It started. Thanks, you all, for coming out. Universal Technical Institute, this is a company that I think has done our conference for maybe two or three years. We've been really hot on the thesis of educational services companies. We have a couple more here today. In Chicago, I think there's a couple of one more that'll be there in Chicago, and we'll guys will talk to you about maybe coming out to Chicago. But we really like this theme, and we like this name. It's done very well for us, helped us with the outperformance of our track record. With that, I'll turn it over to Jerome, CEO.
I want to thank the AV people for trusting me with this in my hand. I appreciate that. My name is Jerome Grant. I'm the CEO of Universal Technical Institute. Universal Technical Institute, oh, actually, before I go.
I've got to do the quick obligatory. We are talking about forward-looking statements. We have certain risks and assumptions baked in here. We encourage all investors to look at our 10-Q and 10-K for a full discussion of all risks. Thanks so much.
Great.
Sorry to have to be here today.
We actually celebrated our 60th anniversary this year. Universal Technical Institute started as a single campus in Phoenix, Arizona, training about five auto workers. Now we're addressing skill gaps in two areas. We have 32 campuses. We'll start somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 students. We focus on two divisions, one in transportation skill, trades, and energy, and the other one is in healthcare skills. We offer over 35 programs, and the dynamics in our market, if you're not familiar with it, are judged based on outcomes first and foremost. We graduate about 60%, excuse me, 70% of our students, which is a very high outcome. Community colleges tend to graduate somewhere in the neighborhood of 30% of their students, and four out of five of our graduates are employed within one year.
Those are important statistics because not only are they about your reputation, but they're also about your accreditation and your ability to continue to have Title IV funding and things along those lines. These are very, very high standards we have. We have a strong financial outlook for the year. Our current guidance for the year is between $825 million and $835 million. We've raised it twice. The wind is nicely at our back. Net income of between $56 million and $60 million, and I think the midpoint's right at about $126 million for adjusted EBITDA. There's a lot of words on this page around a compelling thesis. We've been in a growth trajectory since 2020, excuse me, since 2019. In 2019, the company was $300 million with no EBITDA, and now we'll be somewhere in the mid $800 million range with $126 million in EBITDA.
We've got a proven track record for orchestrating growth organically and inorganically. We're the largest single player in the skilled trades space when you think about the pie chart in the market, and we're continuing to chart out what we believe to be the great opportunity there is in this market. As I said, we've got two divisions: Universal Technical Institute, 60 years old, auto, diesel, welding, energy, etc., and Concord Career Colleges, which focuses in about 40% of the business in the dental areas, dental hygiene, dental assistance, and 60% in mostly allied health. An opportunity for us moving forward is to move more strongly into nursing, where we are not a strong player in nursing. We acquired Concord just about two years ago, coming up on two years ago.
What binds together is that they seem like sort of weird businesses that you think are connected to each other, why healthcare and trades. What binds them together is that we will only focus in areas where the supply and demand curve for workers is wildly out of whack. There are four jobs on our job board for every UTI graduate. There are between five and 10 jobs on our job board for every Concorde Career Colleges graduate, and the markets in which we focus are projected to, that gap is projected to increase over the next 15 years if you were to believe the Bureau of Labor Statistics and everything that's out there. Again, the aging population and people retiring, fewer students going to high school, things along those lines are where the supply and demand curve really, really focuses.
There are areas we won't focus that are alternate to a college education and have a certification. We won't focus in culinary, not a big supply and demand curve issue, and a lot of the aesthetic areas, not a lot of supply and demand curve issue. There is a logic to the connection point between healthcare and the trades, which is we're trying to solve this big middle skills problem. We always like to show pictures. We encourage investors and potential investors to come and visit our campuses because when they come and visit our campuses, and we have 32 of them around the country, the number one thing they say is, "I didn't think it was going to look like this." Right? The industry-aligned education that we have at UTI and the reputation we have for that industry alignment really shows through in our campuses.
Our relationships with Mercedes, BMW, Volvo, and 34 other OEM manufacturers, and the state-of-the-art technology we're using in our healthcare campuses really stands out. All right, so I—oh, you're going to do this one.
Sure. Yeah. This is Bruce Schuman, our CFO.
Hey there. This company has really been on a very, very significant multi-year transformation journey. This is just kind of a look back at our revenue growth from 2018. Really, what's driven this is a few things that Jerome already talked about. We've continued to add new programs, new curriculum additions, new campuses. We've had three that have opened up in this time period. We've already announced three new ones this year. We've really focused on local marketing and admissions optimization, really investing in the field teams or the admission teams who are out in the high schools, generating interest in some of the skilled trades in our high schools, for example. Really overhauled our marketing kind of muscle for the company.
We've moved away from kind of a generic scattershot marketing to a very focused social-first SEO, SEM-optimized lead generation engine that's really driven some nice returns for us. Things like real estate rationalization doesn't sound like a super fun topic, but this has really been an unlock of value for us. It used to be when we'd launch a new program, the very next question would be, "We have to go get a new building. Let's lease new space." We've really focused on, "Let's optimize every single campus, move into more of a blended learning." Some of the academic in-class things have moved online. That's really generated a lot of capacity for us. A lot of the new programs now are going into existing capacity, existing footprint. That's been a huge both revenue unlock and a margin unlock for the company.
I think the final kind of pillar of what's driven this growth is very well-executed, well-integrated acquisitions. We bought MMI back in 2022. That unlocked a lot of portfolio of kind of skilled trades on our existing campuses: aviation, wind energy, the electrical suite, that type of thing that Jerome talked about. Of course, Concorde that was closed in fiscal 2023. That's a huge unlock for the company, really opening up the whole healthcare skilled trades for us, which is going to be a very significant pillar of growth going forward. This page, really quickly, for Jerome and I and the executive team, this is kind of the ultimate scorecard for us. We want to look back and say, "This is the lens through which we look at everything we do, every initiative in the company. Are we meeting our commitments?
Are we meeting our external expectations we've set, our own expectations we've set for ourselves? Are we creating meaningful shareholder value? Those are really the two most important metrics. This is a quick look back through 2022. You can see kind of our guidance, what we set for ourselves, our goals, how well we did in meeting those, both in revenue and EBITDA. Ultimately, that translates into a meaningful share price appreciation and market cap. We're focused on student outcomes and doing what we say and meeting expectations. That's really critical for us and the exec team.
We've been talking about the strategy of the company. In 2020, we went to the market. We raised about $50 million in capital to launch this Northstar strategy. The Northstar strategy really did have three pillars to it, which was growth, diversification, and optimization.
You'll see these words like optimize and grow and things on the slides as you move forward. The engines for both growth and diversification really stand in the lines of new programs that we bring to the table, adding programs like the skilled trades and healthcare, and new campuses. The reason we put this slide in here is that our next phase of our Northstar strategy, which we've put out into the public, really is an organic phase that has to do with these two pillars, where we have a significant opportunity to continue to optimize our campuses by putting new programs, net new programs, as well as MIT programs on the UTI campuses, as well as a lot of greenfield. Looking at our investor deck, you'll see a lot of greenfield geographically for us to launch new campuses.
What we've said, and I do not know if it is on the next slide or not, what I mean about greenfield, a lot of gray space there to put more campuses. What we've said in order to affect this phase of the Northstar Strategy is that we will open a minimum of two new campuses a year. We have announced three for 2026. We will launch at least six new programs a year. We announced nine for 2025, and we will move on to announce our 2026 category every year for the next five years. We like to make things very simple for people. Doing the math on this, in our investor deck, you will see a proforma for a campus. You will see a proforma for programs. If you add six programs executed and two campuses, you see the new programs, etc.
The other thing we ask you to believe is that this management team has a way to organically grow our same store sales or the same program sales and enrollments by 3% a year. We do not go out on a limb and say there is going to be a huge win behind us. There may be, but 3% a year, and that we can get about 2% or 3% out of price. If we can get 3% increases in same store enrollments every year, a couple of points out of price, and then execute the way we have executed over the last five years on new programs and new campuses, that is how you get to that $1.1 billion and the 10% CAGR and the EBITDA that you see approaching 20% by 2029. Okay.
Just a quick breakdown for you of our fiscal 2025 guidance.
I thought it'd be good just to show a few of the major elements here. On the revenue side, the midpoint of our guide would be about a 13% growth year over year. We've said it'll be sort of $825 million-$835 million on the top line. We're very focused not only on top-line growth, but also profitability growth. Our midpoint of the guide for net income will be 38% growth year over year, same for earnings per share, obviously. New student starts, again, that's a critical indicator for us because that's a leading indicator for future revenue. Almost 30,000 starts, about 10% growth is what we're anticipating for this year on new student starts, which is going to be important for 2026. Very healthy adjusted EBITDA profile, about 22% growth at the midpoint.
The only indicator on this whole page that's not up and to the right is adjusted free cash flow. That's directly related to what Jerome just talked about, the Northstar phase two strategy. We have a very significant investment period that's really starting this year on CapEx, extending into 2026 and 2027. We have about a $55 million CapEx expenditure in 2025 to really build out those three campuses we just announced: the Atlanta campus, our fully optimized campus in Atlanta, San Antonio, which is kind of a skilled trades first campus, and then expanding the Dallas campus as well. All of that CapEx has to be executed on in 2025 to make sure that we can maintain that growth that Jerome just showed you.
Quickly, just this last page on growth. I mentioned the growth investment.
We even talked about on our call, we have about $6.5 million of growth OpEx planned for the second half of 2025. That is all the advanced kind of staging and advanced hiring personnel you have to put in place to make sure that you can execute on your growth plans. I mentioned the $55 million of CapEx. Over 50% of our CapEx, you can see there, $29 million is going toward growth, purely growth, getting these new campuses, new programs built out. Quick note here, to be compliant with the SEC, we are no longer calling these one-time adjustments. This is now our normal operating rhythm as a company. We are going to be doing multiple campuses, multiple programs a year for the foreseeable future. Cannot really call those one-time expenses anymore. We are no longer adding those back to EBITDA.
If you're doing the year-over-year compare, that does hurt us a little bit on the compare, but it's the right thing to not back those out anymore. I think that's all I had on the growth piece. Any questions on the growth side? Yeah. Any questions on anything? We like to get through it and have more question and answer than anything else here. Yes.
Excuse me. If the federal government were to direct more education funding to trade schools, how would that affect Universal?
Boy, that was a softball. Quite positively.
Repeat the question.
Okay. The question was, if the federal government is to direct more federal funding towards trade schools and away from Harvard, like a tweet was in that, or four-year education, how would that affect trade schools? It would be quite positive. First of all, we don't plan on that. We don't budget for that. We have room for it. I think that gets to the point of the regulatory environment right now is the question: is that we are seeing a more favorable regulatory environment? Our second quarter report, I talked uncharacteristically positively about that environment to the point where for the four years prior, I was never actually allowed a meeting with the undersecretary for higher education in the Department of Education. They just wouldn't even take a meeting.
I've already met with them on multiple occasions because they want to know what we think as the largest provider in this space of how they can get more skilled workers in America. If we're going to build ships in America and we're going to build planes in America and we're not going to build them in China or somewhere else, they do not have nearly the workers they need. I'll give you an example of that. I had dinner in Washington with a gentleman that has two contracts for shipbuilding. He needs 15,000 welders right now. Right now. I graduate 3,000 a year across my entire—and so that's an opportunity for us to think about bespoke training programs where we may be able to work with them on it.
To follow up, what would be the administrative mechanism that would get the funds from the government to Universal?
Yeah, it's not about getting funds to Universal. I can tell you the advice that I gave Under Secretary Bergeron, which is, number one, I think you need more direct support for students in terms of loan programs and Pell Grants to encourage them to seek in these areas. Some of the budget proposals you'll see in the BBB are angling towards the trades. For instance, Pell Grants and loans for short-term programs, so certificate programs as opposed to degrees, etc., has been added into the bill. Direct support for students is one. This one sort of threw him for a loop. I said, "I think you guys need to spend a lot more money in high schools and community colleges." Some people would say, "Well, community college.
They do.
Some people will say, "Well, community colleges are your competitor." Why would you say that? The reason is that my biggest competitor is lack of knowledge that this exists, this whole industry exists, and parents who, because their kids aren't doing tech programs in high schools, don't know that this is something that they would go on post-secondary to do. We talk to about 500,000 young people a year who are not going on to four-year colleges. The biggest response we get back from them is, "I don't think my parents will let me do this." Money, most of the tech programs have dried up in the high schools. The community colleges have downsized the programs. The energy level for this type of education needs to be brought back to life.
I'll give you an example about why it's not a competitive issue, is that we came into Austin, Texas. We have a greatly successful business there. We've got about 1,000 kids in our Austin campus two years into launching it. Across town, there's another family-owned business that's been there for years and years and years. 500 kids in the same programs that we have. They now have 650. Us coming into the area brought the awareness of the trades to the area, and all boats are floating higher. Those were the primary mechanisms that we had. The other advice I gave, frankly, was, "I think you need to rethink some of your restrictions and rules to allow me to move faster," because there's a lot of red tape you got to go through to get programs approved and campuses approved.
There are timelines associated, all built into our plan, the current timelines. If you would ease up on a couple of these things for folks like us, we probably could move faster.
Would you have a capacity issue?
No. I'm only 40% filled on my UTI campuses. I used to be around 65% filled, but when we moved to the blended learning curriculum, students are now only on my campus three hours a day. I've been able to double the amount of tracks that I have. I've got plenty of capacity.
If you're 40% full, what's the $55 million CapEx program for?
More campuses, more locations. Students won't travel to some. One of the barriers is, "I'm not in Georgia. I'm not in the northwest at all," we can put up the map, is that, yes, some students will travel, but not that many. You need to bring the education to them. Our plan is to open 10 more UTI campuses over the next five years. We're still developing the plans for our recent acquisition in Concord. Healthcare is very local. Nobody goes more than 20 minutes to go to a healthcare school. We do have about 30-40% of our students now that will relocate to come to a UTI campus for a specific program that they have. You really got to bring the education to them.
Did the proposed—I was in a tax bill on increasing the credit requirement for Pell Grants?
Yeah, that didn't make it to the Senate.
Okay.
Sure. The risk share in there did not make it to the Senate either. It is not in the Senate bill. The Senate bill came out last night, by the way, just last night. Luckily, my IR—excuse me, my government relations person sent me a bulleted point list about five minutes ago. Generally speaking, the entirety of the bill actually will not be good news for four-year education and graduate students, etc., along those lines because there are now new caps on how much funding you can get that would—the more expensive schools are going to have trouble funding students. Now, what is the reaction to that? The reaction to that is you will get more students saying, "Maybe I will just go do a one-year program that I can get funded," or a two-year program in nursing that I can get funded.
Those caps, I don't have any programs that come anywhere near breaking those caps on my campuses, so it doesn't really apply to me. Sure.
Can you talk a little bit about the pricing of various programs?
Sure.
Any elasticity of demand?
Taylor, two cities on pricing. The UTI business, which is transportation, skilled trades, and energy, has actually a pretty rational price scheme. Our average revenue per student per quarter is $9,000. The only thing that changes in those is how many months you're with me. $26,000 for a nine-month welding program, $37,000 or $38,000 for a 51-week auto diesel program. Pretty standard across the industry. You do not really have as much upside pricing power during the 2022 spike in inflation. People say, "Why do you not just raise your prices 10%?" Because most of our students receive Pell Grants and government-backed loans, and then they have a small gap, usually a few thousand dollars that they have to pay. Every time I raise my prices, all I am doing is increasing the gap because the Pell Grants and the loans did not go up.
A 10% increase makes more students go, "Ooh, I do not know if I can afford to do that." I do not like to be glib about demand, is that if I build 20 campuses over the next five years and start 48-50 programs on the campus that I have over here, there still will be four to five jobs for every single graduate in the United States, and there still will be five to ten jobs for every healthcare graduate in the United States. The statistics of job growth in these areas cannot be satisfied by this. The smart thing I would have is, where are the cities I should go to to be able to capture as much of that as fast as possible?
When we're thinking about the cities for UTI campuses and for Concorde campuses, we're looking at what are the locations that probably will have the need the fastest, the longest, so that we can capture them the quickest.
Have you looked at partnering with private industry to help fund the gap?
We have, actually.
Great.
Over the last five years, we've worked actually very closely with—we have 6,000 employment partners on the UTI side and another 7,000 employment partners on the Concorde side. When we say partners, five or six years ago, those were not really partnerships. They were just people who would hire our kids. A partnership now manifests itself in a concept of a trip agreement, we call it. To get access to one of our graduates, which are in really high demand, you have to basically lay out what your offer is going to be. We have platinum partners, gold partners, silver partners, and we have job fairs for each of them based on how good their offers are.
If you go to work for Lithia, 400 car dealerships around the country, or Penske, 400 car dealers around the country, they're going to give you a sign-on bonus of $7,000, pay you about a starting salary of about $45,000 to an auto mechanic, $45,000 a year. They'll pay $325 a month to pay off your student loans up to $25,000 as long as you stay working for them. They're a platinum partner. They hire about 1,000 each now of our kids because what it's taken out of the risk scenario of the loan. Mom and dad say, "You should go work for a Penske dealership because I don't have to worry about the student loans." We have 6,000 of those partners now on the UTI side. Concorde's a little further, not as far along. We just bought them. We haven't built all those relationships up.
Frankly, in the healthcare areas, people are not as worried about paying back their loans because the wage increases have been significant over the last five years. Industry alignment is one of the things that sets us apart of why someone would want to come to UTI. The 34 OEM partners, 6,000 employment partners are something we can demonstrate on our campuses. You can demonstrate the OEM partnerships by the fact that we have all the latest Ford products and Mercedes products and Volvo products and all their battery technologies and all their EV technologies and Lincoln Electric welding and all of that on our campuses. We are able to demonstrate on our campuses how the hiring profiles work. It is a strong benefit for having our national footprint and being us. They do not like to work with the individual community colleges because they operate independently.
It's hard to have a relationship with a single community college here and there. But because I've got 16 campuses around the country and 17 on the healthcare side, we sort of get in pole position for having conversations with them.
Sure.
It would seem to me that there are certifications required for a lot of these jobs that you're preparing your students for. Is the certification embedded in the curriculum itself so that they have a certificate when they graduate?
No. Yet, our oath to the students, if you're an auto mechanic, 51 weeks, our oath to you is that you're going to be able to pass the ASE certification. If you are a good student and you pass well, you will pass the ASE certification. We are judged in the healthcare area by how many of our students pass the certifications after they graduate. We prepare them for them, but we do not deliver them. Many of them are delivered by a governing body and a third party right after they graduate. We have very high pass rates. Therefore, we can demonstrate that your risk is very minimal. Again, assuming we have open enrollment, you have to have a high school diploma, and you have to be able to pay, whether it is through federal money or the like.
We work very hard to get people to be able to pass those certifications.
That's a selling tool, too.
Absolutely. Absolutely. But we don't guarantee you're going to pass the certification because we can't guarantee you're going to be a good student. Other questions or ideas, concerns? It's a conference about ideas. We're around, as I said, Matt Kempton is our Head of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. We do really encourage people to come visit our campuses. Our campus presidents love to tour investors and let them see what it is that we do. If you have any other questions, we're going to be around the rest of the day. Okay? Thanks so much. Appreciate it.