ATGE 2027 Q1 Earnings Call

Good afternoon, and welcome to Covista's earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal year 2027. On the call with me today are Steve Beard, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Covista, and Bob Phelan, Chief Financial Officer. Before I hand you over to Steve, I will take you through the legal safe harbor and cautionary declarations. Certain statements and projections of future results made in this presentation constitute forward-looking statements that are based on our current market, competitive, and regulatory expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to vary materially. We undertake no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statement after this presentation, whether because of new information, future events, changes in assumptions, or otherwise. Please see our latest Form 10-K for a discussion of risk factors as they relate to forward-looking statements.

In today's presentation, we will use certain non-GAAP financial measures, and we refer you to the appendix in the presentation materials available on our investor relations website for reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures and related information. You will find a link to the webcast on our investor relations website at investors.covista.com. After this call, the presentation and webcast will be archived on the website for 30 days. I will now hand you over to Steve.

Thanks, Jeremy. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Four weeks ago, in my letter to shareholders, I said we would explain our economics plainly, so I will start there. We are running ahead of the fiscal 2027 guidance we set, and that bodes well for our Purpose at Scale growth strategy. Today, we serve nearly 105,000 students, up 7.6% from a year ago, and our 13th consecutive quarter of total enrollment growth. In the first quarter, revenue grew 10.7% to $512 million. Adjusted EBITDA grew 17.1% to $131 million, and adjusted earnings per share grew 25.1% to $2.19 per share. Our rule for capital is simple. A dollar stays in the business only if it earns more there than it would in your hands. This quarter, we repurchased $84 million of stock and funded new campuses, programs, and technology from operating cash.

That performance ran ahead of our plan, and we are raising our fiscal 2027 guidance for both revenue and adjusted earnings per share. We are taking a prudent view of the remaining quarters, and we will update you as the year progresses. The demand backdrop underpinning Purpose at Scale is durable. We see no reduction in demand for healthcare workers from employers or from the talent who wants to choose these purposeful careers. Recent analysis shows that healthcare accounted for about three out of every four U.S. jobs created over the past year. That dynamic is highly encouraging for our business model, but what deserves more attention is the human toll of healthcare jobs going unfilled. Recently, we published the Covista Healthcare Workforce Index. The analysis projects that without action, the healthcare workforce shortage is on track to nearly double by 2040.

Yet the data also shows that investment in attracting, developing, and retaining talent could close over half of that gap by 2040. In our view, talent isn't scarce. American nursing schools turned away roughly 93,000 qualified applications last year, and about 30,000 more applicants were turned away from U.S. medical schools. They weren't turned away for a lack of ability, but for a lack of faculty, clinical site availability, and lack of space from caps written into state and accreditor policy. The binding constraint here is capacity, not interest. Through Purpose at Scale, we are attracting and developing more future clinicians and partnering with leading health systems to keep them. Three things make this franchise durable. About 90% of our students study healthcare, where the demand is driven by licensure and patient need.

The constraint in our market is capacity, and we fund ours from operating cash at 0.5 times net leverage. A significant portion of our students now arrive through employers who help pay for their education. Let me turn to the segments, starting with Chamberlain. Total enrollment grew 1.3%, our third straight quarter of growth, and revenue grew 7.4%. The difference between the two is threefold: better mix, more credit hours per student, and pricing. Total enrollment growth was led by pre-licensure BSN, and application growth remains strong heading into our November session. As you know, no university confers more nursing degrees than Chamberlain, and we are building on that. That means adding seats, partnerships, and investing in the support that helps students get from enrollment all the way through to graduation. Chamberlain is also expanding into new markets with new programs, delivering on its platform extension strategy.

The Cincinnati campus opened in August, Salt Lake City started classes this week, and Nashville is expected to open in January. We also opened our second physician assistant program in Phoenix at full capacity, with a third location already in the works. Chamberlain entered fiscal 2027 on an improved foundation, and while its path isn't perfectly linear, we are executing on several growth levers at once, and each of them is gaining traction. We are adding seats, we are deepening our health system partnerships, and we are investing more in student success. All of which puts Chamberlain on a sustainable growth trajectory. Turning to Walden, we achieved double-digit total enrollment growth for the 10th straight quarter and set another enrollment record. Sustaining that over multiple years takes execution across every part of the portfolio, and the team keeps delivering. It also means stronger comparables ahead, which we have already contemplated into our long-range planning.

The strength remains broad-based at Walden across all degree levels, with doctoral and undergraduate programs leading the way, and strong persistence continues to compound that new enrollment growth. Our new marketing campaign at Walden is "Your Career Is Our Job," and it's working. It shows undergraduates that Walden delivers on its promise with support from choosing a career through coaching and personalized tools that map coursework to specific jobs. Undergraduate enrollment, a priority we called out at Investor Day, grew by more than 20% in the first quarter. Turning to our Medical and Veterinary segment, it had another strong quarter. Total enrollment grew 3.5% with both medical and veterinary contributing. Disciplined operations continue to turn enrollment growth into healthy revenue and profit. As we flagged last quarter, some students used our multiple intake cycles to start a term early ahead of changes to federal loan programs.

That shift lifted the May cycle and made the September class a bit smaller, so the right way to read the business is May and September combined. On that blended basis, we delivered very strong results. Interest in medicine and veterinary medicine remain durable, and we don't expect the loan changes to affect long-term demand. There are more than 2 applicants for every US MD seat, while first-year U.S. class sizes have grown less than 2% a year for 2 decades. In that pool of prospective students, U.S. medical schools overlook a group who have proven they can succeed with us. We're leveraging the evolving landscape as an opportunity to enhance our prospective student journey, reducing friction and driving engagement throughout the process. Students are enrolling and performing, and our class mix has improved as a result, in line with our core customer strategy. Let's bring this concept to life.

Among students who sit for USMLE Step 1, recent data shows that Ross Med and AUC students passed on their first attempt at rates comparable to or higher than US MD students with similar MCAT scores in most score ranges. On the vet side, we continue to operate near capacity. Leading indicators for the veterinary licensing exam continue to strengthen, underscoring that we're serving our students well and driving student success. Turning to employer integration, our collaboration with Advocate Health, the third-largest nonprofit integrated health system in the country, started in Wisconsin last month. We'll expand that relationship to all 3 of our Chicagoland campuses. Chicago is one of the largest markets for both Advocate and Chamberlain, and the plan has always been to expand over our overlapping geographies. In addition, our partnership with SSM Health has outperformed, and we've raised enrollment targets with them.

The model we continue to advance makes sense for health systems, for Covista, and for our students. Health systems get a differentiated and proprietary pipeline, we get more durable enrollment at a lower cost of acquisition, and students get financial support on their way into the profession. Turning to technology, our enterprise technology investments continue to advance. The AI-powered classroom has moved beyond the prototype stage and is now in full development and testing, bringing together all of our capabilities along with those of our leading technology partners. We're designing it specifically around the needs of our students and faculty. At our scale, we believe this creates an opportunity to deliver a more personalized learning journey and a differentiated student experience from first inquiry all the way through to licensure. On the shift to LLM search, as we've said, this is a real dynamic for any company that serves consumers.

Fortunately, our institutions start from a position of strength. We have strong brands, great student outcomes, and prepare students for careers in healthcare fields where there are real shortages of workers. As a result, our institutions continue to compete strong in visibility, share of voice, and sentiment, and our data shows continued improvement in leadership where it matters. We're building on this foundation by further improving discoverability and positive sentiment of our institutions. We analyze tens of thousands of answers to measure how our institutions appear, and how they're described, and whether they're recommended all the way down to the program level. From there, we develop new content to ensure that the LLMs have the latest and greatest information about the quality and value of our programs. To summarize, Purpose at Scale starts from a position of strength.

Over the next three years, we'll continuously layer in the four priorities we presented at Investor Day that enhance our trajectory and widen our competitive moat. That means operational excellence in everything we do, platform extension through new campuses and programs, employer integration through more and deeper health system partnerships, and a technology focus that brings education powered by AI. Just as importantly, we generate the cash to fund these priorities and still return capital to shareholders at the same time. We are America's largest healthcare educator, and that scale is a real advantage. But scale isn't the point. What you should leave with from this call is that we're deploying capital to extend our lead and build the company in our sector in a way that compounds intrinsic value per share the longest and most attractively. I want to thank you all for your continued support.