable why you need more training than just what might be in high school in order to work in the workforce. At the same time, given how 40% of the people that go to college don't graduate, maybe getting a higher level of education isn't as effective for a lot of people. The middle skills is a good place to be in my book. Our students, again, the average age is 25. About 20% come right out of high school. We have less than 10% that are military students.
A lot of that's just due to our hybrid model. The military will not pay for a student to go to a diploma program that's hybrid. Once we add some courses to it and make a degree, then the military will pay for you to do that, even though the job you get is the same. We'll start regrowing our military population as we add some more degree-granting capabilities to our students, to our campuses, I should say, for the benefit of our students. The skills gap, why does it exist? It exists because of a number of factors. Back in 1980, the decision was made by us collectively, society, that more people should go to college. There was a huge push to send people to college in order to prepare people for college.
We took shop class trades out of high schools so more time could be allocated to academics to help prepare them for college. Now we have multiple generations that have not been exposed to the trades. They do not know what they are. They do not know if they have an affinity or a capability or great skill in the trades. That has helped lead to this shortage. At the same time, you also have this huge demand that is taking place out there. There has always been a need. We have always had more job opportunities at Lincoln than students, but that is just growing significantly. You have the baby boomers who are retiring in large numbers. Companies have not replenished their workforce needs. They are now seeing a huge gap in certainly the entry-level positions. There is a lot more attention on college and the fact that it is maybe not returning a good investment.
All of a sudden now people want to go to our types of schools, which is great for us, which is why we're no longer countercyclical. As we all know, our whole electrical grid needs to be reinvented. We need to build more electrical power plants given AI. We're looking to onshore more things so that we're more protected in our supply chain. Our infrastructure is from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. It all needs to be replaced. All these things require electricians, HVAC techs, welders. A lot of these large construction sites require Diesel technicians, Automotive technicians. Obviously, as people like myself continue to age, we need more people into our Healthcare system. There's more and more demand for our workers. All these things are happening at a great time for Lincoln. We've been training people in these fields. We know what we're doing.
As I'll show you, we're one of the leaders out there. With all that said, I'll show it in another slide. I guess you should change the order of these. We're the largest provider of Auto techs and tradespeople coming out of a post-secondary school east of the Mississippi. We're the largest in the country for electricians, for heavy equipment operators. We're the second largest for welders, Auto techs, Diesel techs, and HVAC techs. With that position, we still only have less than 2% market share of the new people coming into these fields that we train for. It's a very local, regionalized business, which is why there's lots of opportunity for us to continue to grow and expand.
Every company that has a product, and our product is our education, and the way we do it is superior, certainly superior to a community college, which is our biggest competitor out there. First of all, we start with the product. We work with industry to figure out what the skills are that are needed that are going to make our students very attracted to them, allow them to start their jobs effectively on day one. All of our faculty members come from industry. They're not academics who've only read about it in a book. They're all people that have done the job, done the work. They know the book says this, but in real life, this is what you need to do to be successful, to impress your boss, and this is what you should do.
Second of all, we build facilities that are state-of-the-art, giving students the same professional tools, equipment, everything that they would be touching or involved with or needing for on-the-job. So it's a real-life experience for them. And compared to community college, it's far more robust. As I like to say, community colleges are there to serve the community. They're offering a broad array of programs, just like you might want to go to a department store if you want to get some socks and a lawnmower and a toaster. But if you want to buy electronics, are you going to go to Bloomingdale's or are you going to go to Best Buy? We're more of a specialty retailer. So it's a much deeper, richer experience. And it shows when you walk through our campuses.
We'd love to bring students, as well as politicians and others, onto our campus because once you go to a campus and see what it's all about, you understand why we're so successful. That is why it leads to superior graduation rates. In our slide, you'll see we have about a 70% graduation rate. Graduation rate at community colleges is around 33%, so over twice as high as what a community college is. Our placement rate is around 82%. That means that they've been placed in the job that they studied for. If they get a job at Starbucks or Amazon, that doesn't count. That's not why they paid us money. You can't get these types of statistics at traditional schools because their accreditors don't mandate that they track it. If a school does give you a statistic, it's all self-reporting.
Obviously, if I didn't get a job, I'm probably not going to tell my school I didn't get a job. Anyway, our numbers are audited by a third- party. They're solid numbers. In any event, we design programs to get students into the field of study that they want. They're accelerated programs. They get completed in 12 months. Twelve months of education at Lincoln is equivalent to four semesters at college because they're going more hours a week. We don't have spring break, fall break, Easter break, any kind of break. They're going 24/7, not 24/7, but they're going all the time, just like you would in a job. This is going back to where we're number one on the East Coast, number six on the West Coast. As you can see, we just have Denver and Grand Prairie in that area.
We're opening up Houston, and we are looking at other markets in that area to move into. California is a big market. We'll probably eventually get there, but the regulatory environment on any number of fronts is not very friendly. It will probably be towards the end of our expansion process. Given our presence, given our strength, and given the outcomes that we have, we've attracted a lot of major companies that want to work with us. Again, they're all desperate for people. As we tell them, if you get at the top of the list and get our graduates, you'll be ahead of the curve and probably outperform your competitors. As a case in point, Tesla came to us. They only wanted to work with community colleges. It wasn't working out for them. They came to us. They've been very pleased.
We opened up one campus, opened up a second campus. As I mentioned, we're about to open up a third campus. We'll be the largest trainer of Tesla START technicians in the country. We work with other OEMs that have similar challenges, and we provide them with similar quality. We have a program with Johnson Controls where our electricians get trained on Johnson Controls equipment, where they also go through a Johnson Controls mini academy at our campus and then get employed by Johnson Controls. There are other situations like that. We're constantly out there talking to employers. I must say, they all are desperate. They're not all willing to really pay what it costs to run programs. Those that do, they see the benefit of it, but trying to sign up new people can be challenging at times.
In my mind, the puck is moving in this direction. Companies are going to more and more work with us. Also, as we continue to build out our network, I think we become that much more valuable to these larger organizations because, again, it just makes their hiring practice that much easier. Highly regulated industry, which is fine by me. All I want is fair regulations across the Board. And we're very much focused. There is a rule called 90/10 where we can't have more than 90% of our revenue coming from government funding. We're safely around 82%, so no worries there. CDR, that's a Cohort Default Rate. As you may know, the government for the last five years has not required any student to repay any part of their student loan, which is why there's a zero there.
They started the repayment process last September, and the Trump Administration is ramping that up and ensuring that students repay the loans of taxpayer money that's out there. We'll start getting metrics on this. Our metric used to be around 8% for a Cohort Default Rate, which is what the average is of all schools in the whole United States. I can tell you when this metric comes out, it's going to be a lot higher than that because five years of people thinking everything's free and they don't have to repay it, it's going to probably look ugly. Once we all get our hands around it and start enforcing that students repay their loans or the government starts reinforcing that students repay their loans, this number should drop. Anyway, it's a metric I'm not worried about. Financial responsibility is just kind of overall financial health.
The highest you can be is 3%. We're at 2.5%. It's safe. As I mentioned, our graduation rates are 70% and our completion rates or placement rates are 82%. This is my Management team. Average tenure with Lincoln is, I believe, 17 years. We have a lot of tenure. We've been through lots of cycles. We know what's going on. We also have some new younger talent. My Board, I've turned over everyone in my Board in the last five years except for one individual. We have fresh ideas, good diversity of thought, good diversity of backgrounds, and they've really re-energized what we do, which is exciting. Also right there in the middle, Carlton Rose is a graduate of ours. He went to our Indianapolis campus, graduated from the Diesel program.
First day on the job, he was sticking boxes into the back of UPS trucks. When he retired from UPS last year, he was in charge of every single vehicle, whether it was an airplane, whether it was a forklift in a warehouse. I think it was over 150,000 pieces across the whole world that he was in charge of. Another one of the great success stories that we have at Lincoln Tech. Financial Review, first quarter, starts were up a healthy 20%. Revenue was up $16 million. Profitability increased nicely. We had no borrowings on our bank facility at that time. Everything is going very, very well for us. These are just some of the trends out there that you can see of our performance. On the left is on an annual basis. On the right is for the quarter.
You can see that everything is moving very well for us. We're getting good operating leverage as our revenues increase. I'll show you where that's going to take us. Population last year, we grew by 17%. Our first quarter was 20%. Our guidance is for about 12% at this point. Things remain very strong. We'll see where that comes out, and we'll update things as we see our hopefully very much continued success. This is what the guidance is for the year. We updated our guidance after the first quarter. Might be up to getting guidance again as things continue to move forward, but I'm extremely comfortable with everything that's laid out here for sure. I want to focus on the CapEx. It is a very CapEx-intensive year. That's because we moved our Nashville campus. We relocated our Philadelphia campus.
We're opening up the Houston campus, and we've started construction on our new Long Island campus. There are four campuses along with the seven program replications. Our maintenance CapEx is about 2% of revenue, so somewhere, I'd say, around the $12 million level. I would anticipate that next year, right now, we've only announced the Long Island campus. We hope to announce another new campus. These new campuses, I'd say, are $20 million. I would assume we're going to be investing, I'd say, $40 million a year in growth activities. I'd say $12 million-$15 million in maintenance going forward. The rest then should become free cash flow for us as an organization. We are a very seasonal business. As you can see here, our starts occur with the largest starts coming in in Q3. That's when the high school students come in.
From a profitability standpoint, we typically generate all of our profits in the last five months of the year. If you look at the first quarter this year, the growth of about over $4 million increase in profitability in Q1, we're forecasting about $20 million or so increase for our guidance. Given where everything stands, I again feel very comfortable with that trajectory. From a real estate standpoint, we do lease all of our facilities. We do not own any of our facilities right now. We're constantly reevaluating them, again, trying to figure out how do we get the most per square foot, either taking out programs that are underproductive. In certain cases, we've added some square footage in markets where we do not have room to add a new program, but we know there is demand.
We are constantly looking at this, and we constantly do have room for growth. As I mentioned, Houston's opening up, and Hicksville will open up in 2026. In summary, we are a national leader in this field. There is strong organic growth. This is the most exciting time in the 24 years I have been at Lincoln. The runway for what the opportunity is, the fact that people finally have caught on to the fact of something that we have been saying for 20, well, actually probably 80 years. Hands-on careers are a great place for people to go. College is great for lots of people. It is just not for everyone. Take a look at us. We can give you a great opportunity going forward. Our operating leverage is kicking in. We have revamped our business model to be more effective.
Almost everything's moving in the right direction for us, which is exciting. That's about all I have to say. Any questions? Anyone want to enroll? No. Yes, sir.
The EBITDA margin perspective, your campus-based. Yes. What's the most?
The EBITDA?
Your peers. What's the highest EBITDA margin?
Yeah.
For campus-based programs? Maybe differentiate between different kinds of programs.
Correct. Online schools have greater operating leverage. They have less fixed assets to deploy, and they can scale, and they're not regionally located. I can tell you, our projections have us going up to 16% EBITDA margins. There's no reason why, frankly, we couldn't get up even higher, let's say, to 20%. I certainly look at private company on-ground schools that have higher margins. Now, I don't necessarily know how they get to those margins. I am publicly traded. I want to be extremely compliant.
We have more, I'll say, oversight and probably cost structure than some of them. I don't see why we couldn't get up to a 20% EBITDA margin.
Does it make a difference if it's [audio distortion] or nursing?
It does today because today my nursing has a zero margin. I need to correct that, which is something that we're working on doing, is making that more profitable. Once we do, then we'll start growing that part of the business. There's a huge demand for it. Right now, all of the growth is coming in the programs that generate the highest return on investment for us. I'm anticipating, or the objective is to make nursing be part of that category.
We have to make it blended, and we have to make some other structural changes to the program, which will take 24 to 36 months to implement before that happens. Yes, sir.
On the Corporate partnerships costs.
Yes.
Do those partners actually fund part of the tuition, or do they just offer jobs at the end of the course?
It's a mix. They're there because they do different things. Some of them pay us to provide, I'll say, graduate training to our graduates that they've selected to then make them more ready to go into the workforce. Some of them give us free access to their industry company-specific training so that our students can access that for free to then become a likely to be hired candidate with them. Some of them give donations of equipment that enable us to offer the programs.
Some give scholarships to help students get into the program. So it's a whole mix. There's not one kind of model that they all fall into. Anything else? Great. Thanks. Appreciate your attention. Thank you.