Good morning. Excited to have everyone here at our Nashville Auto Diesel College for our second investor day. We're excited because Nashville is a very impressive college, and it's state-of-the-art. Part of the state-of-the-artness is this little fancy screen here. As you can see. Oh, they turned the lights off in the auto shop. They're supposed to have that on. Anyway, you can see that what we've built here is a state-of-the-art facility with all the latest equipment. That's the way we're moving as a company. We want to make sure that our students have the skills needed to be successful out there in the marketplace. This is a really exciting time for us. If we could just start the presentation. Oh, that's me. That'd be great. Safe harbor.
I know you've all read this before, but I do want to welcome you. This year is our eightieth anniversary. There's very few schools out there in this country that have the longevity that we do, and there's really no one else that's been focused on the trades. We started in 1946 training people to fix automatic transmissions and HVAC, and we're still doing that today, and we've expanded it into other trades. We're only focused on those trades that we believe provide a high quality of education and a great career opportunity.
The difference, besides the fact that we have this beautiful facility and all of our new facilities look as robust as this one, but at the end of the day, lots of people can build nice facilities, lots of people can put in professional equipment, but what they can't do is replicate our people. I think that we have a strong focus on people all the time, whether it's our students there, over 19,000 students and over 2,700 employees. We're gonna make an environment where everyone can be successful, and this is, I believe, one of our great differentiators. I have back there the head of my HR team, Steve Ace.
He's not presenting, but I can tell you that the HR department at Lincoln always gets probably the highest ratings out there, and they do such a good job for us and are really the backbone of our success. What unites us is our mission, and this is the statement that if you walk this campus or any campus, you'll see this on the walls, but it's just not a placard. We want people to be living and breathing this day in and day out. We're gonna be focused on providing superior education. We want to be the best. We're gonna be focused on in-demand careers. This is where the people really come in. It's got to be a supportive environment. Our students oftentimes have jobs, our students oftentimes have families.
They're all looking to change their lives, and they're with us for over 800 hours a year. There's lots of opportunities for us to be successful. Also lots of opportunities maybe not to be successful with them. We wanna make sure that all of our students are successful, and it's our people that are gonna make that difference and make it all come together. Then what drives them to come to Lincoln is the fact that we do change lives. People that are joining our organization are very much believers that they can make a difference in people's lives, whether it's the admissions folks or the education folks or our career services folks, even the people at our reception desk. People love what we do here and have a great sense of pride.
Two years ago was our first Investor Day, and I'm highlighting a lot of the points that we conveyed because all these things we have achieved, all these things still exist, and we're moving beyond that. We are very much, and always will be, focused on having a strong regulatory record, making sure that we're compliant, making sure we have great outcomes. Our outcomes, as I mentioned two years ago and showed, we are twice as good as a community college. I just raise that point because a lot of people always ask me, "What makes you different?" What you do is when you come to Lincoln, you get a rich experience, and you're gonna have a much more likelihood of graduating, which means you have a much more likelihood of getting a job, and that's what we're all about.
We also gave you some guidance around where we thought we'd be in 2027, and Brian will share with you that we basically will be there this year, so a whole year earlier. Things are going really well for us. As I mentioned, we do want to be the best. We've narrowed our focus to do that. For each of the major programs we're in, we wanna be the industry leader. We do that by having this talented instructors. Gina Zaffino, our Head of Academics, is gonna share with you more things that we're doing to further strengthen our instructors. For the most part, lots of people always ask me, most of our instructors are full-time. They're not part-time. They're not adjunct. They're part of the Lincoln fabric, and we continue to invest in them.
We also shared with you the Lincoln 10.0 model, which is the way we're becoming more efficient. It's also the way that we are offering more access for students. 30% of the education is online, and the rest is on ground. We'll share with you it hasn't rolled out yet exactly everywhere. There is a typo on a slide, which is my fault for missing. It does show that we have Lincoln 10.0 in our nursing program, and we don't have it there yet, but it is our expectation to get there. We'll be correcting that slide and reposting that.
We are constantly investing in marketing, and the good news is we're getting a good return on that, and we'll have Scott Minder sharing what he's doing and how we're doing that, because the marketing world is constantly evolving. As long as we continue to get that good return, that enables us to continue to invest, which helps drive our growth. A while back, you know, we struggled to get financing. Brian Meyers had the great idea of liquidating our real estate that we had to build a war chest so we could make investments. Today, our company is thriving. Today, good to say that we have great liquidity. We ended the year with no debt. We have a bank facility that is going to be increasing in size.
We have the wherewithal to continue to grow our business, and frankly, we could accelerate that growth. Finally, you know, it's a highly fragmented market that we're in. We've achieved great growth in the two years since now, but we're still less than 2.5% market share when you look at how many people need to be employed in these fields that we're offering training. Great opportunities for us to continue to grow. We only get there though, as I said, with people. This is my senior management team. Two years ago, the average tenure with Lincoln was 18 years. It's now 17 years. We're bringing in some new talent, but Brian Meyers has been by my side for most of all that time. We brought in Chad Nyce, our COO.
He's been the person driving so much of our growth, the program replications, the new campuses, making sure that we have the quality that we need. We also have here, I mentioned Steve Ace, who's not presenting, but has many years of tenure with us. Steve. Gina Zaffino is also new. She's head of academics. Huge responsibility. She has to make sure that our programs are engaging, that they meet industry needs. She has to make sure that all the faculty members are trained and robust and can engage with our students. She has to make sure that we're compliant in everything that we're doing. Jay Rasmussen is here today. He'll be presenting on admissions. Jay has rich experience, a long time with us. He started off as an admissions person in the high school field.
He became a campus president at one campus president at another campus. We brought him to corporate, and now he leads all of our admissions efforts on the adult side. He has great experience. We also just on the new side, we did bring in a new CIO, and Neal's been helping us, and you'll hear everyone really mention AI since it's a part of everyone's life, and he's really been helping us transform in that area. We also have two other people that aren't on this list who are presenting. We have Scott Minder, who's head of our marketing. Scott's been with us a year and a half. He's been navigating for us the digital environment and doing quite well for us. He'll be sharing who our students are and how he goes out to market.
We also have Jennifer Hash with us. She's been, she reminded me, thankfully, that she's been at Lincoln for over 22 years. She was also in the admissions area, became a senior admissions rep, became a director of admissions, a senior director of admissions, ran as campus president for us in Denver, and then we brought her to corporate. She's bringing that same passion and knowledge and process with admissions is very process-oriented, and she's bringing all that to our career services to make us that much more robust. I'm also fortunate, I think, to have a great board to support us, and we've been able to, I'll say, bring new talent onto our board. Jim Burke has been with us since 1999. He has lots of experience in the for-profit area, but we've also expanded the board.
We have great representation across the board as far as skill sets. We have people that are from education, people in marketing, people from healthcare, people from transportation. As I always like to say, right there in the middle there, Carlton Rose is a graduate of ours from the Indianapolis campus, and he retired two years ago as being president of all of UPS and every piece of equipment that UPS has across the world. A great testament of what people can achieve. What my board has in unison is that they all believe in the power of education. Many of them have been first people in their families to go through post-secondary education and advance their skills. We're all united on that goal.
We always want to be the best, and to be the best, you really have to have quality metrics. These are the three key quality metrics that our accreditor looks for. These are the ones that we're focused on as a company. We're gonna constantly grow our business thoughtfully. At the same time, we're gonna constantly invest to ensure that we can achieve these goals. Right now, we're not at these levels, but we're not far away. For graduation rates, we're in the high 60s%. For placement, we're in the mid-80s% and improving. I put down student recommendation. That's the toughest one, frankly, for us. Our accreditors come in and they survey our students, and they survey a number of questions, and basically they come up with a student satisfaction.
I'm very proud to say that when they survey our students on that metric, it's over 85%. There is one question there, which would you recommend? That number is a little bit less, because that's a little tougher threshold to make, because you might be happy with your education, but would you be so happy that you're gonna recommend someone? That's the one we're driving for. We know if we can get 85% of our students to say, "Yes, I would highly recommend this," we'll be in a good place. We're close, but we're not there yet. To execute, we've been simplifying our business. When you look back at 2011, we had 6 brands. We had 40 different programs.
Of those 40 programs, we had over 169 variations, and we had 250 days throughout the year that a start was taking place at a Lincoln Tech campus. That's a lot to manage, and it's not scalable. We've changed our focus. We've narrowed our focus. We're down to three brands, one of which is Nashville Auto Diesel College. The other two are Lincoln College of Technology, if it's a degree-granting or Lincoln Tech, if it's a non-degree-granting school. We're down to 13 programs with only 35 variations, and as we streamline our nursing program, that will become even less. We only have 20 days in the year when we have a start taking place.
Long story short, we're much more aligned, and we've simplified the business so we can be more scalable, which becomes more efficient for everyone, as well as we want to be the best because quality endures. More people will come to us, keeps us safe from a compliance standpoint, and it makes for a very exciting, dynamic place to work, and people really appreciate that as well. I've been at Lincoln for 25 years, and I really have never seen as aligned organization as we have today, as much opportunity as we have today. It's very exciting as we have here. Our Q1 is a little bit more robust than we were anticipating, which is good news. We're starting off the year ahead of the curve. We're not gonna change any guidance as we speak. We feel very good about things.
As you also know, we're very much a second-half company. We're at the most starts and all of our profitability coming. As the year continues to mature, we'll be revisiting this and obviously adjusting as need be. Overall, things are going very, very well for us, and I feel we're very well positioned. With that, I'm gonna turn the presentation over to Scott Minder, our head of marketing.
Thank you, Scott. Good morning, everyone. As Scott mentioned, my name is Scott Minder. I'm the Vice President of Marketing. Today, I'm gonna cover with you an overview of our total marketing strategy and how marketing working closely with admissions has created a scalable engine for attracting students. I'm also gonna talk about the current demand, our current environment that we're in for demand, who our students are, why they choose Lincoln, and then I'll take you through a typical journey that a student would go through to become a student. Our overall strategy, we're very data-driven, and we look at this from a full funnel strategy.
As our students are exploring things possibly on social media, we wanna be there early in the funnel all the way through to that final decision to become a student. Some of the key drivers we focus on, high intent search, so we're dependent on paid search right now. That is still a big driver and a big channel for us. As these students learn more about these careers and they start to search, we wanna be there in front of those searches. We do a lot of keyword research, so high intent searches are very important. Another driver are the social platforms and video platforms, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok.
Early in this process, when students aren't sure what they wanna do after high school, they start looking on these platforms, we wanna be there. We create content that introduces the trades to them. We create more content to follow them through the entire journey. AI. Like most of you're probably been experimenting with the AI tools and platforms out there. Our students are no different, so we create content that is not only optimized for the search engines, but for the AI models now as well. We're seeing a shift to some extent of people using the AI models for search instead of maybe Google, right? There's a little shift there. We create content that is also optimized for the AI large language models.
Finally, I would say another key driver, retargeting. For those of you who don't know, retargeting is a type of campaign. If you were to come to our website or click on one of our ads and go to a landing page, but you did not fill out a form, we can actually follow you throughout your journey on the internet to different sites with a display ad or, different ways to basically reinforce the Lincoln Tech brand. So we do a lot of that. Our CRM, we're leveraging the tools and technologies there for communication, so a lot of emails go out to our students and SMS. Like most of you, they're carrying a phone in their pocket, so SMS is a very effective way to get in front of them. The demand.
The current environment right now, there is a demand for skilled careers, and that's continuing to rise. Some of the drivers there, obviously, there's shortages for skilled labor that creates not only in the trades, but also in the health sciences. That's a driver for us. The four-year traditional schools, there's a lot of skepticism there. You know, when you look at the cost, some of these four-year degrees can run you $200,000-$300,000 to maybe get a job when you graduate. Skepticism there creates opportunity for the trades. A broader social acceptance, these careers can be very successful. You know, I know two people that have started out HVAC and electrical. Both of them went on to start their own companies.
There are tremendous opportunities moving forward in these long-term careers. Also, there's a lot of infrastructure investment, and then industrial investment need skilled laborers, so that is helping drive demand. At this point, we're not in the situation where we have to create demand. The demand is there. We're trying to capture it as efficiently as possible. When we have to manufacture demand, that is a little more costly. Now we're in a position where we're just trying to capture that as efficiently as we can. As we market to our students, it's important that we know who they are, what motivates them, what drives them, and we try and build personas, student personas for not only every program, but every campus and every campus at every program.
For instance, our campus in Atlanta is vastly different than our campus in Indy from a student population standpoint. We look at each campus, and we build a persona of everything we can find and learn about these students. Helps us know how they think, what's important to them. We create content that resonates with them. This is a sample, an overview of a typical student. High school graduates looking for career alternatives, often balancing life, right? Family, work, financial responsibilities. They're motivated for long-term careers, usually because of those family responsibilities, and they're seeking to improve and increase their income and their economic mobility. We know they spend a lot of time online, you know, 26 hours per week. 98% of them own a smartphone. They're connected.
I won't go through all these stats, but the ones on the left, they're mobile. They watch videos on their phone. They're researching for information on their phone. It's always with them. It's easy for them to just pull something up, search for it, so we wanna create content for that phone. When we shoot video, we're shooting it both ways. We're shooting it vertical for the social platforms, as well as horizontally for YouTube and other channels like that. Streaming. Streaming is now becoming more important. Cable cutters, a lot of people are cutting their traditional cable and using streaming services. Our students are no different. 68%, you see there, streaming, audio streaming, so Pandora, Spotify. Podcasts are also interesting. We're keeping an eye on that. That is growing in importance.
Podcasts have very loyal listeners. They come back to every show, so we're exploring podcasts. Probably all noticed in the last presidential election, there was a lot of money being spent in podcast advertising. Again, a very loyal base that shows up every episode. Social platforms, as you would expect, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, those are the primary social channels. Again, we're creating content on those channels. We're not ignoring the other ones, we just know the students are on TikTok. Again, the channels that grow the most, the fastest-growing, the ones you hear about, that's because of this age group of our potential students. They're the ones making moves as far as increasing the use of these platforms.
When it comes to search is still a very important thing for us. Again, we are seeing some people shifting to AI models, so we're in the process now of going through some focus groups with our students, prospective students, to see how much they're using AI and how they're using it. We're still seeing users in search. Google's the primary one. We do advertise on Yahoo and Bing, but Google is still the primary driver. Why our students choose us. Jay Rasmussen will cover this a little bit more, but we're very student- or career-focused, career outcomes. Career focus training, we work with employers to train how they want their skilled laborers to operate and work within their industries. Hands-on learning, again, they're helping us build practical and modern training programs. I'm sorry.
Next, faster path to careers. Again, we're working with these educators and our employers to get career-ready skills, so as soon as they graduate, they are ready to step into these jobs and roles. Career outcomes, we're very focused on that with our career services team, and we have strong employer relationships that students can see, and that is very important when it comes to career fairs. Most of our campuses, we operate career fairs several times throughout the year. Students have an opportunity to meet employers, potentially interview. The career services team that works with them helps them as far as resumes, interviewing tips, so we are very career-focused. Then finally, this is what a typical journey would look like for our students.
Early on in the process, they may not be sure where they wanna go after high school, what they wanna do. They start looking. They're on their social platforms. They're looking at videos. How we impact that is we create content. We're very much a content-driven department, videos, blogs. Our students, again, are on their phones, so we create a lot of video content. We write content. That's for search engines, for AI models. When they're looking, we wanna be there early in the process, introducing the trades to them. As they start to say, "Okay, this is of interest to me," then they're doing a little more career research. That's where we may show up in search engines. We focus, again, career guides. We'll produce career guides, so when they're looking, those show up.
Our landing pages also speak to the career opportunities that they have. The next step would be looking at schools. Okay, they decided trades are something I'm interested. Maybe it's HVAC, maybe it's electrical. Now where do I go for that training? They start comparing schools. Maybe it's a training program, a certification program. We wanna be there, again, in that moment. We create content focused on that, student success stories. Our retargeting campaigns will show these different opportunities, whether it's a graduate highlighted. We have a lot of former graduates, highlights, success stories. We'll show those in a retargeting ad, brings them back to reinforce this is a strong opportunity for me. The next part comes the enrollment decision. Where do we go from here?
Is Lincoln Tech right for me? In this stage, they may fill out a request for information form. This is where admission enters the conversation, and they do their jobs, working with these students, moving them through the funnel. They may schedule a campus visit, get the students here to see these facilities. When you see these facilities, it makes sense. There's a lot of opportunity, and these are state-of-the-art facilities, so you know you're working with the latest technology. Then finally, from the career launch standpoint, we have graduations, employer placement, industry certifications. Our job, from a career services standpoint, is the end result to get these kids a job, career placement.
Employer partnerships, career services, and our alumni success stories, that's how we get in front and resonate with our students in that point in the journey. That is what a typical journey would look like. Jay is gonna cover a little bit more about why students choose us. On that note, I would like to introduce Jay Rasmussen, our Senior Vice President of Admissions.
Thank you, Scott, and good morning, everyone. I'm the Senior Vice President of Admissions. My name is Jay Rasmussen, and I am the father of a graduate from Lincoln Tech. I get a chance to talk to you a little bit about our people and about our students, which is the most important thing to me. First off, our purpose in admissions is unique because we are not the typical sale business. We don't sell cars, we don't sell boats, we don't sell houses. We sell opportunities to be successful to our students that are looking for a career change and a life change. It's really difficult because a lot of these students have defined success, and they have not achieved their success yet. We get a chance to sell the American dream, which is super cool to think about it for a minute.
We impact not just one student attending, but we impact generations. There's articles out there that say 80% of children whose parents attended a post-secondary education, their children too will attend a post-secondary education at 80%. That's super cool. We impact generations of people. In the end, we provide them with the knowledge to succeed and to be successful in their specific careers. I want to say I'm proud of the work we do in admissions and the help that we provide to our students. It's an honor and a privilege to not only work with our students and each and every one of them, regardless of their challenges, but with all of my employees as well. Let me tell you a little bit about our students, right? We put them in three categories.
They don't need to be, we just choose to put them in three categories. First off, we have 22% of our student body who enroll directly out of high school. Those are our high school students. These are prospects that are currently in high school. They're within one year of graduation, and we put them in two other finer buckets. We call them HSOs and HSPs. It's just how the lead or inquiry comes to us. One, an HSP, is a high school presenter, which they go and they work in the local markets. They do presentations like this with our students in their classrooms in high school, and they collect up inquiries of interested students, and then they reach out to them and attempt to recruit them. On the other side, we have the HSO side.
These are the students that find us just like the adult does through the marketing efforts that Scott and team provide. They locate us, we collect up their inquiry, and then we put them through the process. Our adult side makes up about 73% of our overall student body. This is our biggest portion. It's the most successful portion. These students have graduated high school and are out in the working field traditionally, and they've discovered that they are not where they want to be in life. A lot of our students thought, "I'm going to try it this way. I'm going to try a traditional school. I'm going to try a traditional four-year school. I'm going to go to work. I'm going to do whatever." They've discovered that this isn't suiting their definition of success. They look to us to help them be successful.
Many of them have spent a lot of time in the workforce, and it just isn't working in their favor. They're losing ground. The last part, which I am a veteran as well, I served 12 years on active duty and served in Desert Storm and Desert Shield, is 5% of our students. Many of you know this is how we grew up as Lincoln Tech, servicing veterans returning from war and giving them a skill set that they could use to enter the civilian workforce. I'm proud of this part, and I want this to be a bigger part of Lincoln Tech. Our veterans, although only about 5% of our students right now, as we now have our curriculum approved to accept those students based on government regulations, we'll look to expand that a little bit.
Veterans have a lot of the skill sets that we look for. The working world and business world like a veteran. They have good skills, work ethic, responsibility, loyalty, et cetera. They don't have the skill set that mirrors up with industry or the business world in the civilian life. Look at their career fields. They don't always line up. We're here to help them. These are our applications. Our applications, we call them enrollments or applications. Obviously, you can see from the chart on the left that our demand is robust, and admissions, it still needs to guide our students through the process, however. Even though we have robust applications, there are students that have fear, uncertainty, and even sometimes self-esteem issues with attending. I look at us as the caretakers.
We're the ones that are going to help them solve all their challenges. It can be as simple as transportation and getting back and forth to school. It can be as difficult as, "How am I going to pay for this? I need to find a second job," et cetera. We're going to help them solve those smaller issues that prevent them from attending and graduating. Obviously, the application is a critical first step, and it actually shows their first piece of commitment in the process. Some of our applicants have challenges that get in the way of attending. These can be life challenges, a flat tire, an accident with a car, a hospitalization of a family member. These challenges are real, and they get in the way. We call these life challenges.
Our prospects, however, also must complete several other tasks to attend, financial aid, background checks, testing, et cetera, and they all are different based on program. Our application trends and our inquiry trends show strong growth year-over-year. Here's a look at it by our channels. As I explained earlier, we talked about our veteran students, our adult students, and our high school students. As you can see, all of our channels are growing at a similar rate. However, new campuses will contribute to some of our overall growth, but we also need to ensure that we have organic growth. We're looking at the high school and the veteran channels as high opportunities for us at the moment.
They both give us a chance to delve into fields, add some investment, and increase oversight as well as personnel, and we can see growth in those two channels. We do know that our adult program will have to hold down, as it is now, the bulk of the load, but we have some areas of opportunity for our future. This will also, by adding staff to these channels, it'll provide a broader awareness of our Lincoln story, and I believe we should share it with everybody everywhere. Actually, the mic guy, I tried to get a RGR from him and see if he had somebody who wanted to go to school. We should share it daily with everybody, and I will. Let's talk about our start trends over time. The two charts show obviously extreme growth over the last few years.
Our inquiry flow, the bottom chart, obviously positive, and also, as Scott had mentioned earlier, we're projecting a pretty good quarter here in the Q1 , somewhere around 19%-20% growth. Since COVID, our starts have accelerated, and you can see that from the charts. We've added some increased capacity to support that. Obviously, new campuses, new program offerings, replications will help us. Market conditions are positive. Scott mentioned this, and so did Mr. Shaw. They're moving in our direction. We have favorable press now, the positive media exposure that we get. We have the K through twelve institutions that talk about us differently. We're not the last resort. You know, we're looked at as an opportunity for students to go get a professional career and enter the workforce.
Our inquiry trends have exceeded our expectations, and they continue to show positive momentum in 2025, and we expect that to continue. Let me talk a little bit about what keeps me awake at night. I need to make sure that our admissions team are successful for the future. What that means is I need to ensure that the six drivers are key to keeping our success. When we grow at rates like we're growing, the numbers are important, but the people are also important that drive those numbers, and it's my job to ensure that they're doing it successfully. I need to work on culture and keep our culture happy, keep our culture working positively. I need to make good quality decisions along the way. We need to have a durable team, meaning it's durability for time, and not only that, but work-life balance.
We need to continue to develop our employees and train our leaders, build trust, and then we need to define what success is for them and what that metric is. We're looking to ensure that our team stays healthy and active. Obviously, AI has been a big talk of the town recently, and so we're gonna leverage some of the AI world as well. We're dipping our toe in, and we're looking at certain things. Some of these we're using, some of these we're just testing. We're looking at a website search, and what that would be is just like ChatGPT, you go on and you ask a question, and it gives you the answer.
Instead of filtering through 500 pages on my website, you can just ask the question, "What does it cost to go to Mahwah for the automotive program?" It'll give you an answer. We currently do call monitoring. Call monitoring will flag issues with our reps, and we search to make sure that they're staying compliant with what they're saying with the applicants. It also can identify trends that may be positives, things that we're saying right, things that help, things that maybe a new market is looking at and wanting to hear about. We're looking at a rep assistant. Rep assistant could be someone that's just standby. You have a question as a rep, you wanna know about a policy or procedure, specific applicant, you can ask that rep assistant and get some help. We also right now are doing self-scheduling.
We're seeing great opportunities here. Many of us have probably purchased something online. I remember when I got my first computer, someone said, "You'll buy things online someday." I said, "Heck no, I'm not buying anything online. I would never buy anything online." You know, now we buy a car and houses online. I think some of our students wish to be self-serviced that way as well, and they would like to go through the process alone with our support, obviously, in the back. We'd never leave them on the caretaking side. Anyone that applies, anyone that would enroll, anyone that would take our program with a more self-service centered process would obviously have our caretaking. We're also gonna do caretaking through videos and sending letters and automations that we're currently using. The last part is self-service.
As I mentioned earlier, I'd like them to have the ability to walk through the entire process as they see fit through the admissions process and financial aid if they wanna do it by themselves. Growth in 2026 and beyond. As the trades continue to gain favorable press and growing support from the K through twelve leaders, we intend to capture some of this momentum and positive reinforcement from outside of our institutions. The things we've been saying for years are now finally being heard. High school, we'll continue increasing our investment on that side of the house. We'll be adding oversight. We'll be adding staff members, and we're expecting that channel to grow. On the adult side, that's our core program.
It's obviously delivered solid results over the past 10 years, and on a same-school basis, it's grown our student population to its highest level ever. This is a highly functioning team, and we'll continue to benefit from their results overall. We still need to continue to rely on them for durability, drive, and consistency. As I said earlier, our veterans, obviously, we have some opportunity there now that our curriculum is approved, and we are gonna add some oversight and some staffing to cover those parts. With that, I'm pleased at what our admissions team is doing. I'm proud of everything they do on a daily basis, and I'm honored to be a head of a team that gets to effectuate change every single day. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Gina Zaffino, Senior Vice President of Education.
Hello, good morning. I'm Gina Zaffino. I'm our Senior Vice President of Education. I'm gonna talk a little bit about our graduation trends. As Scott said, we've maintained graduation trends in the high sixties, except for our COVID year, but we've maintained in the high sixties, close to 70%. You can see in 2025, we've dipped just a little bit. That's because of all of our amazing growth and trying to keep up with demand. We've put some excellent strategies in place to help turn that corner. If you see in our blue chart over here, you can see early indicators are showing that we're already having a positive trend in graduation with our latest February graduation rates being the highest so far. I wanna talk a little bit about those strategies.
Some of the things we've done in the department is, one, we've put a lot of efficiencies in for flexibility and reduced administrative burdens. Our standardized academic delivery, our hybrid model, offers our students a lot of flexibility, but we've also standardized our structure and our operations to reduce administrative burden so our campus personnel can focus on students. Part of our standardized structure is we've put in dedicated retention coaches at every one of our locations. These are individuals who are focused on academic success, helping to identify early at-risk indicators for students, helping with advising, making targeted approaches for outreach strategies. Their goal is really to help our students be academically successful.
In addition to this, we've put in dedicated student services at every one of our campuses, and these are really people that help with the non-academic needs, and it's really the non-academic needs that challenge our students more than the academics. It's life. It could be transportation, as Jay said. It could be health issues. It could be childcare. It could be all the things going on in their world. So we've put folks in to help them with resources, whether it's financial literacy or helping them find transportation, but we have dedicated people now to help them with their non-academic needs. One of the other things, and I'll talk a little bit more in my presentation, that we've done is put stronger emphasis on our faculty.
In addition to our students' life's challenges, we're competing every day with all the busyness of their life that they wanna make a choice to come into our doors every single day. They don't have to walk in every day. Our faculty are the closest people to our students, so it's very important that we have very engaging, caring, trained faculty. We've put a very robust faculty training and development plan in place, which I will talk about more. Our campus equipment. Last year, we did a big investment in all of our campus equipment to make sure that our students are learning on the most innovative, modern campus equipment. You'll see when you tour the campus today, because having good equipment makes the classroom more engaging. It makes it fun. It makes it exciting. It makes our students want to be here.
This chart's just showing you basically where we're at with our hybrid completion. This is the one Scott referred with. There's a little typo. Nursing is not a check mark yet. That's a 2027. That's in progress, so we'll fix that slide and get that sent back out. Basically, it's showing you everything that is complete as far as our hybrid model. You'll see that we have our new campuses listed. Obviously, they are not in the hybrid model yet. They're not built yet. Also the other one that we're working on is our Connecticut schools. You'll see East Windsor, New Britain, and Shelton. We will be rolling their skilled trades into the hybrid model this summer. The four elements of basically our instructional model are discovery. We give our students pre-assigned work to do at home.
This is part of their asynchronous work that they do at home, and this is where they can use simulations, gamification. What we want them to do is we, you know, we know our students are used to being on phones playing. What we want them to do is do some of their own discovery, figure out some of their learning their own way by doing games. It's sort of a virtual way of doing some of the hands-on stuff. They come to school the next day. This is where they'll get a discussion and a demo from their teacher. Teacher will go over anything that's challenging or maybe they need some more help on in their homework.
From there, they go right out to the shop, and they spend the majority of their time now taking what they learned in their simulations and in their demos, and now they're putting their hands on the real stuff and doing it. Then, of course, we have assessments to assess whether or not they are effectively learning. One of the areas that we've really invested in a lot of time and resources is developing our instructors. Like I said, our instructors have the closest touchpoints to our students, and they're with them the longest. In our industry, we're generally hiring people who are tradespeople, who we put right into the classroom as instructors, and they don't always have instructional training. They may have been training on the job for 20 years, but being in a classroom with 25 students is very different.
We've developed two really good programs. I'll say too, you know, even talking to other educators in our same space, this is one of the biggest challenges, is training trades folks, men and women, to be teachers in the classroom. We've developed two things. One is what I would say is one of the best programs out there, our onboarding program, which is a little bit of a boot camp for new instructors. What it does is it mimics our hybrid model. It's five weeks, and we have our teachers do pre-assigned work, demos, synchronous, asynchronous, and then we put them in the classroom. We give them one year of ongoing training, but that five-week boot camp is how we really turn them into instructors.
We've also developed a program that we call Ladders, which is a growth path and compensation program for our instructors, meaning we have certain metrics in there where they can get better, they can enhance their own skills, and as they get better student outcomes, we have growth paths for them. We rolled these things out last year. We've had a huge increase in, or I should say decrease in turnover, but we've had a huge impact on faculty turnover, and good trained faculty make for a much better student experience. This is just a picture of some of our cutting-edge tools and equipment. When you do your tour today, you'll be able to put your hands on some of this stuff, but this is some of our automotive trainers.
You can see very modern, very cutting edge. When you go out and look at it, you might wanna touch them. That's what we want our students to do, put their fingers on things and touch them. Our equipment's very fun. I myself like to play on it. Of course, we're also leveraging AI in education.
We have right now what we call our AI Study Buddy, which, when our students are doing their asynchronous work, this gives them real-time targeted feedback that gives them instantaneous feedback, letting them know where they need to study more, what they got wrong, and it actually shows them where to go in their studies, whether it's their simulations or their books, to actually improve on those skills for better student outcomes and better, you know, a better academic success. Basically, you know, our commitment is really to support the whole student, just beyond instruction, right? We want a holistic model. We know our students have challenges. We know they come to us to change their lives. We want our students to stay with us. We want them to graduate. We want them to get jobs.
Our model is to give them a great classroom experience, the best faculty. We want modern tools and equipment that are gonna mimic what they're gonna do in the real world. We want good advising and support, and we want to help them with all their non-academic needs. We wanna help them with their outreach or through our outreach strategies. We wanna help them get the resources they need to remove barriers and obstacles so that they can come here every day, graduate, and get a job. We remind our students why they came to us, why they're here. We know why we're here. We talk about it all the time. Our whole leadership team knows why we're here. Our job is to remind them why they're here and to remove as many obstacles as we can so they can graduate.
With that, I will turn it over to Jennifer Hash, VP of Career Services.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Jenn Hash, VP of Career Services, and I'm excited to share with you what we do in Career Services at Lincoln Tech. As Jay mentioned before, we're in a unique business. We do not sell a product. Our graduates are actually our product. They are the measurement of our impact and our success. Our customers are our employers, our employer partners that have critical workforce needs, and they're looking for that skilled, job-ready talent, and we're the bridge between education and opportunity in Career Services. We're the last touchpoint between our students and our employers as we go from their preparation at Lincoln Tech into placement. With placement, every placement, it doesn't just impact that student.
We're impacting families, we're impacting our workforce, we're impacting our communities, and we're also changing the trajectory of that student's life with that career and that opportunity. What we've seen over the years is, the traditional route is a great route for some, but it's not the route for everyone. Having the support of K through 12 now, we hear the need, the skilled trades gap, that's what we are here to do to help assist with that. Our success over the years. We have increased our graduates, 45% over the last decade. We had over 11,000 graduates across our campuses last year, and our highest placement rate on record of 82.8%, and we're very proud of that. It's everybody at the campuses working together to make that happen.
When you look at how we place graduates, this is something I wanna emphasize. It's not just placing them in a job. We have to place them in their program of study. We're looking for them to be able to use their education and place them in a career that uses that education throughout their time, and that's something that sets us apart and we're very proud of. It's something that's definitely different than the traditional route. Now growing, we also have to grow our staff. We've grown our staff 18% over the last two years. We have over 100 dedicated career services personnel at our various campuses, and we're doing this because we are in the people business. We still need to build those relationships with our students as well as our employers.
With our students, you know, they come into us, and they have a little bit of lack of self-confidence. Even though they build their skills throughout their time at Lincoln Tech, their confidence doesn't always build with that. Our career services advisors are there to help guide them along the way. We also did put in a new industry relations division last year in Career Services, and the reason for that is we are growing. We are 22 campuses. We continue to grow, and we need to make sure we have a national footprint on our employer partners. We are very good at our employer partnership at the local level, and so we're bringing this to the national level. Also, When Jay talked about admissions, we're not just recruiting students to come to Lincoln Tech that live in the areas that we have campuses.
We're recruiting nationwide, so having those nationwide employer partnerships are very important to us. Our Employer Link. This is our national premier partners. These are employers that want to give back to Lincoln. They also want to be in front of our students very early in their education. These employer partners, they'll have tuition reimbursement, scholarships, early hire opportunities, and donations to our campuses to make that partnership stronger. How Career Services prepares. We do not start at graduation. We start at the very beginning. At enrollment, our career services advisors are working with students through orientation throughout their entire life cycle.
How we work with them, resume writing, interview prep, education management. We wanna make sure that they understand what the workforce is looking for because we can give students all the skills in the world, but if they can't interview and apply for a job and showcase their skills, they're not gonna receive that opportunity. That is what our Career Services department does. Our curriculum, we're in alignment with what's going on in industry. We have advisory board meetings that look at what does the industry need, and if we need to change our curriculum, we will do that. Education and career services are in lockstep with each other. Our instructors know what our employers are looking for.
Our career service advisors know what is going on in our classrooms, so we can portray that to our industry partners. The focus on professionalism. Again, we can train on skills. We are very good at that at Lincoln Tech. But our employers are looking for professionalism. They're looking for students that can show up to work. They're looking for reliability, that critical thinking, being able to have that the communication with employers and with customers. Most of our students or graduates, they're going to go into areas where they're actually focused with customers. HVAC technicians, you've all had them in your homes. They're usually selling you something. We need to make sure that they can have that those conversations with their customers. Those are the types of things that we do all throughout career services.
It doesn't stop at graduation. We are going to work with our graduates through their placement as well as if they want to upskill, if they're changing locations, we will work with them throughout their lifetime. The demand, obviously it is there. We focus on three essential industries, skilled trades, transportation, and healthcare. With skilled trades, you have your HVAC technicians, your electricians, your welders, and those are a broad area. HVAC, yes, you have your commercial and your residential, but you also have the chillers at the grocery store that keep your perishable foods cold. You need HVAC technicians for that. Your electrical, you know, we think of electricians, but even everybody here today, that's the low voltage side of it.
You're looking for people to keep your infrastructure with home theater networks, fire alarm systems, security systems. That's all within our electrical program. Then welding. Our infrastructure, it's old here. We have to make sure we're building our infrastructure up. Definitely that skilled trades gap, we're filling that with our graduates. Transportation has always been a core with Lincoln Tech, with automotive dealerships, independent shops, collision repair, diesel fleets, again, filling that gap. Then healthcare. Healthcare is not going away. It's accelerating. We have an aging workforce as well as we have many people that need this service, so having those allied healthcare individuals in patient care. We talk about AI. These are things that AI cannot take away. You're not gonna have a robot working on an HVAC system at somebody's house.
You're not gonna have for allied health, you need that patient care. You need that individual touch. We're in a recession-proof industry as well as we're in an AI-proof industry. Our employers, they come back to us because we do have a long history. 80 years at Lincoln Tech. We have graduates that are ready day one. These aren't graduates that need to, they're able to go into an entry-level job with skills and know what they're doing. We also have 10 graduations a year, so we're able to supply graduates out into the workforce all throughout the year and not those two times a year, and definitely a proven track record with what we've done. Strategic focus. One of the things we look at is where are these industries evolving and the sectors that are evolving.
We're focused on mission-critical industries supporting those 24/7 operations, including data centers. Our electrical and HVAC programs align directly with what is gonna be needed in these industries. The partnerships with high demands, working with new types of industries like AV integrator industries that don't understand that we have the talent that can support their job needs. The national approach is consistent. We wanna make sure that every graduate at every one of our campuses, whether it's Nashville, Denver, New Jersey, that they have the same opportunities of all of our other graduates, as well as our employers have that same opportunity no matter where we're at. Our programs definitely align with what is needed in the industry, and we are able to change if we need to, depending on market research.
The great part about this is our graduates are positioned for high-demand, high-wage careers with long-term growth potential. Lincoln Tech has always focused on this. We have always focused on the trades, transportation, healthcare. We didn't just get into this because this is something that's hot right now. This is something that's our backbone and core. With that, I would like to bring up Chad Nyce, our COO.
Thank you, Jen. Thank you everybody for coming out today. As the newest member of the senior leadership team, I feel that I have a very unique perspective on the world. I've worked for some really great companies. I was with Strategic Education for about 12 years, and I also worked for Fidelity Investments and also Goldman Sachs. If it's not obvious to you guys, this is a special place. What makes this place extremely special is there are six things that need to be in existence for greatness to happen, and the first three are you need to be at the right place at the right time with the right offering. Check, check. So is everybody else in our space. They're all at the right place at the right time with the right offering.
What makes this place different is we have a simple plan that's easy to understand. We have an exceptional management team. We have the ability to execute, and we've proven that over and over again, and that's what makes this place really special. I'm gonna talk a little bit about our growth strategy. We don't have a fancy name for it because it doesn't need to have a fancy name for it 'cause it's simple. It's four very simple things that we're doing. We're gonna continue to build new campuses, just like the one you see here, and for those of you that attended our investor day in East Point back in 2024, just like the East Point campus. We have a simple model that we replicate over and over and over again, and it's very consistent in its outcomes and its performance.
We will continue to replicate our most in-demand programs. These are the most in-demand programs with the best outcomes, also with the best financial outcomes, and we'll put them everywhere that we don't have them, where we have space to do it. We can only do that for so long, 'cause eventually you'll run out of places and space to put those. The one that most companies overlook when they're growing is an eye on organic growth. Not only are we growing our new programs, not only are we growing our new locations, but our core business is very, very healthy, and Brian will talk a little bit more about that. The good news about our core business is it's not even close to being at capacity, and I'll talk a little bit more about this on a future slide.
We're only running at about 57% of our capacity. If we didn't build any more buildings, and we didn't do anything else, but we just figured out a way to fill all the open capacity we have, we're only about halfway full, just a little bit halfway. We could almost double the size of the company without changing our footprint, and that's a really unique position. The way we're planning on doing that is we're gonna increase our marketing efforts that we've been doing. We've made a large investment in our high school recruitment. In fact, we actually have our high school recruitment leaders, Jeff Mickey and Anthony, sitting over here on the right-hand side. So they're the ones that are driving our new high school recruitment programs.
We've made also investments in military, and Jay talked a little bit about that. That's a huge opportunity for Lincoln Tech. It's core to who we've always been. It's how we started, and there's a lot of opportunity there to serve way more veterans than we have. We're also seeking degree granting in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York, and that's also gonna help us better serve the veterans as well as the ability down the road to potentially offer RN. When you look at our portfolio, when you just group our programs into the three simplistic groups they are, which is healthcare, transportation, and skilled trades, you can see that skilled trades makes up the bulk of who we are and what we do. 5-7 years ago, that wasn't the case. We were a transportation school.
The skilled trades have grown and grown, and the popularity has grown and grown. The area that we're gonna focus on in this sector is healthcare, and Jen touched a little bit on that in her comments. Scott has talked about that our nursing program, our LPN program, isn't as profitable as we'd like it to be. We're working on that, and we have a plan in place of exactly how we're gonna do that. Once we prove to ourself and others that it's as profitable as we want it to be, we're gonna replicate it, and that'll become one of the program replication programs you'll see show up in that second box. Now I wanna talk a little bit about our instructional model.
Those who were with us in 2024 saw these slides before at East Point, and Scott has talked about this in numerous of the earnings call, and this is what ultimately led to our what we call our Lincoln 10.0 model. Our legacy model was very simple. It was a 100% residency model. Students came to school five days a week, six and a half hours a day, and they studied with us. There were a lot of limitations with that model. One is it takes a lot of time and commitment for students. They have to be with us six and a half hours a day, five days a week. Jay talked a lot about the fact that the bulk of our students are adult learners. These are people that have lives. They have bills. They have families.
They need to work. To have them locked up in a building learning for 6.5 hours is time away from earning money that they need to do that while they're going to school. The other thing that it didn't allow us to do is provide much scalability and efficiency with our instructional model. Think about this. If you have 3 shifts a day, and two of them are at 6.5 hours, and this evening shift is at 3 hours, to teach one cohort, you would need at minimum 2.5 faculty to teach just one cohort or more likely 3 full-time faculty, and that's just not scalable. Like, in my world, any time you scale, you start to be able to bend that cost curve of cost.
We call it the cost to teach one student in one month. This model never gave you that scalability 'cause you can only have so many students. You'd have to have one professor, and it was a fixed ratio. We went to what we lovingly know, we did put a marketing name on this one, Lincoln 10.0. The reason why it was called 10.0 is when we designed it, we want it to be 10 times better than what we had before. What this model does is, this is our current hybrid learning model, and essentially students come to school four days a week, not five days a week. They have eight hours of online learning, and they have four days that they come for four hours per day.
From a student perspective, this gives them all day Friday, all day Saturday, all day Sunday to work, or it gives them, because they're only in school for 4 hours a day, 4 days a week, it gives them alternative times to work in the morning, afternoon, evening. It gives them that flexibility. For Lincoln Tech, what this allows us to do is because it's only 4 hours of teaching, now in this world, you could take one instructor and have him teach the morning cohort, have that same instructor teach the afternoon cohort. Now you could teach this same cohort of students with a minimum of one and a half faculty or let's say two full-timers, so way more efficient. Over the past few years, we have gotten a lot of efficiency out of this model.
We've driven a lot of cost efficiency out of here. This has been a real game changer. Not to mention, to recruit and retain faculty, this has been a very effective tool for Gina and her team because now we're trying to convince people that have access to unlimited overtime who are paid extremely well out in the field to come and teach and maybe not make quite as much. Now we can at least say to those people, "Well, the nice thing is you have a three-day weekend every single weekend. You're teaching four days a week, Monday through Thursday. If you wanna go out in industry and supplement your income with that, you can go ahead and do that.
If you're further along in your career and you wanna do this more as kinda your retirement career, this is a great opportunity." This was a game changer for the organization in driving efficiency. Now, I just wanna talk a little bit about this capacity to further explain this. The way we think about capacity is, you could just say we could take every single classroom we have. Let's assume every classroom at Lincoln Tech and every campus had exactly 30 seats. We could do the math and say, well, there's 30 seats times X number of classrooms times 3 shifts a day, and that would be your theoretical max capacity, right? But that's not practical, so we developed a practical capacity model, and we said, "Okay, we're not gonna fill 100% of the seats for all 3 shifts.
That's probably unrealistic." Let's say it's 80%. Let's call that our practical capacity limit. What these charts show is how much capacity we have by shift just based on our practical capacity limiting everything to 80%. Our morning shift is our busiest shift, so we're at three-quarters capacity throughout our system right now. Our afternoon has a lot of capacity. We're only at 38%, and our evening is at 51%, and when you sum it all up, we're at 57%. If we ever got into a situation which we haven't done yet, we don't do anything Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We could start to run weekend cohorts if we wanted to. Right now, they're at 0 capacity because we don't utilize the buildings.
If you extrapolate all that out, our actual capacity based on our 80% practical capacity, we're only running at about a third of what we could do. If we could fill up all the seats and do weekends, we could triple our business in our exact footprint, without adding one more building. That just gives a little bit more insight to that. Then this is another way to kind of visualize over on the right-hand side. Our class size ratio is currently running at 18 to 1. Before Lincoln 10.0, it was roughly at about 12 to 1. That shows the efficiency we've driven out of running this hybrid model and really focusing on filling the shifts and the seats.
We have, you know, again another 12 students that we could put in and again fill up capacity. If you think about that, the extra margin of each incremental student is really the cost of acquisition. It's basically consumable costs, and it's a fraction of the teacher cost. Said more simply, it's about 85-90 cents on the dollar fall straight to the bottom line for each incremental student that you add in there. There's a lot of leverage in this business. Even in my previous life at Strategic Ed, there's a ton of leverage. The beauty is there's a lot of upside, great leverage when you're going up, and when you're coming down, the leverage gets de-leveraged really fast. It's a highly leveraged business.
You know, Scott, I know Brian will talk a little bit more about, you know, kinda our revenue projections and our EBITDA projections, but we've made a lot of progress with our margins. You know, you might be looking at our current midpoint guidance. I know some of you have asked questions around this, that, hey, it looks kinda like what it was last year. You know, we'd mentioned that we've made big investments in high school and military and things like that. You know, that was all before we started talking about what our Q1 is now shaping up to be. I'm sure over time we'll provide a little bit more guidance around that as well.
While we're executing our very simplistic four-point strategy, which doesn't have a marketing name, we are also focused on non-Title IV sources. We're doing this for a few reasons that should be obvious to everyone. One is we always have to be conscientious of 90/10, and we need to be good stewards of the organization that's been here for 80 years, and we will continue to do that and look for opportunities to drive 10-side money. We're also looking to do things to lower the cost of education for our students, which also coincidentally help on the 90/10. More importantly, they help our students and lower the cost it costs to come to Lincoln Tech.
The third area that we are strategically focused on is workforce training. This is stuff outside of core Lincoln Tech and what we do. This is companies coming to us saying, "Hey, we have a need. You guys teach in these areas, and we have a group of people that have this skill set, and they need this skill set, and we're not in the education business. You guys are. Can you come on site, and can you teach this workforce that has this skill set and get them to here?" We have different relationships, like with Container Management Corporation and a newer one with New Jersey Transit, where we're doing exactly that, and we'll continue to pursue those opportunities. The very last thing I wanted to talk about is just our high school share program.
This works very similar to what is done between high schools and community colleges, commonly known as dual enrollment programs in the traditional higher ed space. The way our program works is, we have relationships with high schools, mainly in New Jersey, at least as of right now, but we're working on others around the country, where students go to a traditional school, meaning their high school in the morning and do their gen eds. Think of it like a lot of us are probably my age, Gen Xers. I was gonna say Gen Z, but I'm not a Gen Z, I'm an X. We would have known it as you go to vo-tech in the afternoon. Well, those vo-tech schools are all gone.
What they do is instead of sending them to historically would have been known as vo-tech schools, they bus the kids to our school in the afternoon, and those students attend our, like, automotive program in the afternoon. During their junior year, they'll amass 3 of the 11 classes that are required in, let's say, the automotive program, and then your senior year, they'll complete the next 3 classes. This is all paid for by the school district. The school district pays us pretty much the same price we would have gotten for our retail tuition.
The benefit for the students is that when they graduate, not only do they get their high school diploma, but now they're a little bit over halfway through a Lincoln Tech program, and all they have to do is enroll at Lincoln Tech, complete five programs for less than half the price, and they're on their way in less than half the time it would have taken if they would have graduated and gone the traditional route. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Brian Meyers to finish up on the finance side. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. I'd like to start by recapping the plan we laid out that we outlined in our last Investor Day in March of 2024. At that Investor Day, we laid out that we're projecting to have 2027 revenue of $540 million. Our midpoint of our 2026 guidance has us at $585 million. We're already a year ahead of schedule and $45 million more than what we were projecting to do in 2027. All three of our growth drivers are doing well for us. We're getting nice growth from our base, from our new programs at our new campuses and our campus relocations.
For adjusted EBITDA, the 2027 projection has been restated for our new guidance that now just adds back non-cash stock-based compensation. That new number is $78 million we said we were gonna do for 2027, and our 2026 midpoint of our guidance has us at $74 million. We're already 95% there, you know, a year earlier. It's what's important to note that in 2025, we opened up our new Houston school, opened up in Q4, and then we also relocated our Nashville school, this school and our Levittown school. As they begin to scale in 2026, it'll really help us easily exceed that 2027 number. We are showing strong growth in all our guidance metrics. Our EBITDA is growing 30%.
Our net income is growing at 8%. Our net income is lagging a little bit to our EBITDA growth, and that's due to our depreciation expense from our recent growth initiatives. As those growth initiatives scale up, we should start seeing the same level of growth from our net income as we are from our EBITDA as well. We are projecting to have about $72 million of CapEx, and it's important to note that 70% of that is for our growth initiatives, our new campuses of $51 million. On this slide, 2025 has been restated. The numbers do reflect our new guidance methodology, which adds back again non-cash stock-based compensation. We did have a one-time item in 2025 for pension expense.
Now for our first growth driver, which is our organic growth. As you heard earlier, you know, that we are benefiting from the macro environment where growing interest in skilled trades, people are questioning. I think Scott mentioned that people are questioning a four-year college education, the value there, as well as, you know, for AI, that it's impacting a lot of the white-collar jobs. Our model that I'll show in a little bit, it does assume a very, I would say, a conservative 5% growth in our base. And what is
I would like to let you know what our base is or what we call organic growth that Chad was saying is just campuses that were open prior to our March 2024 Investor Day. When we talk about our organic growth, we're talking about all campuses that were open as of March 2024. That's what we're calling our organic growth. Our model does assume a 5% growth, and we'll get that from 2%-3% tuition increases, higher enrollments. As you know, Chad mentioned, we have a lot of capacity at our campuses. When we start increasing our population, we'll start getting great operating leverage. We'll start, you know, as Gina mentioned and Chad, rolling out our hybrid learning model.
We'll still get efficiencies from that. We do, as Scott said earlier, that we are thinning down our programs, so we're constantly looking at programs at our existing campuses that are underperforming to put them, you know, to replace them with higher demand, more profitable programs. Our second growth is coming from our new campuses that we announced in our campus relocations. We have announced, you know, four new campuses and two campus relocations. All the ones that launched have been performing very strong for us. We did invest, you know, make capital investments in these campuses of $140 million, all of which will be paid for by the end of 2026.
Additionally, on our new campus, excluding our East Point campus, they all at 2025, on a combined basis, they had negative EBITDA of $7 million. As you scale up, you can see that it will have some nice growth there. All these campuses, as they scale up from 2025, they should be producing another $100 million worth of revenue, and all these campuses combined should have about $50 million worth of EBITDA. One thing I want to mention is the strong performance of our East Point campus. East Point campus opened in Q1 of 2024, and by the Q3 , it already reached positive EBITDA.
What we thought it was gonna do, what we projected it to do in 2027, it did that in 2 years earlier in 2025, reaching $8 million worth of EBITDA. That was very strong for us. Based on, you know, the strong performance of our recent launches, we do have a new campus model, based on the success of our launches. A couple of things I wanna point out is that for our new campus openings, it takes us 21 months from lease signing to opening up a new campus. In the model, year one is 9 months of pre-opening, and year two is 12 months. That's how you come up with the 21 months from lease signing to having starts. Each new campus will cost us between $20 million and $25 million.
All our growth initiatives that we do internally, we try to have a minimum return on our investment of 20%. Our new campuses have been producing more like 30%. We're getting a very nice strong return on our new campus. Our third area of growth, which you heard from Chad, that we're looking to build two new campuses a year. We're looking to spend between $50 million and $55 million each year. You know, and building out to two new campuses is flexible depending on market demand and site availability. It is a little bit fluid. But again, we're looking to spend about $50 million-$55 million each year. All that is looking to be self-funded.
By 2030, our future new campuses, you'll see, are projected to produce about $90 million worth of revenue and about $20 million worth of EBITDA. Our startup costs for each of these campuses in each year is about $10 million of losses in each year. That will all be included in our EBITDA. Now for our revenue, our revenue plan for 2030. Our midpoint of our guidance for 2026 is at $585 million, and we're planning on getting to $850 million by 2030 from those three growth drivers of, our campus relocations and new campuses that were already announced, our organic growth, and our future new campuses.
By the end of 2026, including our Hicksville campus, that's gonna be opened up in Q4 of this year. We'll end this year with 23 campuses. Our next new campus will be in Q1 of 2027, which will be our Rowlett, Texas campus. We'll have 24 open campuses. You could see that, you know, just the middle red box there, that just shows all our growth initiatives announced to date, all our new campuses and our campus relocations. You know, we are gonna have future new campuses, but even without that, we'll be able to still do $760 million. Each year, we're projecting to have a 10% growth year-over-year.
For adjusted EBITDA growth, right now at the midpoint for 2026, our midpoint is at $74 million, and we're looking to more than double that to $150 million by 2030. That's an annual growth rate of 20% each year. You could see that, you know, even without any future new campuses, we'll still grow by 90% at $140 million. Again, that middle bar, it just is all campuses that were announced to date and all growth initiatives. That's why it only has 24 new campuses. Now our future new campuses that by 2030 we're hoping to sign nine new leases and open up six additional campuses.
You know, as Chad mentioned, you know, we right now we're projecting to have about a 13% margin, and we're looking to grow that margin each year by 150 basis points to 18%. You could see where we're getting the growth from, the relocations, the new campuses, our organic growth and our future campuses. By 2030, we're looking to triple from what we're projecting to be for 2026, triple our net income to $60 million. Also almost triple our diluted EPS to $1.90. Each year, we're looking to spend about $75 million-$80 million in CapEx, which $50 million-$55 million will be related to our new campus build-out.
We're gonna continue to have a very strong balance sheet where we'll by 2030 be generating over $50 million worth of free cash flow. We should have over $100 million of cash on hand. Each year from 2026 to 2030, we might have to borrow during the year, but we're projecting right now to have no borrowings at any year-end because we're very seasonal. In the second half of the year, we do generate a lot of cash. We're projecting to have no borrowings at year-end. I think as Scott mentioned, we're very well positioned right now to more than double our existing credit facility to spark some of our future growth. With that, I'll turn it back over to Scott.
Thanks, Brian. I think you can see that we have a lot of great momentum. I really do believe that this is a great time for Lincoln. No one else has our longevity, our 80-year history. No one else has been in the trades as long as we've been in the trades. We do provide a quality product, and we're gonna be constantly focused on that. We wanna drive profitability, but we wanna drive our outcomes. That's gonna lead to long-term success for us. We are constantly having more people come to us. There's more interest, whether it's employers, as like Jennifer Hash mentioned, or it's frankly the high schools that for years kept us out, and now they want to embrace us. There's a lot of new opportunities ahead for Lincoln Tech.
Given the strong balance sheet that we have, we are well positioned to continue to grow our business. At the end of the day, I do believe that our people are the difference. We're gonna continue to make investments to make sure that we hold on to our people, give them great futures, and really make them, as happy as can be, because happy employees make for happy students, which makes all of us happy. With that, we're gonna turn it over to questions.
This group shouldn't be shy.
Yes. Sorry.
On veteran opportunity, what's the process and timeline to getting degree-granting structural?
Stephen, please.
Oh, sorry.
They won't be able to hear it otherwise.
The question was, what's the process for getting degree-granting status? Because just so you all know, the way that the rules work, lots of times life goes faster than the government, and we are not allowed to, or I should say another way, vets are not allowed to take a diploma online program and take advantage of their benefits. In states like New Jersey, where we have six campuses, in Connecticut, where we have three campuses, and in New York, where we have one campus today, and soon we'll have two campuses, we're seeking degree-granting status. That should be, I'm hoping, it'll be within twelve months for New Jersey and Connecticut. For New York, it's a process that I've heard anywhere from one to five years. Our application is in front of them.
Our senator that represents us in our district has already voiced how this needs to accelerate, but I can't tell you exactly when New York will be. I feel pretty confident that we're gonna get New York and New Jersey. I'm sorry, we'll get Connecticut and New Jersey in the next 12 months.
Okay. On nursing, maybe update us on your journey there.
Sure. As Chad said, our objective is, again, we wanna be the best at everything that we do. We have nursing at seven of our campuses. Our NCLEX rates last year averaged 95%, so we're in very solid footing there, but it's not a big contributor to our EBITDA. We're reorganizing the program. Even though the slide says we're in Lincoln 10.0, we're not in Lincoln 10.0 yet. We're gonna move to Lincoln 10.0, which will add efficiencies to us. We're changing how we're compensating some of our nurses to help drive profitability there. I'm hoping that within 18 months we'll see what the profitable model is, and we'll be transitioning our campuses over into Lincoln 10.0.
I can tell you that in all the projections that we're giving to you, we're basically assuming nothing's happening with nursing beyond, you know, where they are today.
I just wanted to ask on the organic growth, I guess what is the biggest hurdle to filling excess capacity, excluding even if you were to go through Friday, Saturday, Sunday classes, just with that existing capacity? Because obviously demand is so robust, it should seem like you can fill that pretty quickly, or is it a geographical thing with certain campuses? Or I guess
Any color there.
Well, demand is definitely robust, but we literally have hundreds of thousands of leads come in. We're constantly even though everyone thinks, you know, trades are wonderful, everyone knows it's the trades, you just open your doors and they come in, it's not that easy. We have to be constantly out in front of these people, constantly reminding them what the opportunity is, as well as not everyone knows who we are. We just had a meeting down in Trenton with a group of the state senators and assembly people, and here we are, we've been in New Jersey 80 years, and some of them didn't know who we are. We think everyone knows who we are, but there's a lot of people out there that still haven't gotten the message. That's what it is.
It's really getting in front of people, letting them know about the opportunity. The good news is more people are receptive to that, but we still have to get in front of them. It'll be nice, good, consistent growth.
Mainly a marketing initiative.
I believe so.
Yeah, I was explaining to one of the other-
I think I'm micced.
Oh, you're mic'd.
Yeah. Yeah. I was explaining to one of the other folks this morning that, you know, when students come to us, like, you know, it's a little bit different than traditional college students. You know, when we all went to high school and everybody wants to go to college, people are pretty, like, motivated, dead set. You're like, "Yeah, I can do it, and I'll go to college, and I'll apply." Our students aren't like that, right? They come to us and they're not as self-confident as you'd think they would be. The good news is the ones that come to us are the most self-confident of the least self-confident people. But that doesn't mean they just come to us like, "Yeah, I wanna do this." They still have a lot of reservations and a lot of doubts like, "Can I do this?
Can I afford it?" Like, "Is this really what Like, can I be successful at this?" It takes a lot of hand-holding. It takes a lot of convincing them. Like, "No, you can do it." Like, it doesn't matter where you came from. The human brain works the same whether you're wealthy, not wealthy, whether you're, whatever your racial background is. We have to overcome a lot of self-doubts in people, and that's probably one of the biggest hurdles. It's not that there's not demand out there, it's that the people that come to you, they still have reservations whether they think they can actually do it.
The biggest issue are things like transportation and affordability, 'cause like I said, some of them have kids, and they have real bills, and it's like, "How am I gonna go to school and still pay for my apartment and feed my kids?" I mean, there's a lot of food insecurity out there. It's a bit more complex than people think in trying to. Trust me, we would wanna fill up all the seats tomorrow if it were that easy, we would've done it.
I'm sorry, I skipped a slide just to kind of summarize that. This was a comment from one of our admissions people when we were asking them, like, "Why do you enjoy working at Lincoln Tech?" This kind of summarizes it. Here, from the admissions perspective, they can see the excitement in the students' eyes. They also see the little bit of despair or uncertainty. It's really, from an admissions standpoint, it's really getting them over that hurdle so that they can be, the success that they all wanna be.
Thanks. Scott, question on Lincoln 10.0. 30% of the course, coursework is online. Is that asynchronous, or are there any live classes? And then second
Asynchronous.
How'd you settle on 30%? Could it be 40%? You don't need the capacity. You have a lot of excess capacity, but could 40% of it be online for some programs?
It's a very good question, something we debated. You know, we're a hands-on institution. People come to us. You know, the biggest complaint from our students, "We want more hands-on." We don't wanna take that away from them. At the same time, we know there's, you know, stuff that they can learn online. There's theory, there's things of that nature. We wanted to make it, like, I'll say enough where it builds in flexibility for their lives, as well as enough of the content that can be really almost maybe well, better done online. We wanted to maximize the online experience. I don't know, Chad, anything else?
Yeah, I was gonna say, I think it also goes back to what I was talking about the vulnerability of some of our students, and if you're already scared and nervous, "Do I think I can do this?" Even though, like, you know, my kid's 20 years old, and his whole life he grew up on online learning, even a public school system, students still go through that, and they come out, and they're like, "I'm not an online learner." Like, they'll come and tell us, "I don't want online. I don't like that. It's not how I learn." If we went too far with online, we would only probably push more and more people away.
Great. Thanks. That's helpful. Then it seems to me high school's a great opportunity. Veteran is a big opportunity, but so is high school. What have you been doing there differently, say, from 2, 3, and 4 years ago, and how big could it get, and what is the structure of that enrollment counselor force? Are they out in the field? Do they get compensated the same way, you know, for inbound calls for adults, things like that?
I'm not gonna let Jeff speak, our head of high school. He would gladly take the stage.
He's chomping at the bit.
Stage right here, we have time limits, I'm gonna address that question. What we've done is, first of all, we brought in new leadership. We have a dedicated resource for high school. Before, Jay was overseeing most of it. His business and our business is growing very well, we wanted to bring additional resources to put additional focus, has a deeper approach, broader approach. He comes with a lot of experience. He comes with, I'll say a fan base who's been following him to Lincoln Tech, we're getting a lot of good talent. We are increasing some of the compensation.
The reality is we were a training ground for a lot of other people's high school initiatives, but now with the receptivity that we are seeing from high schools reaching out to us, parents of high schoolers being more inclined to send students to us, we're gonna really lean into that. We're putting more resources, hiring better people, paying them with better wages, and increasing the number of high school reps that we have out there to take advantage of all that.
I was just gonna say one other thing about that. What's different about the high school model versus the adult model that Jay runs, the marketing team feeds Jay's team with inquiries. They just come in, and Jay's team works all of those inquiries. In the high school model, there are no inquiries that are generated from the web. These are human beings that go out school to school to school, and they make presentation after presentation after presentation, and they generate their own leads. They're their own marketing engine. They're doing everything on their own. Not only do they generate their own leads, they work their own leads, they enroll their own leads. It's a totally different role.
During the school season from, let's say, August to May, these folks are on the road all the time. They're just traveling one school to another to another. They do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of presentations during the school season. It's a totally different job and it requires a very different compensation, which we didn't have it dialed in right, and that caused a lot of turnover. Think of it, if you're a high school counselor, you're very protective of your kids.
If one week from Lincoln Tech shows up, Jay, and then a year later it's Chad, and a year later it's Scott, you start to think to yourself, "I don't know if Lincoln Tech's where I wanna send my kids 'cause I keep seeing different faces all the time." It's a model that you have to have people that are dedicated to it, and they have to be in these roles a long period of time and create these long-standing relationships with the high schools, and that's what we're doing, but it takes a little time.
[inaudible]
Most of them, yeah. Yep.
Yeah. Raj Sharma, Texas Capital Bank. Fantastic to be here at the new campus. I wanted to just follow on the high school share program. Seems like an excellent program, and I think you mentioned the reimbursement model. How well established is the reimbursement model from the high schools? Is there pushback? How do you do that? 'Cause that's pretty critical.
Do you wanna take it?
Yeah, I'll take it. It is critical, and that's why it works so well in New Jersey right now. New Jersey funds high school at a much higher level
T han many other states, so it works very well for us. The problem is you have to negotiate with every kind of school district, which makes it less scalable, and it's harder to implement. We're out there probably in about, well, we have, like, 48 different school districts both in New Jersey and outside that have expressed an interest. Now it's really trying to determine, can they afford it, and can we make something viable work for them? Every school district, we have to negotiate something a little bit different. It's a great opportunity. Again, it does speaks to me about the desire by more people to come into the trades, and we're just trying to figure out how we can meet that need at all different levels, whether it's in high school or post-high school.
It's still small. Like, in New Jersey, we have maybe 128 students. Last year it was about 60 students. Hoping to maybe double it this year, and then we're looking to bring it in some other states. It's a great model. The administrators say, "Wow, this student is doing so well.
Yeah, we're just surprised." Well, because he's doing something he likes, or she. I mean.
Right
They're engaged. Before, they might have just been kind of, I hate to say, sitting around doing something that's really unproductive. It's trying to meet people's needs, but it's difficult.
How tough do you foresee this to be? 'Cause it appears, you know, the biggest part of the reticence is gonna be from the parents who wanna do this and, of course, from the school district too.
Yes. That's all things, you got to market. If you get parents really pushing behind it, that can get school districts to change their mind. They also have limited budgets. We benefited in New Jersey in certain regards was they were sending students across the border to New York, and all their programs now are full. They said, "Sorry, New Jersey, you can't come." Now we're filling that gap, and they're far more receptive. It's constant marketing and letting people know that this exists, but it's a great way. Dual enrollment. 20% of the people in community college are dual enrollment. They're in high school.
Right.
We're just trying to, you know, replicate that model.
This is a brilliant program.
Yeah
Super good. Thank you for that. My other question was on the same, in the same vein, you know, reducing dependence on Title IV, corporate programs.
Any new on the horizon in. How do you see that?
Well, I see it as a huge, huge opportunity.
Right.
I somewhat get, as I tell Jennifer Hoff, you know, frustrated with a lot of our corporate partners. They just, you know, they think that our product is like buying something at Home Depot off the shelf. They're gonna get exactly what they want when they want it at the price they want, and yet they're all screaming that they need more talent. Well, that's only going to come if you partner with people like us, and you frankly have to pay some money to train people. With this, with regards to that and with regards to corporations, we're seeing more people come to us. It just takes them a long time to make that decision. We're looking at bringing in more resources in that area to add more focus, add more skills, to open up more doors.
I know the doors are there. We've just hired a marketing person to help us craft what the value proposition is for things of that nature. That's on the training side. Jen and her team are bringing on resources to make sure that the employers that are currently hiring our students are getting more involved and offering better benefits, more tuition reimbursement, more plans hopefully to provide scholarships. We have certain companies that do start providing scholarships six months in, once they've interviewed a student, and they like what they see, and they kinda wanna lock them in. We're just trying to encourage as much of that as possible.
Great. Thanks. My last question is really more for Brian as well. Just on the projections, the 2030 EBITDA with the new programs is $150. You know, there's not much of a difference from the $140 without the programs, and obviously that's because of the run rate.
Right.
Can you talk about what the run rate of, you know, by 2030-
That implies a run rate revenues for the programs have already been opened, but they're not contributing peak revenues and EBITDA.
Correct.
Can you talk about that? Then the follow-on question to that is when do we expect your CapEx to fall off in the sense of, hey, you know, we've built all the campuses?
Yeah. I'll take the latter. Right now for the foreseeable future, unless market demand changes, we're gonna keep the CapEx between $75 million-$80 million and looking to, you know, build 2 new campuses, which is a little bit, you know, flexible based on demand and based on a site availability. That'll keep going. As far as the run rate, we do have a slide in there that shows that each campus we're expecting to get to $30 million worth of revenue by year 4, I believe, of opening. 4 or 5 of opening.
Each one to generate $8 million-$10 million of EBITDA.
Yeah, $10 million worth of EBITDA. Yes.
You can do the math and see where it's gonna
Right. Right.
[inaudible]
Correct.
Yeah. There will be 9 leases, 6 open, so a full run rate will be 6 times the $30 million or $60 million. Yeah.
Thank you.
All right. Before, Griffin, we take your question, we do have a question coming from the virtual audience. Scott and team, with the desire to involve more veterans combined with President and DOD's publicly communicated plans to revamp our naval fleet, is there potentially a large opportunity to train veterans and students in shipbuilding? How quickly can new programs be added to the Lincoln offering based on ever-changing labor needs of the country?
Sure. Well, I mean, I think what he's probably referring to is the government's looking to revamp the submarine fleet. They need to build 3 subs a year starting next year, and they forecast the need for 250,000 skilled tradespeople, of which a good number are electricians, welders, and even HVAC techs. We've been having discussions. I know Jen and her team have been in discussions with the different providers, whether it's Electric Boat, as far as a large employer in Connecticut where we have a strong presence, down to smaller firms that are providing all the parts that go into this. It's not necessarily needing to bring vets into it.
We're happy to bring vets into that workforce, but we're constantly trying to get in front of all these organizations that need talented, skilled trades, electricians, HVAC techs out there. I don't know, Jen, what else you wanna share on that.
Yeah. We're in talks with many organizations, with the Department of Defense, and building our fleet up. One of the things we see is everybody wants someone with three to five years of experience, and obviously, we have entry-level techs. Looking to see how we can upskill our techs and our graduates quicker. Maritime welding is a little bit different than the welding we teach to see if that's something we wanna get into as well.
Thank you. Thanks for taking my question. So I just wanna jump back to the leads discussion. Scott, you mentioned you guys get hundreds of thousands of leads. I think it was on one of Jay's slide. It showed the trajectory for this year, which looked relatively similar to years past, maybe slightly north of 50,000 so far in the first couple of months. I'm curious what designates a lead. Is that everybody that interacts with Lincoln via the marketing initiatives or high school students that express interest? You know, second kinda part of that is 19% starts growth for the Q1 is really robust. Is that a function of you know, greater intent by these leads or better conversion of the leads that you have or just you know, overall demand?
Oh, go ahead, Jay.
It's probably Scott more than me, but, you know, our leads come from several different sources. We also have the high school leads that we talked about earlier. We have our rep-generated referral leads, which those are the leads that we generate ourselves through asking a prospect, do they know of somebody else that who might be interested. We also have the marketing-generated leads, which are dozens of channels as well. Demand does look like it's similar to prior year and, however, it is an uptick. It's an early measurement on my chart there, as you saw, for 2026. I think that the lead base is there for our start growth and our projected start growth, and the 19% is proving that we have the availability there to still grow.
We do focus on conversion. That is important. All leads are not the same. Channels are not the same. That's how we measure the quality of a lead is conversion. We are seeing improved conversions early on. I'll attribute that to admissions on that side. We're certainly doing what we can, but we do focus on that. It's cost per start from a lead source is much more important than a cost per lead.
There's a healthy tension between marketing and admissions.
No tension.
They are constantly focused on, you know, bringing in more leads. Again, we wanna bring in quality leads, because you could have flat leads and actually get better performance if they're better sourced leads. Scott and his team are constantly looking to do that for us, and Jay and his team are constantly training his people to improve their conversion rates. Even when things might slow down, we can still drive growth. In particular, for the Q1 , you know, the surprise growth really came from the organic side. We're just seeing more robustness there than we thought. The new programs are delivering what we anticipated, but it's really the core business which is growing faster than we might have budgeted.
Would you say that stronger growth, did that ramp up in the last month since your earnings call, or was that, you know, similar to what you were talking about on the earnings call as well?
It's continuing trends. You know, sometimes we just can't believe what we see. We're very cautious in how we project, and we'll take the upside.
Thank you.
Hi, Eric Martinuzzi from Lake Street Capital Markets. My questions for Gina. It's regarding the graduation rates. You talked about there was a slight decline the last couple of years, but then there's been some reversal. The issues that you guys talked about, the reason that students drop out, you know, mental health, financial issues, transportation. Have you done kind of the after action surveys with those students that didn't graduate? Do you have access to them to really figure out was it a student-specific issue, or was it maybe a Lincoln issue with maybe quality of education or facilities?
Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know if we do surveys for students that haven't graduated, something that we could do. But we know just from talking to, you know, our students, we know what the issues are, we know where we need to help them. That's why we've made so many changes, right? We know that, you know, our students tell us when they leave why they're leaving, right? It could be they're not always honest. They're not always gonna say, "I'm leaving because I have a mental health issue," or, "I'm leaving because it's financial." They generally tell us, you know, when they're talking to their dean, you know, "This is why I'm leaving." We can look at the trends as to why they're leaving.
This is what kind of triggered the areas that we need to focus on. As far as after the fact, I'd need to look into that, but again, we know why they're leaving. They tell us when they're leaving, why they're leaving, so that's the areas that we focused in on.
Those focused efforts, you feel like that's what's caused the reversal?
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, because again, we're focusing on the reasons that they're telling us why they're leaving, right? I don't have transportation. I don't have childcare. And you know, they're letting us know why they're leaving. You know, how honest they are in those discussions, I don't know, 'cause again, some things might be embarrassing for them to talk about, but that's where we did focus our efforts on why are our students dropping, and what are the most important things. Again, most of the reasons why they're dropping were non-academic things.
Was there, as far as among the 22-23 campuses, any trends by geography or campus, problem campuses?
I don't know if I'd say campus, but program, you can see trends in programs, right? Our allied health with a lot of childcare, right, where other, you know, you can definitely see the trends between skilled trades and allied health.
We survey our students to get a sense of what they like, what they don't like, and we definitely know that they want more training aids and better training aids. As Brian mentioned, we've put more money into that, and we'll continue to make more investments. It's almost no matter what you do, you still can never satisfy them. When we moved into this facility, I don't know if you ever saw the old Nashville. We still didn't get 100% of people, "Wow, this is fantastic.
They still had, "I don't like where my parking spot is," or, you know, who knows what the issue is. It's very tough to fully satisfy them no matter what you do, but the issues tend to be life issues that get in the way, which is why we track attendance, and we reach out to them when they're not attending, because we know if that starts repeating, there's something there that they're missing. As Gina said, though, lots of times people are very private, and they're embarrassed to say why they're struggling. That's why we try to create an environment where people feel free to talk about you know, what their challenges are. They can find someone here that they can talk to, so we can try to help them.
You know, we can't solve everyone's problems, and especially we don't know what they are, but we do try to solve as many problems as we can. It's life issues. It's boyfriends, girlfriends, it's children, losing jobs, spouse changing a job, all these sorts of things that are the number one driver. Sure, some might be dissatisfied with the education. Frankly, some say, "Boy, this is a lot harder than I thought." Because it's an accelerated pace that we're putting people through, and some people still have this mindset, it's a vocational school, this'll be easy. Well, it isn't. There are multiple ways, and it varies by campus and by program, and we just have to stay on top of it to make sure that we can get all those people over the finish line.
Okay, last question, it may be for Chad, but you got 2 new campuses per year. Particular areas of the country that you're gonna be focused on as you know, investigate where are our services in the greatest demand? Then programs, you know, whether it's skilled trades or transportation or healthcare, what's the focus for the-
Yeah, no problem. Yeah. Let me answer the latter first. The program offerings will be, for the most part, what we call our full-service campus program offering. It's the big four. It's auto, it's welding, HVAC, and electrical. That'll be how we'll open up most of our new campuses. As far as location, you know, we're obviously looking in markets that have high needs. You know, we have certain metrics that we're looking for, populations of students between the age of 18 and 44 that have high school education but don't have college education. You know, things that are very attractive to us are, you know, markets we've already been in.
I know Scott has talked publicly on the calls about the scalability of opening up a second campus in an existing market because you get to leverage your marketing dollars. You'll probably see us look at some of our bigger metro markets as opportunities for additional campuses as well as some new markets.
Okay. Thanks.
You can go again.
I guess I wanna touch on the healthcare side of the business. I think obviously baked into the expansion strategy for opening new campuses is going to be skilled trades campuses. Have you guys thought about at all on the healthcare side of opening any campuses? Could you just kinda remind us your footprint of how many of your campuses offer healthcare programs?
Sure. When you look in the investor deck, you'll see on Gina's slide where we have medical assisting, which we have at more campuses than licensed practical nursing. Today, we have licensed practical nursing in only seven campuses. They would be three campuses in New Jersey, two in Connecticut, one in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and one in Rhode Island, so maybe I miscounted somewhere, but that should be seven. Then we have MA at those same campuses, but we also have medical assisting in East Windsor, we have it at Indianapolis, we have it in Chicago, we have it in Marietta. As of now, I believe that's all the only places where we have it. As Chad said, we're expanding. Our real heritage is automotive and skilled trades.
That's also where we have, I think, the greatest advantage and also where we have the greatest brand recognition. Healthcare, though, as Gina and Jen said, is also growing. I mean, there's a huge need out there. In certain of our markets, especially in the Northeast, I think that we do have some competitive advantage and can see expanding our opportunity there and ensuring that those programs are the best that they can be. But as of right now, we're gonna continue to invest more in the skilled trades and automotive because I think we just have a better competitive advantage there overall.
Maybe one other thing on that is, you know, when and if we get to a place that we decide we do wanna expand some of the healthcare programs, even though we're opening up our campuses like a Houston or like a Levittown or even the new Rowlett, there's extra space in those campuses that we're not building out. It just gives us the opportunity to either use it as additional space should any of our existing programs grow too big or if we decide we wanna put healthcare in. We're not thinking that as, like, we would build separate healthcare campuses. We would just put the programs in existing campuses where we have space.
Thank you.
Yep.
Anything else? If not, appreciate everyone's time and interest. For those that are here in Nashville, we are very excited to give you a tour so you can see this facility. I will be out in California at the Roth Conference. I'll be attending, Brian and I, a number of other conferences over the next 60 days. If you have more questions or wanna meet us, please do so. Also, I encourage anyone to come visit any of our campuses. You can reach out to Brian or anyone else. We can set up a visit. I think if you see what we do and who we do it for and how we do it, you'll have a much richer appreciation, both for who we are as well as I think what our opportunity is. Thank you all very much.