Good morning, and welcome to Strategic Education's Investor and Analyst Day 2023. I'm Terese Wilke, Director of Investor Relations, and we are so pleased you are able to join us. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that this presentation may include forward-looking statements made pursuant to the Safe Harbor Provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The statements are based on current expectations and are subject to a number of assumptions, uncertainties, and risks that could cause actual results to differ materially. Further information about these and other relevant uncertainties may be found in Strategic Education's annual report on Form 10-K, 10-Qs, and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All Strategic Education filings are available for viewing on our website at strategiceducation.com. And now, after a brief introductory video, Robert Silberman, Chairman of Strategic Education, will provide opening remarks.
We kindly ask you to hold questions until the end of each of our three segment presentations. Robert Silberman, Karl McDonnell, and Daniel Jackson will also be taking questions at the end of our presentation. Thank you. Let's get started.
The future is here for Strategic Education, Inc.
The power of SEI is in the sum of the parts.
Just a few years ago, we were a totally different company.
We've become more of a diverse company that provides education to students around the world.
We're truly, truly making people's dreams come true every single day.
But the world is changing faster than ever.
It's not just a labor shortage, it's a labor shortage with the right skills and the right competencies, and the traditional path for university education isn't by itself enough to solve that.
As a global company, Strategic Education has the power to bridge the skills gap and drive the workforce of the twenty-first century.
SEI is unique in that we have the ability to take a variety of businesses, bring them together all toward their mission of economic mobility, and that's an incredibly powerful thing.
The power of SEI is innovation.
Innovation is in our DNA. It's at the core of who we are and what we do, and combined with the power of AI, I think we're going to be unstoppable.
Technology is what got us where we are today, and that's what's gonna bring us into the future.
The power of SEI is our reach.
We are now truly a global company.
SEI is the premier learning organization for people of all different walks of life. People who want short-form credentials, people who wanna learn on the job, people who want the traditional degree, people who wanna get ahead in life.
The power of SEI is partnership.
SEI has to offer more experience in the world of online higher education than anybody else, with a particular focus on solving the needs of employers. We're not only knowledgeable, but we're extremely passionate.
The power of SEI is our passion.
We have a phenomenal community of people who are driven by purpose.
I love every morning when I wake up, and I think about the students that we are helping today.
Our job is to leave our students in a better spot, and that has a ripple effect on generations to come.
I'm so, so proud of you-
Thank you. Thank you.
- you being a strong woman.
I'm so happy that I don't even have words to describe my happiness right now.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you.
I'm gonna make sure I don't read Terese's comments, so... Thank you, Terese, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's my pleasure to welcome all of you, both our attendees here in New York, as well as our shareholders listening around the world on our webcast, to SEI's 2023 Investor Day. I have the easiest job today, consisting solely of introducing what, in my admittedly biased point of view, is the best management team in the higher education space. However, I did wanna make three brief points to both preface and set in context the presentations that you're going to hear this morning. The first is that SEI has a very experienced, dedicated, committed, and mission-driven team. The average tenure at SEI of our senior managers is close to 20 years. We all take a very long view of our operations and our results.
We have seen a lot, we have managed through a lot, and we've learned a lot. The second point is that our senior management team understands that SEI is, at its core, the steward of important educational institutions. Because of that, on all business and operating decisions, we always solve first for the academic success of our current and future students. We know that that academic success of our students is the only true generator of sustainable, long-term, attractive returns on our shareholders' invested capital. The third point is that in stewarding first-rate academic institutions, we run an inherently operationally levered business. Relatively small increases in student enrollment, and therefore revenue, have outsized positive impacts on our generation of operating income and cash flow.
Indeed, we believe that modest mid-single-digit enrollment and revenue growth over the next 5 years should create cash and net income growth, which will compound annually in excess, in excess of an average of 20% per year. However, and most importantly, that financial performance is solely dependent on our commitment to maintaining the academic quality of our institutions, which in turn ensures the value of our educational offerings to our students. And I can tell you from long, close personal observation, that the management team, which you'll hear from this morning, both understands that dependence and welcomes that challenge. And so with that, let me kick things off by introducing our President and Chief Executive Officer, Karl McDonnell.
All right. Good morning. Thank you for, those of you that are with us in person, and welcome to everybody online. I wanna kick off by echoing what Rob said about our management team. And I've had the good fortune of working with a lot of great leaders and a lot of great companies, and this is the best management team that I've ever had the privilege of being associated with. And I would describe our management team as very driven and very competitive, but with a collective low ego and a lot of humility. And it's an absolute privilege and honor to be working alongside this group. So, I'm looking forward to you having the opportunity to interacting with them. I have several objectives this morning for our Investor Day. Obviously, I want to give you an overview of our corporate strategy.
I'd like to talk a little bit about how we organize the company and our culture and our people, and at the end of my remarks, I'm gonna provide a new notional five-year outlook for the company. I think the best place to start in having a conversation about SEI and our strategy is to really understand our stewardship principles, which you can see here. Let me start with our mission, because I think it's important that our owners have a deep understanding of exactly what we're trying to accomplish. Our mission has three elements that drive every operating decision we make. The first element is we want to get as many of our students through their academic programs as we can successfully.
It's impossible for a student to truly monetize the value of their credential, their degree, if they don't successfully complete the program, so that's always first, our highest priority. Second, we wanna quicken the time that it takes people to get through their programs. You can think about FlexPath as being an element that is designed to get people through their academic programs in about half the time and half the cost. But also now we have Sophia Learning, which you're gonna hear a lot about later with Joe Schaefer, and we allow students at Strayer and Capella to use Sophia for free, foregoing tuition revenue that we would otherwise get, such that they're able to complete their program sooner. The third element of our mission is we wanna lower the overall cost of the program, and in particular, we want to lower the amount of debt.
One of our primary strategies is to, over time, work to transfer 100% of our revenue, if we're able, from Title IV lending to private sector employer pay. Now, the rest of these tenets, being student-centric and quality-focused, having high standards and a long-term orientation, those are what I would just refer to as kind of advanced common sense in terms of how you should operate an organization, but they absolutely drive everything that we do as a management team. Next, I'd like to provide you with an overview of the assets that we actually own and operate, starting in the United States, where we have two of the best adult-focused digital universities in the country with Strayer and Capella Universities.
I would actually go so far this morning as to say that I think Capella University, right now, is the strongest adult-focused digital university in the United States. But both of these universities are in the midst of multi-year highs on academic achievement. Both of them participate in the largest corporate partnership network in the United States, with more than 1,200 relationships. Both of them will exit this year with enrollment growth rates approaching 10%, and in a normalized environment, both have very high contribution margins. In fact, Capella University right now, excluding corporate overhead, has a contribution margin approaching 30%. Strayer's margin is artificially depressed due to the adverse impact of lower enrollment during the pandemic, but we fully expect Strayer's margin to recover over time, also into the mid-20% range.
In Australia, the largest asset that we acquired when we made the acquisition of these Australian assets back in two thousand and twenty, is Torrens University, Australia. Torrens is one of forty-three federally licensed universities, and it's the only investor-funded university in Australia. And inside of ten years, Torrens grew from nothing, obviously, to close to twenty thousand students, and also within ten years-... is now recognized in many of the most important academic components or categories within Australia as being a top ten university, which is an incredible feat to have accomplished in just ten years. We also own Think College, which is a relatively small vocational, primarily healthcare, uh, sub-degree credentialing school. And we also own the Media Design School, which is one of the world's most renowned graphic art, gaming, and technology, uh, organizations.
And then the most nascent part of our organization, but the fastest-growing and with the highest margin, is our education technology and services segment, which consists primarily of Workforce Edge and Sophia. Workforce Edge is a technology platform that SEI built that enables us to manage education benefits on behalf of large employers. In just under two years, we went from no clients and no employees on the platform to now 60 clients and approaching 1.5 million employees on the platform. We allow our corporate clients to use Workforce Edge for free, and we monetize Workforce Edge when employees at the employers that we have contracts with decide to attend either Strayer or Capella University. Sophia is our direct-to-consumer SaaS application. It's a portal of high-quality general education courses that have all been recommended by the American Council on Education.
And a subscriber pays a very low monthly fee, roughly ninety-nine dollars a month, and in exchange for that, they have access to Sophia's full catalog of high-quality gen ed courses. And the idea is, you go to Sophia, you pay ninety-nine dollars, you successfully complete a course, and then you transfer the credit for that co- course to an institution. That clearly enables you to get through your program quicker and at a much lower cost. Joe Schaefer, our President of ETS, will share some statistics about the amount of tuition dollars that we've saved, uh, So- Sophia subscribers over the last several years. These assets compete in very attractive markets to us. In the United States, certainly post-COVID, you've seen a dramatic shift in both the, uh, popularity and legitimacy of online learning.
So having two of the best adult-focused digital universities in the United States sets us up very well here. In Australia, higher education is actually Australia's third largest export. Being one of only 43 universities in Australia, we believe that over time, we will more than double our student body from its existing 20,000 to ultimately 40,000 and 50,000 and beyond, and also getting Torrens margins into the mid- to high 20% on a contribution basis. I think this slide is really the key to understanding our strategy. This is the crux of our strategy, which is our strategy is to directly confront and solve the issues around what's not working in higher education today, both for students and for large employers or all employers, frankly.
We hear constantly from students that higher education is too expensive, it takes too long, the outcomes are uneven, and it's very inflexible. From employers, and we hear this from our 1,200+ corporate clients all the time, they're in a constant war for talent. There's high turnover, extreme dissatisfaction with the quality of graduates coming out of schools. The nation's employers are having to spend $hundreds of billions every single year trying to get their workforce trained in the way that they need them to be trained, and that just has extreme frustration with higher education today. So we're trying to put ourselves directly in the middle of solving both ends of those issues. For students, we wanna make programs more affordable, more accessible.
We want the skills to be relevant to employers so that when they get into their career, they're much more effective. There's less of a need on the part of the employer to train them, and we want, obviously, to do that to the extent that we can, so there's zero tuition to the student and therefore zero debt. And if we're able to do that, we'll help the nation's employers deal with this war for talent. We have data over many years that suggest when employees of an organization partake in education benefits, turnover is dramatically reduced, and in many cases, reduced by as much as 50%. And if you can reduce the turnover for a large employer in key roles by 50%, it really becomes a self-funding benefit that, when all is said and done, ends up costing the employer nothing.
The kinds of things that will enable us to be successful in executing these strategies, be it a lot of experience in the digital learning space and advanced technological infrastructure, having connections to industry, diverse portfolio, these are all SEI strengths. So as we execute against this strategy over the years, we feel we're well positioned to be successful. Let me talk for a minute about how we organize the company. We think of this as kind of horizontal integration, if you will, and that means we leverage large shared services that provide centers of excellence for all parts of our organization, and that really enables us to do three things. First, it enables us to identify best practices and share those best practices across the company as fast as possible.... Second, it enables us to innovate more quickly. And third, it enables us to be synergistic.
When I say synergistic, I mean both from a revenue synergy standpoint, as well as a productivity or cost synergy standpoint. Productivity is a major goal of the company because it's the only way, over time, we're gonna be able to lower the cost of our academic programs, both to just our straight consumer students, but also for our corporate students or students that come via our corporate affiliations. Vertical integration or the bundling of our assets in creative ways is a major part of how we differentiate ourselves. And really, I would argue, this set of assets are really unmatched anywhere in higher education. You'll hear Joe late
There's not another organization in the country that has that capability and can match SEI's offerings. Throughout today, I think you'll hear a lot of examples from our team about how we're thinking about bundling all these assets in ways that benefit our students, and as I said at the outset, directly connect to our mission. I also wanna speak to the fact that our culture and our team, in my view, is very much a competitive advantage for us. We've got an agile, entrepreneurial culture of experimentation. We wanna give a voice to every single employee, to SEI, to contribute to the constant search for a better way of doing things.
And we have actually a whole technological infrastructure set up internally, where people can submit their ideas around, "I think we should do this differently." We particularly wanna hear from people who are on the, what we would call the front line or student-facing roles. You know, I'm probably the worst person to have an idea around how to improve faculty advising, for example, but our faculty advisors certainly have a point of view, and we wanna give them a voice such that anyone in the organization can contribute to us being better. This is where a lot of humility comes in and low ego, because we never assume any one of us has all the answers, and that a spark, a little spark of a great idea can truly come from anywhere. Our people are so connected to our mission.
If any of you were fortunate enough to attend one of our graduations, and you just randomly went around and talked to 25 people, among the first things that would be impressed upon you is the degree to which these people are absolutely committed to SEI's mission and SEI's students. Now, obviously, in a world where digital learning is the future, having a very robust technological infrastructure is enormously important. I just want to describe for our owners that I would say SEI's technology is best of class in nearly every case. We've got some of the most advanced cloud computing platforms that are available that enable things like very advanced predictive analytics for our management team. SEI has been and will continue to be a leader in the use of artificial intelligence.
When you hear from our U.S. higher education team, you'll hear a, a little case study on how we've used AI already. One of the things that I'm also very proud of is the fact that we're one of the best and biggest partners to the edtech community in the United States. Such that, if you're an entrepreneur in the edtech space, you've got an emerging piece of technology, you're not sure of the efficacy, we invite you to come to SEI, and in particular, Capella and Strayer universities, and test your product with our students. We run dozens and dozens of little experiments every academic term to see what might emerge as something that could be truly effective in deepening learning or helping students get through their programs more quickly.
And then our team will iterate with the entrepreneur and say, "Well, if you tweak this, you should do this differently," to make the product better. And we've done-- there's countless examples of this over the last five to ten years, and we wanna be the nation's premier partner to the best edtech entrepreneurs in the country. Now, obviously, we operate in a heavily regulated industry, and I think many of our owners understand the regulations that we operate within, but I, I am gonna take a minute to go through them. But before they-- before I do that, I just wanna say that SEI absolutely agrees with the fact that higher education, A, should be heavily regulated, and we also agree with the stated objectives of what the US Department of Education is trying to accomplish, which is to improve student outcomes and to lower debt.
As I said earlier, our strategy centers on trying to take all of our revenue away from Title IV as a source and transfer that responsibility to pay for college to the nation's top employers. The key metrics that we work within, or the key regulations, rather, are here. First and foremost, the Financial Responsibility Composite Score is a metric that applies to all institutions in the United States, and it's a metric that's essentially designed to assess the financial health of an institution. And it's a complicated metric, and it, it's very complex. If anyone has an interest in really learning it and deconstructing it, as some of our owners do, I invite you to get with Dan Jackson offline....
But there's a level below which you're considered to not be financially healthy, and if you fall below that level, you are subject to additional scrutiny and regulatory constraints, such as having to post letters of credit against your Title IV disbursements. And it just opens you up to such incredible levels of additional scrutiny. SEI has always tried to maintain a healthy margin of safety above that non-passing threshold, such that we make capital allocation decisions, resource allocation decisions, that maintain that buffer. That if you were only solving for some financial optimization of a balance sheet or a transaction using all cash or not issuing shares when you're making an acquisition, you could make a better financial decision, but you would open yourself up to failing the score, and that's not something we're gonna do.
So we will-- even if it's financially inefficient on occasion, we're gonna solve for compliance with this financial composite score rather than optimizing balance sheet or capital allocation, things like that. The ninety/ten metric only applies to investor-funded institutions, and the ninety/ten rule states that at least ten percent of your cash revenue in any given year must be from non-federal fund sources. And, uh, both Strayer and Capella Un- uh, Universities have traditionally done very well in this metric, and we expect to be in compliance moving forward. The new gainful employment regulation we've carefully reviewed, and at this time, we're confident that no programs at either Strayer or Capella University would fail the new gainful employment metric.
I wanna speak for a minute about 2023, because it's been one of our best years, one of the highest performing years that I can remember, and I think it would be beneficial to kinda walk you through where we're at vis-à-vis our goals. When we started the year, our primary goal was to continue the recovery of Strayer University. Strayer University has a decentralized local operating model that relies on local campuses in communities, and the employees of those campuses are residents of those communities. And that's how we've always enrolled students, via that campus network.
During COVID, we had to shutter that whole operation for the better part of two years, and it was not an operating model that was ever used to conducting itself with remote work, unlike Capella University, which had always been online and had some familiarity with remote work. And I'm gonna just fast forward a minute to show you the, both the very steep enrollment decline that we had at Strayer University, which was the, the sharpest decline that I've seen in my seventeen years with the company, although there had been some other declines. But you can see in two thousand twenty-one, when we reopened the campuses, we saw just as sharp as, of a recovery.
And when we were in the midst of the enrollment decline, based on our experience with prior reductions or prior periods of enrollment decline, we estimated at that point it would take Strayer probably two years before it would return to year-over-year total enrollment growth. And you could see they accomplished it in essentially one year, which is about half of what we were expecting when we were planning our budgets and so forth. We also are very, very proud of the work that Capella has, has done in repositioning Pe- Capella from a relatively flat to very low-growing enterprise, to an institution that, as I said, will exit this year growing close to ten percent. If you went back a decade and you looked at Capella's revenue growth, you'd see a very stable line that would hover somewhere between one and three percent.
Andy Watt, who you're gonna meet momentarily, and his team, made a very convincing argument to the board of directors that we should dramatically increase our advertising investment in Capella, because we wanna position Capella as the nation's premier adult focused digital university. When we made that investment, which we agreed to, it reduced Capella's margin, but the argument was it would reposition permanently, structurally, as long as we maintained a certain level of investment, Capella at a much higher growth rate, and that has worked. Since we made that investment in 2022, and Andy can share the exact number of quarters, every single quarter since we made that investment, Capella's new student growth has been in double digits. So repositioning Capella has been a huge success this year, repositioning Capella's growth rate.
We're in the midst of having our best ever year on corporate partnerships, so we've got 1,200 of these corporate partnerships. One in three, basically, students at SEI. Well, in the United States, at Strayer or Capella University, is affiliated with one of our corporate partnerships. I'm not aware of another adult-focused digital university in the United States that can say that. We've got small accounts, we've got big accounts. Some of our largest accounts are growing this year, new students, 20%, 30%, even 40%. So this is clearly probably SEI's strongest competitive advantage, this very robust network of corporate partnerships. It would take an institution many, many years, if not decades, to try to replicate what we have with our corporate network. Sophia and Workforce Edge are in the midst of terrific years.
I don't want to steal Joe's thunder, but Sophia Learning, as an example, was essentially an asset that we owned. We, we never really figured out what to do with it. In its best year pre-pandemic, it might have done a few million dollars, $2-$3 million. Sophia Learning this year is on track to do basically $35 million with a mid-40% margin, and that's a business that we think ultimately will get to over $100 million with a 50% margin. So an absolutely terrific asset. Workforce Edge is on its way to becoming the country's best education benefits management technology, competing head-to-head against Guild, EdAssist, InStride, others. And in the back half of this year, we're very pleased to see Torrens University return to new student growth.
Obviously, they operated in one of the harshest COVID-related lockdowns anywhere in the world. Getting the normalized operating environment back has been huge for Torrens, and we're very optimistic that they'll be growing in 2024. In terms of our long-term objectives, as I said when I was going through the regulatory slide, the first thing that we always solve for, and we have a culture of compliance, actually, is to always maintain the strictest compliance with any regulations that we face and our accreditor standards as well. Once we're confident that we have the right posture from a quality standpoint, we want to generate sustained revenue growth. And we believe as an organization, given the current environment, given current demand levels, what we see, sort of in the near-term future, we should be able to sustain mid to high single-digit revenue growth.
To the extent, as we grow, we can strengthen our competitive position, that's also a key priority for us. If we're successful in positioning Workforce Edge as the country's premier platform to manage education benefits on the part of employers, we absolutely will build one of the largest competitive advantages anywhere in the country in the higher ed space. And just let me talk about how that would work for just a second. We give the platform away for free. We allow employers to use it for free. We amass millions of employees on the platform. Those employees have access to a curated set of schools where we have negotiated a discount such that the employers can cover a large part of the tuition expense, with Strayer and Capella typically being the only institutions on the platform that will offer a completely tuition-free, debt-free degree.
We expect, basically, over time, to be able to get somewhere between 0.5%-1% yield, if you will, of all the employees on the platform deciding to enroll in Strayer and Capella. If we're able to get 3 million, 4 million or 5 million employees on the platform, and that yield of 0.5%-1% holds, that would mean that we would be getting 10,000-20,000 new students every year with virtually no acquisition costs as a result of having Workforce Edge. We're, we're very eager to continue to invest in that product. I think we're very skilled at managing expenses and looking for productivity.
If you go back five years and looked just at corporate overhead, I'd say our corporate overhead growth has been limited to somewhere between 1% and 2% per year over five years. And of course, we've got wage inflation and other things that are much higher than that. So the management team is very skilled at looking for ways to offset increases in incremental investments that we make. We'll continue to do that. And then, obviously, we want to maintain a very healthy, welcoming, vibrant culture where our people can do their absolute best work each and every day. In terms of what we think is possible, for the next five years, we think that we can generate consistent revenue growth of somewhere between 4% and 5% each year.
We think we can limit the growth in our expenses to somewhere between 2% and 3%, which would yield a 200 basis point gain of margin each year and compounded net income and cash growth of 20% per year. If you make those assumptions and go out five years, this is where we see the organization. You can see that in U.S. higher education, we'd get to $1 billion and a 17% EBIT margin that's fully burdened. Education technology services would essentially double to $150 million with a 50% EBIT margin, and our Australia, New Zealand would add just over $100 million of incremental revenue, getting to $350 million at a 25% EBIT margin.
So the company as a whole would be at $1.5 billion with 22% EBIT margin. And I'm—I don't look at this plan personally and and think that it's gonna take any amount of necessarily heroics, or said differently, I think this is an immensely achievable plan, and I'm looking forward to working with our management team over the next five years to executing against it. And with that, I'm gonna invite Andy Watt and Constance St. Germain and Andrea Backman to go through their overview of U.S. higher education.
... Two universities, one mission: enabling economic mobility through education.
So I just got home from work. This was on the, this was on my front porch. I'm shaking. I know what this is. This is them four years of that hard work. Oh, it's so real!
At Strayer University, our ultimate goal is to see people thrive and to advance their careers and their personal lives.
At Capella University, it's not just about graduating for our students, it's really about providing them the skills that will make them successful in their careers and in the future beyond.
I learned so many great things as I completed my degree with Capella. What I want to do is take that knowledge that I've gathered and forge a new career opportunity for myself.
I chose to get my BSN through Capella for the reputation within the nursing community.
We have an obligation to make sure that we're delivering curriculum that is absolutely relevant, so that our students are successful, not only in their workplace, but also in their personal life.
Capella provides innovative solutions for busy adult students.
FlexPath gave me the flexibility that was a necessity to be a single mom to my two kids.
The deadlines were realistic for me. I could set my own pace.
Strayer University is innovating the online experience to deliver the support and skills students need to succeed. From AI providing routine student support-
Irving is an artificial intelligence-based virtual assistant that helps students with a wide variety of support activities.
To our groundbreaking curriculum that teaches essential employability skills from day one.
At Strayer, it's not just about learning today, it's about helping our students future-proof themselves for the jobs of tomorrow.
At Strategic Education, we make learning accessible and relevant to all.
As an African American female, I want to be able to be that example, to let everyone know it's attainable. So if I can achieve it at 52, anybody can.
It's my college degree. I did it. I did it!
Good morning, everybody. As Karl mentioned, my name is Andy Watt, and I'm the president of US Higher Education here at SEI. Along with my colleagues, Dr. Constance St. Germain, who is President of Capella University, and Dr. Andrea Backman, who is President of Strayer University, we're gonna spend the next 45 minutes or so going a bit deeper into the U.S. higher education segment, specifically talking about Capella and Strayer. I'd first like to say, though, that I'm incredibly proud to be here today to represent literally hundreds and hundreds of dedicated staff and faculty who every day put their energy, their smarts, their passion into helping our students be successful.
I can tell you, I've been with the organization now for 21 years, and one of the main reasons I've stayed within the organization, and I know is the reason so many others stay for so long as well, is that we collectively as an organization, believe we have the power to change people's lives. I want to spend a few minutes here just giving you a high-level overview of Capella and Strayer. While both institutions are adult-focused, they have very unique and different histories, and that gives them some characteristics that are different in terms of how they go to market and support students today. First, I'll talk about Strayer. Strayer was actually founded over 130 years ago and has had a long history of supporting adult students to meet what is an ever-changing economic and job landscape.
In fact, Strayer was founded in 1892 to teach shorthand, accounting, and typing skills to farm workers. So obviously, a pretty long history. Since then, Strayer's continued to evolve with the economic landscape, staying at the forefront of making sure students have the skills necessary to be valuable in the workplace, and today has bachelor's and master's programs delivered primarily online, but also integrated through a network of campuses that provide extra support for the students. Capella, on the other hand, is about 30 years old. Capella was founded actually with the opportunity of seeing the internet emerge as a new tool that could create flexibility and access to professionals in career who are looking to advance in their profession with a graduate degree.
You know, Capella, over the last, you know, few decades, has really evolved now to support bachelor's, master's, and doctoral students in a variety of different professional disciplines, now reaching around 46,000 students. Strayer at about 36,000. Now, while both Capella and Strayer are adult-focused, they have incredible opportunities in the current landscape of higher education. Higher education right now and the transformation that's going on in the industry actually really plays to both Capella and Strayer's strengths. I'll give you a couple examples. First of all, I think everybody knows that changing job and career landscape is requiring people to constantly reskill and upskill. Lifelong learning for adult professionals is going to become the norm, not the exception, as we move forward.
We have decades and decades of experience catering, in Strayer's case, over 100 years, being able to customize our learning for that adult professional who needs to continue to reinvent themselves. Secondly, as Karl mentioned, digital learning is the future. Unlike a lot of institutions that have actually moved their traditional delivery online since the pandemic, Capella and Strayer were both very much at the forefront of digital learning and have been doing it for decades. We have an expertise that is really, really important in today's market because as more and more students have online experience, particularly high school students who are coming up into their adult years, they have a very different level of expectation, what they want from a digital learning experience.
Finally, you'll hear a lot more about this later in my presentation, but also in Joe's presentation around ETS. Employers need institutions that can move at a pace that they move at. A lot of traditional higher education is unable to adapt to the changing landscape that employers need to be able to reinvent curriculum, make it more relevant, to be able to provide services and support. Capella and Strayer have done that, and I think where the industry is going serves us and sets us up incredibly well. Now, one thing I learned many years ago in this space is, you know, it's very difficult for any one institution to be all things to all people. Very different segments of the student population have different needs, they have different wants, they have different desires in what they're looking for.
I think this is truly one of the game-changing differentiators of SEI: we actually have two wonderful institutions, but that serve slightly different markets. It has not prohibited us from being able to cross-share and leverage best practices and expertise and capabilities. As you heard Karl say, we do that, and we do that excellently, and I think we're continuing to figure out new ways to expand where and how we do. But we also stay very true to ensuring that each institution is unique and focused on its priority, kind of student focus. I'll start with Capella in this regard. Capella, having been a graduate-focused institution from its origination, has really defined the career amplifier as its primary student focus.
Career amplifiers, and I'll get into this a little bit more detail, but are people who are typically in career and they are looking to get a job for advancing on that track. And it's a lot—in many cases, it's a licensure program. They're looking to get an advanced degree at a master's or a doctoral level, whereas Strayer, we've defined that segmentation, the career builder. And we look at kind of the psychographics, the wants, the needs, the motivations, and the behaviors to find that. And that career builder is really about what are the skills that I need to potentially change careers or go from a job into a career? And those are slightly different, but important differences. The other thing that I think differentiates our two institutions is how they go to market.
Capella, having been focused on a broad graduate market throughout its kind of early history, ended up deciding to build a national brand, whereas Strayer, which has always been very tied to its campuses and the power of that local and community presence, and being able to provide support for students, has built more of a local and regional brand. Then finally, the differences also play out in the professional focuses, the professional disciplines, while both institutions, and you'll see this in Constance and Andrea's section, both institutions have a wide discipline of programs. Capella typically focuses on the mental and behavioral health and healthcare space, whereas Strayer has historically and continues to be very strong in the business and technology space. Now, let me tell you a little bit more about the career amplifier.
So as I mentioned, the career amplifier is someone who is typically coming with prior experience in higher education. They're typically in a job and in a career, and they're looking to complete a bachelor's that they already started, get a master's, or move on and get a doctoral degree. And they care very, very much about professional relevancy and credibility. These are in-career professionals, again, oftentimes looking to get a licensure track program, and they want to make sure they're learning what is absolutely critical for their field and their professional track. Secondly, they really, really want to optimize personal flexibility.
And one of the things you'll hear about is FlexPath, and I think FlexPath is a great example of where we've kind of engineered and reengineered how learning can happen and unfold in order to give professionals who have a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience to come back and be measured more on demonstrating their learning versus seat time, and Constance will talk a lot about that. And then finally, that speed to impact, helping people move as quickly through a program as possible. If you look on the right side, this is just for a nursing example, we take the full, the full spectrum of all the capabilities that we have across SEI to bring this value to life through unique features. So things like our specialized accreditation in nursing is really important.
The opportunity to choose FlexPath or GuidedPath from a delivery modality, our employer relationships and partnerships, the ability to help find these students site-based practicum experiences that they require for their professional track. All of those things come together to create a very differentiated position for the career amplifier. I want to bring this to life by sharing an example around nursing. You can see up here that when we have the right product, the right experience, the right brand, the right credibility, we can do really, really amazing things. Over the last six years, our nursing programs at Capella have gone from about $40 million in revenue to over $110 million in revenue. So we've seen just tremendous growth. More importantly than that, though, we have great outcomes.
We have over a 60% graduation rate in most of our nursing programs. As Karl mentioned earlier, one of the points of differentiation that we really think about is how often are our employers and our employer students picking us? You can see within our nursing programs, we have an over 60% mix coming from employer partnerships. This is really proof that, you know, we have a differentiated offering, we're driving really great outcomes, and we're continuing to build that momentum. Now, what's super exciting when you get that flywheel effect going of credibility, quality, channel, relationship, it leads to new opportunities. One of the things that we were so excited to announce a couple of months ago was an extension of our portfolio into the nurse practitioner space.
So Capella now offers two specializations in the nurse practitioner space. It's an area that we've long been interested in, in getting into. However, one of the really, really important aspects of the nurse practitioner program is a very robust, site-based learning and practicum experience. And we actually were approached by a longtime partner, UnitedHealth Group and Optum, to come together to help solve a workforce challenge and shortage that they have and all of healthcare has. The demand for nurse practitioners is high. There's way more demand than there is supply.
The expectation over the coming years is for that gap to continue to widen, and the opportunity for us to bring our high-quality, online, scalable learning model to the nurse practitioner market and have access with their partnership to place our students, whether they're UnitedHealth Group, Optum employees or not, in their sites to generate more graduates of this program, was a truly remarkable partnership, and we're so excited about it. I think it is the perfect example of how higher education and industry need to continue to work together, to come together to solve the twenty-first century workforce challenges. Now, it's not just the employer channel, it's not just nursing that's driving a lot of Capella's success. As Karl mentioned, one of the things that we've long believed is Capella has a wonderful set of programs. It has a great reputation within the higher ed space.
It has great outcomes. The challenge in this fragmented and, you know, very competitive market is being able to create that brand awareness. And how do you get enough people to know who you are and how you do what you do? And we made, after several years of robust analytics, testing, pulling data together, we made a very calculated decision that said, if we could invest in our brand at Capella, both in terms of more absolute dollars, but also shifting more of our mix of marketing spend to brand, that we would be able to really break out and step out and grow Capella at a, at a higher rate and bring this wonderful set of programs to a broader part of the population. And as Karl said, we've had seven quarters now since we did it.
We've had double-digit growth at Capella every quarter, and we've had more efficient, more efficiency in driving that new enrollment than we frankly have ever had in our history. So we're really, really proud of that. I would say, though, it only comes true and only actually delivers on those results if we continue to make sure Capella's brand and reputation and the quality of our experience and the outcomes of our students is where it is and has been. Now I want to shift to Strayer University. So Strayer University, as I mentioned earlier, focuses on the career builder, and this is a really, really large part of the market.
Oftentimes, career builder students do not have prior education, and so one of the things that Strayer has been uniquely focused on, and Andrea will speak more to this, is: How do you make learning more interesting, more fun, and have it be a lot more supportive? If a lot of these students don't have as much discipline previously from learning, we have to change the game for them. We have to come forward with a different model that is gonna grab their interest and really help them be successful. And I think, you know, Strayer's done a phenomenal job of that. You know, focusing on those in-demand skills that are really, really important for employment... making sure that personalized level of support is there. And then another area that I think Strayer has done such a fantastic job of is really driving affordability.
In fact, I think Strayer was the first institution in our space to really step out and make affordability a priority. Now, you can see on the right side of this slide, a lot of the different features for Strayer that we bring together. Karl mentioned free Sophia. What an incredible opportunity and advantage for Strayer students, and I'll, I'll share a bit of data on that in a minute. Obviously, we continue to build the same types of employer relationships for Strayer, but as Andrea will talk about, the way we've created new way, learning and, and new ways of delivering that learning, I think is the really exciting and special sauce of Strayer. In addition to that, Strayer has long leveraged a robust network of campuses.
Karl talked about was one of the big impacts during the pandemic of not being able to operate as we normally have in those campuses. I would be remiss to not thank the teams who have got back, got those campuses open, and have seen dramatic results since. The campuses have evolved, they are continuing to evolve. We see them continuing to evolve. They are more support centers today than they've ever been. But the future, and one of the things that we're really thinking about and excited about, is how potentially could these campuses evolve further into being a hub for our higher education and employer integration? How do we bring these, these campuses in to be a center where a lot of that community, local employer aspect comes together in new and unique different ways?
So that's something we're really focused on and thinking about, but we're really proud of having these campuses back open and the great results that we're seeing. Similarly, I wanna you know, say that Strayer, as I mentioned, has done a great job on the affordability front. These are just some figures to bring home the point, things that you've already seen or heard about. So for instance, since 2000, when we actually made Sophia free and available to Strayer students, we've had 23,000 Strayer students take advantage of Sophia, and using kind of Strayer's tuition levels, probably helped them save about $100 million from a credit perspective. So that's just a tremendous advantage. I know it's something that really differentiates Strayer.
People are coming to Strayer, thinking about the opportunity for how Sophia, patched with Strayer, can create a new, more valuable, more affordable bachelor's program. The Graduation Fund, which we've had in place for many years, is a really, really great scholarship model that allows students to earn scholarship funds that they can apply towards the back of their program for every credit and class that they take earlier on in the program. And year to date, we've had 10% of our students basically take advantage of about $43 million of scholarship credits. And then, obviously, our continued focus, and you'll hear more about this from Joe, to drive more and more of our students to be leveraging employer tuition reimbursement and employer pay.
All of that is really leading to this focus that Karl mentioned and is actually one of our key corporate goals. We've been reporting this for a couple of years now on reducing the Title IV per credit hour at U.S. Higher Ed. So what that is, is basically taking the total Title IV dollars of Strayer and Capella and dividing it by the total number of credits that are earned from Capella and Strayer students. And you can see over the last three years, we've actually reduced that metric by about 25%. And our plans is to continue building with all the various tools and opportunities that we've discussed, keep building momentum towards that, where we one day envision primarily being moved away from Title IV for our students. Now, before I hand it over to Dr. St. Germain to talk a little bit more about Capella.
I did want everybody to know that it is important for our teams, for all of you, to understand that everything in higher ed starts with a focus... U.S. Higher Ed starts with a focus on our students' experience and our students' outcomes. So we're constantly thinking about how do we take advantage of all the capabilities that we have to deploy them against helping bring total program costs down, making sure that the speed to impact for our students is as fast as possible. As adults, we wanna get them benefiting from their education, improving graduation rate, and then also making sure they're getting the career impact that they need.
That comes from a variety of different elements: making sure we have the right access and onboarding, making sure we have high-quality learning, making sure we're personalizing the support experience, and also leveraging the best of technology and the capabilities we have to offer. Thank you for your time, and with that, I'm gonna ask Constance to come up.
... All right. Good morning, everyone. It's lovely to see all of you. My name is Dr. Constance St. Germain, and I am the president of Capella University. I've been with the organization a little over six years now, previously as its provost and chief academic officer, and most recently as its president. So I'm just absolutely thrilled to be able to be here today to talk to you a little bit about Capella's journey and really its transformational approach to learning, that's made it a beacon of innovation in the realm of higher ed. So before I get started, I'd like to share a little bit, Andy mentioned a little bit about the history of Capella.
So we had our genesis in 1993 as a graduate-focused institution, pioneering master's and doctoral programs to adult learners who are looking really to take their careers to the next level. And so we started off offering degrees in four distinct disciplines. So fast forward 30 years, and we actually celebrated our 30th anniversary this year. We now offer almost 50 degree programs. We have over 46,000 students, and we've conferred over 140,000 degrees. So if you look at Capella itself, you can see while we have a firm foundation in the business and IT disciplines, we are primarily focused in the social and behavioral sciences and the nursing and health sciences.
So think degrees like education, social work, counseling, clinical psychology, nursing, all of those degree programs that we know now in a post-COVID endemic society are so greatly in demand, and so many of these degrees that we offer are at the master's and doctoral level, and they lead to licensure. And if you were to take a snapshot right now in time of who our student is, they would be in their mid-30s, established in their careers, as Andy mentioned, and they come to us with some transfer credit. So they're really looking to amplify their careers, and that's why we call them career amplifiers. So the way that we deliver on our promise to the career amplifier is really in three ways: one, around how we actually deliver the learning in our academics.
Two, about how we integrate the work and learning, and the third one is around our approach to innovation and educational technology. I'll talk a little bit more about each of these in turn. Our educational philosophy is one that's based on competency-based education, and the competency-based education model has nothing to do with traditional rote learning. It is not about memorizing something. It is not about read something, write something. It is about the demonstration of mastery of certain competencies that are aligned to the discipline. It's the marriage of theory and application, and we what we do is we bring this together in three ways. One, around how we actually deliver our curriculum, so we're always trying to make sure that it's relevant, engaging, interactive. The second one is around our faculty, and our faculty, we have approximately 1,200 faculty.
We call them scholar practitioners, and over 80% of our faculty have doctorates. So not only do they have the academic credentials, but they're also actively practicing within their disciplines. So they bring that outside knowledge into the classroom to share it with their students. And then the last one is around authentic assessment, and authentic assessments are the application of theory to real-world scenarios. And so we can do this in a variety of ways, whether it's through putting together digital portfolios, it can be through video and them recording, you know, what their experience is and showing that. And so we are always trying to think of how we can differentiate those assessments again, to make sure that we are moving away from the traditional read something, write something.
Now, we transitioned to a competency-based model a little over 20 years ago, so we've been doing this for quite some time. Because we were so successful in the competency-based model, in 2013, the Department of Education actually recognized us as one of the first institutions in the country to pioneer a new form of competency-based education that was untethered from the traditional credit hour, and that's known as direct assessment. Now, the traditional credit hour is what higher education measures learning by. It is known as seat time, and it was established in 1906 as a way to measure learning by how much time a student spent sitting in their seat in a classroom. But direct assessment is completely different from this.
And what it is is it actually, as I've mentioned, measures not just mastery in competency-based education, but it's measuring how fast a student can move. So a student can move as fast or as slow as they need to through any given course by demonstrating their mastery of any given topic. And with that, we started offering these in 2013, just at the undergraduate level, and since that time period, we've actually expanded it all the way up into professional doctorates. We were one of the first institutions in the country to offer a professional doctorate in a direct assessment model, and it's been so well-received. You can see that almost 40% of our total enrollment today is in our FlexPath model. Now, just for clarification, there are two forms of competency-based education that we offer.
One is the traditional model, which we call GuidedPath, and the other one is the direct assessment model that we call FlexPath. So really, we have had, with both of these models, such resounding success in terms of student outcomes and academic achievements. We are seeing some historic highs in terms of student completion of their courses, their persistence. And if you look at the actual outcomes of them, a student who's going through a FlexPath course spends less on tuition, they take out less financial aid, and they will complete their degree faster than their traditional counterparts. So another way that we deliver on our approach to the career amplifier is how we integrate work and learning, and we do this in three distinct ways. One is around credit for prior learning. It was previously known as Prior Learning Assessment.
Credit for prior learning, because our learners are established in their careers, allows these learners to bring their experience together and work with our teams to put together a portfolio for review for college credit. So that's one way they can do it. Another way is to think about perhaps they were in the military, and they took courses in the military that were approved by the American Council on Education for college credit. They can bring that in as well as credit for prior learning. Now, the second way we do this is through experiential learning, and we do experiential learning in a very unique way.
On one hand, we in some cases partner with external organizations, nonprofits who bring to us projects or things that they need help with, and our faculty collaborate with the students to work with that organization to solve the issue that they need help with. The other way they can do that is we actually allow our students to take what they've learned in the classroom and apply it to something they're doing at work and bring that back into the classroom to demonstrate their mastery of a given topic. And then the last one is around site-based learning. Andy mentioned this earlier.
Because so many of our programs lead to licensure, after the students complete the academic requirements, so many of them have to go on and take clinical hours, practicum hours, in order to apply to their state boards, for licensure to be able to practice. And so we have a very robust site-based learning team. We put approximately 12,000 students a year through our site-based learning program. We have over 20,000 sites across the United States, and that's growing every single day, and we track and catalog all of the hours and where they're at and the forms that they need for their any given state.
So when they actually complete all their required hours and they apply to their state licensure boards, we then help package up all that information for them and verify that they've completed all of their requirements. Then lastly, we are constantly innovating. Both Karl and Andy mentioned this in their earlier remarks. We use data analytics all the time, not just for students to see where they might need extra support or how they're performing in our classroom. Being that we're an online institution, we use it for faculty. We monitor faculty to help us see where they might need extra support. Faculty can use it as well to see how they're performing against their peers, what they might actually be able to do better to enhance themselves.
So data analytics underpins everything that we're doing, and we're very open and transparent with our faculty about the use of those analytics. We've been doing some very interesting things lately. We have a learning lab that is constantly iterating and doing small pilots. Any given quarter, we have approximately 20 pilots that are going on in various stages. Most recently, we were piloting HyFlex, and because we are an online asynchronous environment, we started offering the option to our students in certain courses to be able to take courses synchronously, and we wanted to see how they would receive it. They absolutely loved to have that option.
They loved being able to connect with their peers and their faculty in real time, and if for some reason they couldn't make it, perhaps their child had a soccer game or something else was going on in their life, they had the option to either do an alternate assignment or watch the recording of that interaction as well. So we're constantly doing those kind of things to really promote that peer-to-peer engagement and lessen that interpersonal distance sometimes that you find in an online environment. We are very robust multimedia. We are constantly using interactive media, simulations, video messaging to try to convey the information. Again, move away from the read something, write something area. And then lastly, around AI. This has been such a significant lift for, I would say, the institution. We are so thrilled about AI. We are embracing it.
It is evolving at such a fast pace that we believe that it's going to be simply like a calculator, a cell phone coming in the future. So we're trying to figure out what is the best way to leverage that. So we have teams all around SCI and the university who are thinking through how can we use AI, not just to make sure that our students are ready for work, but also for faculty, and to remove those heavy administrative tasks sometimes that they have. So we can take that burden off of them, so they can actually focus on teaching and connecting with their students. Underpinning everything that we do is our commitment to excellence.
You can see here, as I mentioned earlier, since so many of our programs lead to licensure, these are all of the numerous accreditations, recognitions, designations that we've received and are actually required in specific disciplines here. These are considered the gold standards of their disciplines, and in many states, unless you graduate from one accredited program, you cannot apply for licensure. So we have a very robust, continuous quality improvement process that's always going on. It seems like every single year we have some accreditor who's visiting us, and we are really lucky to be able to say we have such great relationships with all of them, and it helps us make sure that we are being aligned in the best way possible, to not only what's going on in the discipline, but to their standards as well.
I'm going to get it ready to turn it over to Dr. Andrea Backman, and I'll just leave you with this thought, that Capella isn't just an institution of higher education, but it's actually a transformational movement and a force for change. I think it's a fantastic representation of what's possible when passion meets innovation. Thank you.
Good morning. I'm Andrea Backman. I have the honor of serving as Strayer University's president. I've been here for about a little over 16 years, 15-ish years, and, the thing that makes me so passionate every day, getting up to do the work that we do, it's been mentioned before, but it's worthy of mentioning again as I start to talk about Strayer University, is the deep commitment to economic mobility. So I've spent my career thinking about access and making sure that people who gain access actually achieve the goal of education. But if nothing ultimately changes in their lives, then we haven't done what we've set out to do. So economic mobility is at the heart of everything the team thinks about every day. I can't wait to share some of the innovations that Strayer, continues to iterate on.
But before I do, I just wanted to share a little bit about our program mix. It's not surprising, given the history and our legacy that Andy mentioned, that 71% of Strayer students are in business-related programs. And has historically been the case, our second-largest program continues to be IT-related programs. Now, Andy mentioned the really strong recovery post-COVID, and the really strong, continuous new student enrollment growth, which of course, we're very pleased about and is very important to our organization. But equally as important is the success of the students coming in, and so I wanted to make sure that I took some time to share a few of the metrics that my team looks at every day and that we find to be really important in thinking about student success. The first is student course success.
This is the number of students that finish the term and have a passing grade. That might feel like, well, just like a nugget, but it's actually a really important proxy for continuation. Continuation is important because it is a proxy for student success into the future. The more important metric up here is the first-year success metric. You can see over time, and actually, if I took these numbers back, there'd be three more arrows up there of cohorts of students coming in who are doing better year-over-year as it relates to first-year success. First-year success is important to Strayer students and students across the nation because those who get to the end of their first year are much more likely to graduate.
So for us, this is a proxy for gaining success in graduation rates, as these students move through their programs of study. As Karl mentioned, I'm going to spend a little bit of time on this slide. Technology for us is core to everything we do. We don't sort of rest on our laurels, that what we've introduced into our classrooms is going to be good enough into the future. And so we're constantly looking at ways to evolve learning so that it's the most engaging experience and the most successful experience for students. So I just want to spend a little bit of time on a few of these here. The first is Irving. Capella has Ella, so, I could talk a little bit about Ella, too.
But Irving is our proprietary chatbot that we introduced actually in 2017 as a way to remove rote questions that faculty and staff got all of the time, to be able to provide instant feedback to students who had questions about things that were not academic or that honestly were just sort of an FAQ list of questions. Since 2017, Irving's had almost 3 million conversations with students, removing a lot of the goo, if you will, that faculty and staff would spend their time answering questions on things when they could be having substantive interaction with our students. So we're really proud of the evolution of Irving, which is now also inside the classrooms. Faculty Action Center for us has been game-changing. Again, it's a proprietary tool that we built internally.
We've stretched it across all of our institutions, including Strayer and Capella, and it's a way for faculty to immediately be able to see which students need what help in what areas. And you can imagine, if you're an instructor and you have, call it 1,000 students across several sections, trying to find who needs help in what areas in online, in an online environment is very challenging. This tool allows people to immediately understand who needs help in what ways, so that we can do immediate outreach. And it has been game-changing in terms of both, again, faculty efficiency, but also student success and support. The 10X model of instruction is something that we also deployed within Strayer and have then ported to the other universities. So we realized some years ago that we had some really superior faculty in our midst.
These were a gem of faculties who could create environments where students thrived at levels that were just exceptional. So our first thought was to figure out how do we create more superior faculty? And if you look at the definition of superior, it is that way because it's a category of people who are exceptional. So we could grow a few more, but we couldn't grow at the scale that we needed to, to have that level of faculty in front of our students. So instead, we flipped our thinking and we scaled our best faculty, our most superior faculty, them to the most number of students possible. So today, our best faculty are teaching great numbers of students, meaning that instead of having five sections of 30, these faculty can teach 1,300 students in a given quarter, and that has been remarkable in terms of student success.
They don't do it alone. This is technology-enabled, again, our commitment to technology, and also behind the scenes are a group of very dedicated teaching assistants with the right credentials to be able to support students. If technology is important, we also believe that the environment in which students learn has to be as engaging as possible. If you've ever been in an online course, and it's not a Strayer course, but the online coursework can be boring unless you focus on making it not so. And so we decided we wanted our content to be episodic and interesting and fun. Learning can be fun, so that students want to come back and want to engage in the content. So we actually went out and hired a few documentary filmmakers and said, gave them a pilot. You've heard about pilots. Said, "Here is our largest course.
Take this particular content of the course. We'll carve out some students, and we want to pilot what happens if we put a docu-style learning event inside the course room instead of the traditional sort of video answer, discussion question." The results were remarkable. People want to hear real-life stories about real-life people doing real-life things. So what you see up here, I won't go through all of it, but you know, we have a award-winning actor up here. We have a WNBA player who's known everywhere. We have the first female Thunderbird pilot, and then we have our crew, who is here on the runway. But all of these individuals are inside of one of our biggest courses, which is a general education course, psychology. They're all talking about decision making in bite-sized chunks.
And Nicole Malachowski, who's the Thunderbird pilot, is talking about, for example, decision making in the face of stress. And she's talking about it from the context of flying right next to her peers in the air, and the nanosecond decisions that she has to make. So we believe that this content is very unique and different, and it's driving great student engagement and results. I would be remiss if I didn't highlight our faculty. So I've worked at a number of institutions of higher education. I think our faculty, I know our faculty are world-class, but it's not just us who think that. Our students are telling us that term after term. So this is Net Promoter Score. Anything in between 50 and 80 is considered exceptional as it relates to Net Promoter.
You can see over time, our faculty have remained in the exceptional category, but there continues to be a climb. That's because we focus on faculty culture. We also focus on making sure that faculty have all the supports they need to be successful. There are two faculty categories that I pulled out. The first one is the 10X category on the left-hand side, and the second is the Jack Welch Management Institute faculty, which I'll touch on in a minute. But those two scores are considered to be world-class by Bain & Company. I just wanted to make sure I highlighted that we think the faculty have a really big impact on what happens in our classrooms and the success rates that we're seeing. Now, equally important, at Strayer University, our students come to us, they're about 37 years of age.
They have a lot of competing life priorities. Many of them lack confidence. There's a lot going on in their lives. And so if our goal is to create access and then have them realize success and economic mobility, and yet food insecurity or housing insecurity or childcare issues are getting in the way, it's going to be really hard for our students to focus on schoolwork, even though they really, really want to. So during the COVID era, we did a 36-week pulse survey with our students to better understand what was happening. We knew that all of the things I just mentioned were already happening, and things just got worse and direr, and we decided that we had to invest in a center for well-being that really focused on the whole person and supporting the whole person.
Even though we are an academic institution, we recognize that we have to be helping students navigate all of these six component parts that are around the wheel. So we can't deliver all of them, but we can triage, we can make supports available to have conversations with students and make sure that they're able to be successful in their educational journey. We also believe, and it's been mentioned several times, that students should not wait until the end of their academic program to realize benefit and currency with the investment that they're making. So there's a few things that we've done over the years that have been really essential to student success, and I just want to highlight two here. First is the 10 essential employability skills. So for most institutions of higher education, there's a general education requirement.
That requirement is about 40% of an undergraduate degree program. It is almost always completely disconnected from the world of work. So someone's sitting in a classroom, and they're learning. Very important. We all believe in the general education curriculum, but we believe that there was a way to infuse skill-based learning so that it mapped, students were understanding how it connected to the workplace while they were learning the general education curriculum. So, for example, if I'm in a history course and I'm a Strayer University student, I'm learning about history, and I'm being measured on my content knowledge. I'm also learning about productivity over time and my, how I can be a productive employee within a workplace. And I'm being measured on that, and I have a scale on that too. So students understand the relevancy, and they're also growing those skills.
The second thing that I would highlight is that, again, along the way, we want students to be able to demonstrate to employers and to the world that they have a skill that they didn't have before they came to us. For example, if they get one of the 10 skills along the way, we send them a badge. They can put that badge on their social media sites, which we also help them figure out. That's really important to have those out there, and also just tell their employer that they have something, some skill, some currency that they didn't have before they started. The Jack Welch Management Institute, I just wanted to quickly highlight, this is one of our gem programs within Strayer University, with close to 2,000 students.
I had the distinct privilege of serving as Jack Welch's dean when he was here and building this program, and he was deeply, deeply engaged in the content, in exposing his expert of practice network to the team so that we could capture stories, not just Jack's, but other world-class leaders in the classroom. And you can see the thing that is... Two things on this slide that are really important. The majority of students are experiencing a promotion or a raise while they're in the program, and this is a graduate program, so it's a shorter program. And also, that it's not just us that thinks it's great.
Again, Princeton Review, this year, we showed up 7th in terms of the top 50 online MBA programs, and that's been, we've been climbing our way up for the last few years in really, really, really good company. Finally, again, our North Star is to create economic mobility and ensure students have the best experience possible. We have over 150,000 alumni, Strayer University. That's as far back as we can count, given how long we've been around. And, alumni are, 83% are saying that it was a worthwhile investment. So that's why we do what we do. It's what we set out to do. And with that, I'd like to invite Andy and Constance back up for questions. Thank you. Go ahead.
Any questions?
Hi. Say, when you were talking about Capella, you said that many of your programs lead to licensure, and so I'm curious, do you track how many people apply for these licenses and then either pass or fail?
Not all licensure actually requires them to take a test, similar to like an RN test, if you're thinking about that, when they're trying to get that. Some of them just have to apply, and because we have so many of them, we do our best. Many of our accreditors actually require that we actually keep track of that, and we have to report that out in our self-studies to them.
Yeah, there's not any one specific metric overall. I think we feel really good about the licensure success rates. There are, as Constance was just saying, different areas, like the nurse practitioner program, for example, will require actually an exam, and so that's something-
Right.
that, you know, we will have and be able to consider reporting as we get into the future.
Hi, Emily Marzo with Bank of America. I guess my first question would be, when you look at AI and the future of AI, are you looking to leverage it more internally first, or are you looking to use it externally with the students and with, engagement that way?
Yeah. So I'll maybe start, and then I'll ask them to, to jump in. I think we see it honestly being applied to a bunch of different categories. First of all, I think we believe we need to be teaching the future students how to use AI. The world's going in that direction, so how we integrate AI and, and create programs and curriculum in that space, but also just across discipline, how to use those tools is, is definitely a focus, and, and we're working on that.
I think secondarily, there's opportunities to figure out how to deliver a better learning experience, and that's both in terms of how instruction and learning happens, how we empower our faculty to be more effective, more personalized in the learning, but also thinking, and I think Constance and Andrea can speak to this, how do we also make sure that the credibility and legitimacy of our assessments are withstanding the AI tools and evolution? But then on top of that, there's massive opportunities for productivity and efficiency across the rest of the organization, and that is everything from how do we use, like, generative AI in ways that could better personalize through avatars or other means, a support service that today we use people to do? How do we make them more effective?
How do we give them the tools to reach more students, kind of 10x our support staff? And then also, there's back-office areas where, you know, we're seeing the opportunity. We, you know, one example is we deal with a lot of documents, and so how can we use AI automation to much more efficiently process some of our back-office capabilities? I don't know what else you'd like to add.
Well, I can just give you a really great example of how we're leveraging AI in the classroom that we've been piloting. We try to be very transparent. We have student advisory boards. I've spoken with our students. I know that they're using it. They've already told us they use it in their jobs a lot. And so we have decided to embrace that. So, for example, we'll have a faculty member who will provide the prompt and tell the student as part of an assignment, "I want you to write this essay. Then I want you to go, and I want you to upload it into ChatGPT with this prompt, asking it to do these specific things," right? "How can I make this paper better?" Right? "What are areas that I need to work on with my grammar?" Things like that. Then-
...get take that feedback they get from the AI and then rewrite their paper. And they have to upload not only what they were uploaded, plus with all the feedback, and then the final product as well, right? And make sure that they're properly citing to the, of the use of AI. So we're trying to actually teach students how to use it to improve it. So it's not unlike going to a traditional writing center in a traditional campus and asking for help.
I mean, I would just add that we think that artificial intelligence has a lot more benefit than it does risk for the classroom. And so there's a lot of ways that we're already training students and faculty about the proper use. But we've also introduced programs across SEI for people to learn more about AI and to study what AI is, so that they can grow their careers in that way.
And then a second question is on Sophia and, like, and the Workforce Edge program and converting, I believe you said 0.5%-1% of employees on the platform. I guess, how are you driving that? What is making students convert over to Strayer and Capella, and how confident do you feel of that conversion?
Yeah. No, that's a great question. I think Karl said about 0.5%-1%. I know Joe Schaefer... We're gonna have a whole section on ETS in a couple, a little bit, and he's gonna go into much more detail on that, but he'll, he'll explain.
Hey, good morning. Jasper Bibb, Truist Securities. I guess my first question was just: How do you think about the balance between the employer-affiliated channel and individual enrollments over the next five years in this plan? And if mix keeps going towards the employer-affiliated channel, what would be the implications for your unit economics, revenue per student, cost of acquisition?
Yeah, it's a great question. So I'd say right now, what's contemplated is that employer, as a channel, will continue to grow faster than our direct-to-consumer. But it's not going to be a light switch. It's more of a dimmer switch, so continuing to grow the direct-to-consumer business. We think there's an opportunity to continue with our brand expansion to reach students directly. We just think that employer is gonna grow faster. So I would say an equivalent mix shift that we've been seeing the last couple of years. In terms of the unit economics, you know, one of the things that is, is really great about the employer channel is the efficiency of the enrollments, particularly as Joe will get into in a minute.
When we can get a platform like Workforce Edge, you know, integrated into an employer, it almost becomes a micro ecosystem for us to build our brand and reputation with, and, and then also be able to really access those employee students at a much more efficient level. So even though there's a lifetime revenue pricing decrease, our efficiency to reach that student is much less. And we also see our employer students often persist better than the direct-to-consumer students, too. So on a total lifetime value, even though the pricing is lower, it gets, it gets averaged out. So we feel like the unit economics work very well, and there's a whole host of other advantages that being more focused on the employer provide us.
Thanks for that. And then my second question was just on the future of the campus network. Like, if you look at the history of Strayer, the growth was fueled through building out the campuses, and then you brought that number down a bit. As you look out to the next five years, do you think, like, the current campus footprint is sufficient to support your growth objectives? Do you see yourself opening up more campuses in the next couple of years? Just any context there would be great.
Yeah, I think it's something that we're trying to figure out. I think, you know, we are trying to figure out. You know, it's possible that investing more in certain campuses and certain geographies and actually even building a bigger campus position in certain markets might be a really attractive option, but maybe having fewer campuses. So right now, I think we're still trying to figure out what is the go-forward. I would not expect a massive increase in campuses, but I think there could be some, and we're gonna be piloting some things over the next year or so that's gonna help us uncover, you know, the specific direction.
Thank you. Just wondering, you know, given the success and the new enrollment growth in Capella with the brand investment, are you considering a similar investment in Strayer?
Yeah, I think it's something we talk about. Obviously, when the model at Strayer was under pressure, given the campuses were closed, during the pandemic, you know, it was something that, you know, we were not really thinking about. I think as we get Strayer into a more recovered position, we're seeing some momentum. I think there is a question about whether or not we take a step and go bigger there. I think we would do it differently if we did. Building a national brand is an expensive proposition. In fact, we looked at doing that for Strayer pre-pandemic. It's taken Capella many years to kind of build that.
So I think we would probably, if we did make an investment, focus more on that local, regional, strategy, and maybe in combination with, you know, some of the, the new campus ideas that we have. So not right now, we're not planning on it, but it's something that we're considering.
Sure. And then, who do you think your biggest competitors are?
I mean, I'll ask presidents to join in, but I would say competition varies widely by program and by institution. So we do look at data through the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS) about kind of where our applicants are going that don't enroll. So we can kinda understand that. It's very different by different programs. Like, nursing at Capella would have a very different competitive set than others. But it's the big categories, it's some of the large online national branded institutions. It's a lot of local and regional schools, but those are onesie-twosies, but as you know, there's a really large list of them. And so it's kind of all of those. I think there's not any one particular competitor that makes sense.
I don't know if you'd add anything different to that.
No, that's correct.
All right. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Andy, Constance, and Andrea. We will now take a 30-minute break, so please join us in the gathering space for refreshments, and we'll meet back here in 30 minutes. Thank you.