Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I am John McNamara. I'm with Three Part Advisors. We're very happy you've taken the time to be with us this afternoon. Our next presentation is Universal Technical Institute. It is a leading workforce provider of transportation, skilled trades, and healthcare educational programs. It trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol UTI. Presenting for the company, we have Jerome Grant, CEO, and Bruce Schuman, CFO.
Thank you very much. My name is Jerome Grant. I'm the CEO of Universal Technical Institute. Before I start speaking, my better half needs to do a little words of warning.
Yeah. Just a quick forward-looking statement. Anything we say here is just basically our personal opinion and based solely on the company's current beliefs, expectations, and assumptions. We would ask everyone to read our 10-K and SEC presentation material recently published.
Great.
Thanks so much.
There we go. I'm never allowed to talk without that permission statement in front of it. What we thought we'd do is try to give you a bit of an overview, 10 - 15 minute overview of the company. We've got some slides in our investor deck. We try to put together a pretty fulsome investor deck to outline who we are, what we're doing, and what we're trying to do moving forward. I always invite you to do that. The other invitation that I usually forget to do in these presentations is if any of you live near or traveling near any of our campuses, we love to have the investment community come to our campuses. Our campus presidents are great tour guides, and you really got to see where we are. I'll show you a few pictures as we move through here. First, who is UTI?
I said we're one of the country's leading providers of workforce education in two high-in-demand segments. We've got 32 campuses, over 35 programs. The thing that binds together our transportation, skilled trades, and energy division, which is UTI, and Concorde, is this incredible demand in the market. We won't focus in areas that don't have supply and demand curves that are incredibly out of line. To that end, you'll see that there are four or five jobs on the job board for every single graduate in every single program, higher in the healthcare areas. Right now, we've got about 22,000 active students. Our guide this year is that we'll get very, very close to 30,000 students that will start this year in $830 million, $835 million, $56 million, $60 million in net income, and our adjusted EBITDA somewhere between $124 million - $128 million.
What we're going to spend some time talking about is our strategy, a little bit about where we've been that got us to this, and then our phase II of our North Star strategy and where we're going. Just to point to our field as what we've done, what we've publicly set out in the market is that from this base at the end of 2025, we expect to clear the $1 billion mark, probably $1.1 billion, $1.2 billion by 2029, and adjusted EBITDA of $200 million +. There are some things we're doing to enhance that as well, which we're talking about in some of the individual sessions. This will help you think through the trajectory. There's a slide in the deck that shows you how that trajectory moves over the next five years. The compelling thesis really is that these are high-demand areas.
We've got a proven model for starting campuses, programs, and growth. We are the single largest provider in this space of technical education in the United States. There are others, and there are many in every city, but none as comprehensive as we are. We have gone through a transformation effort beginning in 2017 that set us up for the North Star strategy and put us on our trajectory. One of the things that underlines this business, and this is like what makes someone great in this business, or what makes someone suffer in this business, is outcomes. We graduate over 70% of our students on time. Over 85% of our students get a job in market in the first year. We have a between 95% - 100% satisfaction rate from our employment community, who is our end customer from the students that we educate. A very healthy balance sheet.
All we talk about in terms of what we're investing in between now and 2029, we have the operating cash flow to fund ourselves. We will go through that a little bit more. Of the two divisions, this next slide, Universal Technical Institute, which celebrated its 60th anniversary this year, we were honored to be able to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate that, focuses in transportation, skilled trades, and energy. Auto, diesel, welding, energy technology, aviation, robotics, automation, and the skilled trades. Concorde Career Colleges is in health. Most people, when you say you're in healthcare, say, you're in nursing. No, that's not the primary focus of where Concorde is. It's an opportunity moving forward, but not the primary focus. About 40% of the Concorde business is in dental, which is a very fast-growing market.
Dental hygienists, dental assistants, and then most of the balance of the business is actually in what we would call allied health. Think of everybody that surrounds the doctor, radiology tech, nursing assistant, pharmacy tech, surgical tech, physical therapists, occupational therapists, all of those folks that surround the doctor in those clinical areas. 2/3 of our business right now is Universal Technical Institute, and about 1/3 of our business is Concorde. This is a slide in our deck, which is meant to represent what we will and what we won't focus on, is that all of the offerings are meant to address a huge deficit in the labor market. This is also a point where I tend to say that with the aggressive growth trajectory we have, we have 32 campuses now.
By 2029, there will be clearly 50 - 55 campuses that we're operating organically, but we grow between now and then. We still will not have made a dent in the supply and demand problem in the U.S. There still will be four or five jobs for every UTI graduate, five to ten jobs for every Concorde graduate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics and all of the numbers will show that in that time period, the opportunity is still there. There is a lot of greenfield opportunity in the space. Love to show pictures. Actually, love it more if you go to the campuses and look at it, is that we run state-of-the-art facilities around the country, both in healthcare and in transportation, skilled trades, and energy.
We also like to boast that we are the most industry-aligned educator in the United States, and that manifests itself by having over 35 manufacturer partners represented on our campuses. That's primarily represented in what you would probably think of as our graduate school. A student will go to school to be an auto technician for 51 weeks and then stay on and do a Mercedes program, a Porsche program, the Peterbilt, Harley-Davidson, Carrier, etc. No other person in this space has such a focus on that industry alignment. That actually does two things. One, three things. It brings higher wages to our graduates because doing those specific programs moves them quicker into the higher-paying jobs, which is doing warranty work. Two, it brings free stuff to the company.
When we want to do EV curriculum, Ford gives us all of their battery technology and all of their EV materials to work on. That industry alignment brings more and decreases our investment. Three, it really helps from a marketing standpoint where students tend to, the affinity is not to something called Universal Technical Institute, but I want to be a Honda tech, I want to be a Porsche tech, I want to be a Harley tech, or that sort of things. It helps in marketing as well. This is our trajectory. I alluded to the beginning, I joined the company in the end of 2017. The company was $300 million with negligible EBITDA at that time. The thought here was to really play into the supply and demand curve area.
The things that we've done to get us to this point have been, we completely changed the way we teach on our campuses. We now have blended learning models, so students are spending less time on our campuses. They spend time in the labs doing the hands-on work, but everything else is online. The benefit of that for working adults is that you used to be in our campus for six hours a day, five days a week for a year. Now you're only there three hours a day, so you can keep your job. We've been building new campuses. We've built three new campuses since 2018. We're now set to build somewhere between 3-5 campuses a year from 2026 - 2029. Real estate rationalization, we have about, on the UTI side, we have about 2 million sq ft . We used to have 2.5 million.
For what reason, I don't know. I think they were built all in the time where people didn't think about things like revenue per square foot or EBITDA per square foot. They were just beautiful big buildings with a lot of space in between everything. We took a lot of costs out by doing that. I already talked about the blended learning model. The curriculum additions, I think, are important in that 2022 through 2025 standpoint, is that we acquired MIAT College of Technology, which brought us into aviation, HVAC, electronics, renewable energy, and a number of other programs that we now are putting on the UTI campuses. We bought Concorde Career Colleges in 2022, which brought us into healthcare. As I said, we're going to be somewhere between $830 million - $835 million in revenue and about $126 million at center point on EBITDA this year.
He's got to run a little money.
Yeah, just quickly. When you talk about delivery and expectations, this is really a value that Jerome and I spend a lot of time with our executive team, our management team, the whole company, which is really just doing what we say we're going to do. This is just a little look back for the last few years on our guidance we put out to the market, the analyst consensus on revenue and EBITDA, and basically what we ended up delivering back, looking back through 2022. This is something we're going to continue to do. Jerome and I will talk here in a minute about where we're going from here over the next five years. This focus on execution, doing what we say we're going to do to the market for ourselves and our shareholders is very important to us.
Look back over the last few years, it's generated a very nice total shareholder return on our stock value, and we intend to keep that performance up. Jerome talked a little bit about basically growth, diversification, and optimization are kind of the three pillars of our strategy. We're going to continue doing that, adding new campuses, new programs. We've freed up a lot of space at 500,000 sq ft that Jerome talked about. We have made really good use of the MIAT acquisition that we made here back in 2022. That gave us access to a very broad portfolio of skilled trades education. We've been in the process of instilling those programs across all of our existing campus footprint. That's been a big part of our margin expansion story over the last few years. We still have a lot of headroom to go.
We're still today only about 49%- 50% utilized in our physical space at UTI. A lot of room to run to still grow these new programs and grow our profitability footprint. We put this slide in our deck. One of the things that we get asked a lot is how do you determine what new locations you want to grow into? We know the supply-demand imbalance is there. We have a lot of opportunity, a lot of total available market. We're a lot more scientific today about what cities we go into, even within a city, what part of the city really should we be in to maximize our returns. This just gives you a sense of the data points that go into this model that we've built over several years. Detail on demographics, detailed on regulatory environment, city regulatory dynamics, everything.
We feel we have a very good model that gives us very accurate views of where to place our new campuses. We intend to deploy this model in the future. We've already done this over the last couple of years. It's been very, very successful for us. If you want to say about this one, this just shows you where we are. This is our footprint today. Basically, we've announced two new campuses this year already. We have the next two. We're about ready to announce here on the UTI side, same thing on the Concorde side, and we're going to keep at it.
Yeah, I think the question we get on this all the time is in your strategy, you're going to build all these campuses and do all the program launches, is what's your headroom? You can see from the gray, there's a lot of headroom. We tend to target cities that have a population of over a million. That's a lot of cities. Using the mechanisms that Bruce outlined on the last slide, it helps us prioritize where we're going to go, where the next campus should be, based on where we think the jobs are going to be and where they ramp the fastest. There are also regulatory concerns associated with it. I'll give you an example on that front, I know that I could put 1,500 kids in a campus on Long Island if I had one built within the next two years.
The state of New York takes about three years to approve you going into their state if you're a for-profit institution. Maybe we'll think about them for 2029 or 2030. There are other states where we can move much more quickly. Therefore, that's part of the prioritization in our analysis. We'll go through as many questions as you want. We're rounding third here on the presentation part of this, and then we'll open for questions. Our North Star strategy, which we completed the phase I at the end of 2024, has got very specific elements to it. New campuses. This is sort of the what do you need to believe to buy into these guys' story, right? I think the bars you see down there on the bottom across the screen are the things that are probably most important to believe.
Number one, we believe we can generate about three, we never budget more than 3% organic growth a year, meaning same store, same program. Very conservative. We've been beating it year in and year out. Certain market conditions can vary that, whether it happens to be a 40-year spike of inflation or a pandemic. Generally speaking, we budget about 3% student growth of new student starts, same store, same program. We get about 2% or 3% in price every year. We don't move much further than that because our students are very, very focused on federal funding through grant programs and student loans. We don't want to outpace their ability to pay and create their out-of-pocket beyond those programs' expansion.
The thing you have to listen for, and we're very straightforward on this, and we have pro forma in our deck, is that that 10% CAGR, you stack on top of that the number of program expansions and the number of campuses we build every year. We're going to build somewhere between 12 - 20 programs a year between our two divisions and two campuses on each division. They make up the gap between, say, 5% organic growth and the 10% CAGR that we laid out there. The squiggly line down in the bottom is actually very intentionally squiggly so that you understand the contour of our investment strategy, is that in, as we said, midpoint in our EBITDA projection for this year is about $126 million. We don't adjust out the startup costs, operating startup costs for our campuses or our programs.
Because we're ramping up to four campuses being built in 2026 and nearly 20 programs, you're going to see moderation in our EBITDA in 2026 and 2027. It really takes off as those scale in 2028 and 2029. We can go through details on that individually with you about how that contour looks. Right now, you know the target is you know at least $1.1 billion in 2029 and around $200 million in EBITDA. Close to 20% EBITDA is where we expect to land by then.
Okay. I just wanted to really quickly give, this page gives you two things, a little bit of a click down on our fiscal 2025 guidance for the year beyond just revenue, and also just a little bit of a look back on historical performance. This year, we feel pretty good about how the year is shaping up. We actually tightened up our guide. We slightly increased the revenue and starts guidance for the year. Our midpoint of revenue, we're going to be driving about 14% growth, kind of in that $830 million- $835 million of revenue. Net income, this has been a year we've really been focused on, like Jerome mentioned, EBITDA per square foot optimization, margin expansion opportunities, making better use of our space. We've really grown our net income, grown our adjusted EBITDA. We're seeing about 38% net income growth at the midpoint.
We're going to keep that focus even as we on our base business, even as we focus on these growth investments. Earnings per share, you know, in that $1 - $1.08, so that's similar growth that you've seen on the net income side. New student starts, we're going to be closer to the 30,000 mark for new student starts for the year. That's about 11% growth. Adjusted EBITDA, about 22% growth, like Jerome mentioned, that $126 million at the midpoint. The only metric on this page that is a little down year over year is adjusted free cash flow. That is a very intentional decision as we grow our investments and grow into this North Star strategy. Because of that $55 million roughly CapEx investment this year, the underlying operating cash flow growth is very strong, about 37%. With that CapEx investment, it's bringing it down a little bit.
You'll see a similar trend in 2026 as we grow these new campuses. Hopefully, that little click down is helpful. The last page here is just to give you a sense of just what those growth investments look like for 2025. About $6 million of our OpEx was purely focused on growth, early staffing on the Concorde and UTI side to prepare for our growth in 2026. Like Jerome mentioned, we no longer add those back to adjusted EBITDA. Our print, the midpoint consensus of about $126 million would have been closer to about $132 million with this $6 million growth investment in 2025. A similar story on CapEx. I mentioned we're spending about $55 million this year. A full 50% is fully focused on growth investments for next year. I think that is all. I think we can take a couple of questions if we have time.
That's all we had in the presentation.
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Sure. We are fully accredited, titled for institution like any state school, any community college, etc. The typical student, let's give you an example. The typical student for a $36,000 one-year auto program will likely get somewhere between $10,000 - $12,000 in Pell Grants, which is free money. Then somewhere around $20,000 , $20,000 in the federally backed Stafford loans. You can tell by these numbers that some of the things you saw in the big beautiful bill don't really apply to us, meaning the caps and levels that were put in it. They're actually more focused on expensive four-year schools or graduate education. We're under the thresholds on all of our programs for those. There's usually some small little gap that the student would have to figure out how to pay, $3,000, $4,000, etc., to move on. We do have gap financing programs for them on that as well.
That's about 75% - 80% of our students are fully Pell eligible. That proportion works for about every program. The UTI side of the equation is really easy for you to do the math on, which is we get about $9,000 a quarter in every program at UTI. You can take the average number of students times $9,000 per quarter and know exactly what's going to go on. A welding program is three quarters, 9 x 3 , etc. The healthcare side is actually kind of the Wild West on pricing. There are some, we have core programs like medical assisting and medical records office administration that are lower priced. Then you have clinical programs that have, you know, lab work in the hospitals or dental work, which are higher priced.
That average is about $6,500 per quarter, but some of them are $3,000, some of them are $8,000, and in between. It's not as regimented.
Typically, you said $10,000 - $20,000 that comes to Pell Grants.
No, about $10,000 - $12,000 in free money, because it tends to stretch over two academic years. The typical student, I think, walks away with about $20,000 in debt. One of the things we've been working on, there's so many things we can talk about. One of the things we've been working on over the last five years is organizing the employment community around the supply and demand problem. What I mean by that is employers have to register to get access to our students. They register by filling out these things we call a TRIP agreement, where they outline how much they're going to pay, how much sign-on bonus, how much tuition reimbursement, and what's their benefit program.
For instance, if you go to work for Lithia or you go to work for the Penske, that's 900 dealerships around the country in those two chains, you're going to get around $42,000 a year, a $7,000 - $10,000 sign-on bonus, and both of them will pay up to $325 a month to pay off your student loans as long as you work there. They get first access to students. Each of them hire about 1,000 students apiece out of our campuses, because our oath is to do right by our students in terms of lowering the risk of education. What that's done is it's gotten everybody else in line because they're like, wait a minute, how come you're having events for those guys, but I can't come to it? I said, you got to up your money.
If you want to do sign-on bonuses, they buy cars with their sign-on bonuses. You sign on bonuses, you pay a fair wage, and you do tuition reimbursement, you can get into the Platinum Club over here. What we've been doing is leveraging the fact that the demand is so high. An example of that is we just had a job fair and an open job fair in Austin, where we have 1,000 students, about 600 of them are in our Automotive Technology program. They had 1,500 open jobs they could hire for on the spot, just in Austin. We've taken it upon ourselves to organize the investment community to better our students' outcomes at the end.
This is kind of a follow-up question, but obviously, most of the campuses around the city, this comes up to the population. It seems like a lot of the skilled labor is in less populated areas. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Yes, I have thoughts. The Universal Technical Institute campuses tend to be out in the transportation lanes: Avondale, Arizona; Exton, Pennsylvania; Mooresville, North Carolina, where you find fleet service companies, the car dealerships, and things along those lines. Whereas the healthcare tend to be right next to the hospital centers, because the students then can do their lab work and their clinicals there, and they don't have to travel too far from them. About 40% of the Universal Technical Institute population relocate to come to school, just like going away to college. We have housing programs and housing providers that pair people up for apartment living for a year or a year and a half, as long as they're there, doing as many programs as they want to. In healthcare, nobody drives more than 20 minutes to go to school. There's no relocation, etc.
The density, it's also a different student. It's a 25 - 35 year-old versus an 18 - 24 year-old. They tend to be more set into their community, and they're looking for a community-based education. Anybody else? Sure. Yeah. I thought you got all your questions out.
Three campuses weren't rotated. Uses to track all students through the higher ed, cohort default rates, gainful appointment, 90/10 compliance. Do you have numbers for that? If so, what are they?
We do, and we publish them. Cohort default rate is kind of a trick question right now, because right now it's zero, because they haven't been collecting on student loans since 2020. Nobody's defaulted. They're not really looking at that one yet. I think in the next couple of years, they're going to regenerate that. Our cohort default rate was down in the 12 %- 13% range, which is pretty normal. What were the three again? Say again. 90/10 until they move military into the federally funded, which we actually disagree with. We think the military's GI Bill should be thought of as compensation, not as federal funds, but that's okay. We're at about 81% now with military in the vets, so we don't talk much about it because it's a pass-fail, and we're not in any danger of getting near any lines.
We were at 63% until they pushed the military into it. The composite score, oh, the gainful employment numbers, I don't have those off the top of my head. We don't have a problem with it. We have one program at Concorde Career Colleges that gets even close to the line in terms of gainful employment, which is a massage therapy program. The reason why is because it's mostly tips. You're not allowed to count tips in the salary numbers, but our salaries keep us above the line on gainful employment pieces. Our composite score is above 2.0, so we don't worry about the 1.5 that is the limit beforehand. We've got strong, strong benchmarks. Even in states where the Democrats don't like, they say, you're the good guys, so we like you.
We see access to walls for India.
Yeah, no. What I probably should be more specific about is that the strategy, the North Star strategy, is actually program replication. When we bought MIAT College of Technology, they gave us six new programs that UTI didn't have. The plan over the next five years is to get all those programs on the legacy UTI campuses, to transform a UTI campus from being auto, diesel, and welding to auto, diesel, welding, aviation, electronics, HVAC, all of those programs. What we've been doing is working on, by going to blended learning, and working on freeing up all the space to be able to do that. Our new model moving forward is that in the same 110,000 sq ft that used to house 750 to 800 students doing auto, diesel, and welding, we now have over 1,200 students doing auto, diesel, welding, aviation, HVAC, electronics, industrial maintenance, robotics, etc.
Hence the margin expansion we've been talking about, right? It's not exponential investment. It's a couple more people on the campuses. We're utilizing the same faculty in some of the electronics areas in auto that we are in the electronics areas. You have the same sales reps, same financial aid, same student services groups that are there just with incremental investments to grow them. When I talk about program growth, generally what I'm speaking is talking about that. We are looking at new programs. In renewable energy, we're in wind, but we're not in solar, we're not in hydro, we're not in nuclear energy, we're not in any of these other places. We're looking at can we round out our energy portfolio. They're all electronics trades by nature, and so can we add them to our electronics pieces?
We're looking at going deeper into electronics and electrician training than we are right now. We're opening high voltage, low voltage, linemen, things along those lines that actually build into a lot of the infrastructure bills that have been out there. On the Concorde side, because we just bought them, we're a little further back. We've got to get a lot of the programs that they didn't have on some campuses on those campuses before we think about adding new programs. We're not in veterinary. We're not big in nursing. Big opportunity for us, right? We're big in allied health and dental, but not nursing. There are opportunities for us to do that over the next five years as well. Any other questions? We're around. If you need anything from us, reach out. We're happy to talk. Was I being, was that light saying stop talking?
Is that what that sounds?
It was just recent.
Okay. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Appreciate it.