Thanks for joining for the session with American Public Education. I'm Stephen Sheldon. I'm an analyst in the tech group at William Blair covering the broader education sector, including APEI. So please go to our website at williamblair.com for a complete list of research disclosures and potential conflicts of interest. It's great to have the APEI team back at our conference again this year. They've been coming for, I think, the last three to four years, so it's been great to have them here. As most probably know, the company is a leading education provider specializing in what we think is a few very attractive portions of the market, military, you know, active duty military veterans, you know, creating a new supply of nurses. So I think very attractive end markets for them to be playing in. The team has executed exceptionally well the last few years. The company has set some very encouraging growth targets at their investor day recently, I think growth targets through 2029. So, you know, we think it's a great time to be looking at the story. So yeah, we have Angie Selden with us today, the CEO of the company. We also have Ed in the audience. There he is right here. So with that quick intro I'll turn it over
to Angie. Terrific. Welcome everyone to American Public Education. I want to thank Stephen and Matt for including us in the meeting today. I'm really pleased to be able to tell you the story and thank you for that great intro. You've stolen the first 10 minutes of my presentation so we'll jump into more details I guess, right? But of course we do forward-looking statements. Our lawyers always want to make sure that that we are covering ourselves in terms of the things that we're about to say but the four-year growth story is a really important part of what I want to share with you today but how many of you are familiar with a PEI how many know the story okay we have a lot of folks that maybe don't know a lot about the story so let me try and simplify first and then we'll jump into some more details today we operate two businesses our first business is what we call military plus it is comprised of undergraduate master's degree and PhD programs for active duty military for veterans and their families. It's about half of our $650 million worth of revenue right now and it's a market that we've built a really substantial moat around and we'll talk in a few minutes about that moat. The other half of our business is what we call Health Plus. It's comprised of two schools that we own today. One is called Rasmussen University, the other is called Hondros College of Nursing and together they have 27 nursing campuses that offer pre-licensure nursing education, so we are the largest creator of new bedside nurses in the country. Another great moat. Very difficult market to enter into, very difficult market to be successful in, and we're very proud of what we've accomplished there. As Steven mentioned though, one of the most important things that we've done in the last several years is simplified and strengthened our business. I'll take you through the capital structure. Highlights there include about $14 million of savings that we generated last year from simplification around selling buildings, exiting a preferred, renegotiating our debt, refinancing. So we've done a lot to really simplify the capital structure and that's really flowing through in 2026 and beyond in terms of annual savings. But the punchline really is that in the next four years, we expect that we will grow APEI from $650 million of revenue, which is what we generated at the end of 2025, to somewhere between $890 million and $1 billion of revenue. And that wide gap, that difference, is really whether or not we find a tuck-in acquisition that would take us to that billion dollars. organically we expect we're going to grow between 890 and 920 million dollars of revenue on the top line the big story is that that growth is going to expand our EBITDA margins so today we're operating around a 14% EBITDA margin we will get to 18 to 20% EBITDA margins by 2029 but the big story is that we're going to go from about $85 million of EBITDA that we produced in 2025 to almost $200 million of EBITDA, $180 to $200 million of EBITDA by 2029. And the final part of that big story is that we are a business that has the great good fortune of being a very strong cash generating business. And so consequently, we today have $221 million of cash on the balance sheet and over $100 million net debt. Between now and 2029, we will generate an incremental $300 to $400 million of cash from the flow-through associated with top-line revenue growth that we are forecasting that we're going to generate. So for those of you who have known the story for a very long time and have seen the good fortune we've had in terms of the stock appreciation in the last couple We are still in the early innings of the story, in our opinion, and the next four years will really give ample opportunity for people to take a closer look at APEI. So we're excited to be here today. As Steven mentioned, Ed Codespoti has joined us just recently as our new CFO, and Gary Gary Jansen is also with us today, and Gary actually runs our growth and strategy business, and so we're pleased to have both of them here today. I want to just talk a little bit about our competitive moats and our investment thesis. So we'll jump into some details about the competitive moats in military, the competitive moats in nursing in a few minutes, but suffice to say that we've built a business that has has been very resilient for the last 20 to 30 years around penetration from competitors. We've also really focused on streamlining our business. As I had mentioned a few minutes ago, we spent 2025 doing two things, simplifying the business. So we took four divisions that we had and combined it into two, Military Plus now and Health Plus is the way we're reporting the segments in the future. And importantly, we had a fourth subsidiary, non-COR, we exited that business in the middle of 2025 and consequently are saving about $6 million in lease expense associated with that exit. So we streamlined the business in 2025 to position us for 2026 and beyond. We're also poised for future growth.
We'll talk today a little bit about how the two businesses grow.
APUS, the military business, is finding new markets. We'll talk about an adjacent market in the veterans and an adjacent market in military families that is offering a very substantial TAM and a great opportunity for top-line growth and bottom-line margin expansion. Furthermore, in the nursing business, we can grow that business through opening of new campuses, campuses, adding students to our existing campuses, and importantly, also adding new and different programs to our two nursing schools. We'll talk a little bit about that in just a minute as well. I'm very proud of the fact that for the last seven quarters, we have had year-over-year top-line growth, and so we believe we're standing here today with the evidence of proven performance to you as we think about this four-year story in front of us and the work that we will continue to do to deliver on that quarter over quarter year over year growth. As I mentioned, the balance sheet has been simplified in 2025 and is a very strong part of our overall story. It gives us the opportunity for inorganic growth. If we want to tackle a tuck-in acquisition, we have now the means to either be able to finance that ourselves or we have a very strong balance sheet that will allow us to explore tuck-in acquisitions as well. So overall we feel that APEI is a very compelling investment thesis and something worth taking a closer look at. I want to jump really quickly to our military business. So this is the legacy business for those of you who have followed the American Public University story over the last 30 years. Today we are the number one educator of active duty military. 30% of all active duty who take any educational courses, which are reimbursed by the Department of War, are taken with our institution. It's a very big point of pride for us. And in the last five years, our share of active duty students being educated has grown from 17% to almost 30% market share. And so we've nearly doubled the share of those who are taking education through the tuition assistance benefit. We also believe that there is a tailwind in active duty education, and the reason for that as we all are experiencing the consequences of the war in the Middle East, et cetera, we know that the Department of War is investing to add more service members to its troop force in the next several years, and each of the service branches, except for Air Force, has talked about increasing their number of recruits going into next year. And consequently, if you take the math where of the active duty, 10% take education, 30% take it with us, as that pie grows, we still believe we will get our fair share of that incremental growth. But now let's talk about the real story at APUS, the military business. The active duty, which is our legacy business, is the little green slice of this very big TAM. And so what we have done is we've really focused on two parts of adjacent businesses around active duty that we believe have substantially larger TAM than the market we serve today. So first is veterans. All right. So many of you who may follow a military business may understand that there are more than 6.2 million veterans in the United States. What we've said here is that this TAM represents those veterans where either they have not already exhausted their GI Bill benefit, because much like active duty military, the government funds their education, or they see education as a means to be able to advance their career after they've left the military. So we have said our target market for veterans is about 6.2 million, three times the size of active duty. Even more interesting is a very recent development that we've been investing behind called military families and what we've determined is that for every active duty or every veteran there are four to five family members who can benefit from education and so what we have done is we've offered competitive pricing where active duty military family members can get the active duty rate that rate is 750 dollars per course which equates to 32 000 for a four-year degree, which is 30% below in-state public school tuition, and is creating an environment for our active duty in particular where 70% of our active duty will graduate with zero student debt, because all of it is funded by the federal government. So our military families are able to enjoy the same price and the same cost for education as their corresponding family member, and so we have seen success and substantial growth in this green shoot in the military families. We're also very excited about the fact that this is a 10X TAM associated with families versus our core legacy market, which is active duty, and so this families market is growing at high teens growth in the last several quarters, so it's a green shoot. It's a very exciting part of our business and something that we believe we have a substantial moat around. So before we advance, I want to just talk about what are our moats. Our first moat is that we offer the education at the reimbursable rate. It's very difficult for most schools to offer higher education at $750 per course. So consequently, we have stayed true to our zero out-of-pocket cost mantra for our undergrad active duty for 23 years. They have not raised the reimbursement rate for 23 years and what we have done to be able to deliver 30% plus EBITDA margins out of the APUS business is to optimize around technology to to simplify the teaching and learning experience and to continue to innovate around the way in which we deliver the education and so for 23 years we've kept our price at the reimbursement rate now Now we have 160,000 alumni who have graduated from APUS. And about a month ago, we actually celebrated our annual commencement. We had 17,000 people walk the stage graduating from APUS. That's the same size graduating class as Penn State. So we have a substantial moat then, the second moat is around this alumni base. And the reason why that matters is because 40% of our active duty come to us from referral. That's the single biggest opportunity we have for continuing to generate 30% EBITDA margins, is that for those students, we are not spending marketing dollars in order to be able to generate that student enrollment. We're able to leverage that referral of that 160,000 alumni base in order to be able to generate that next student. And then finally, we have a system that we've purpose-built that is directly connected into the service branches. It makes it very easy for active duty to be able to choose APUS for their education and to register for courses with us. So we see those three areas as the big moats that we've built around not just our active duty, but now these adjacencies around veterans and the families of active duty and veterans. Okay. So let's move on now to our Health Plus business. So Health Plus is the combination I mentioned of Rasmussen University and Hondros College of Nursing. So in the blue are the campuses that Rasmussen owns. In the green are the campuses that Hondros owns. You can see there's no overlap. So when we acquired Rasmussen in late 21, we were able to acquire adjacent markets and incremental campuses with no overlap. Today between the two schools we have 27 campuses and we are operating in eight states. What's really exciting about the nursing we we do and we educate is that because many of you are probably saying wow there's lots of people doing nursing. There's not people doing our nursing and what I mean by that is we are the number one educator of bedside nurses. The biggest supply-demand gap that exists in the United States right now are nurses who are willing to provide care at the bedside. So our degree programs are LPN, which is a 15-month program, and the two-year degree RN, which is called an associate's degree or an ADN, that leads to an RN license. It is the fastest way for you to become an RN, is to follow a two-year degree ADN program. When our students enter the workforce, we will only fill five percent of the nursing supply-demand gap that will exist starting today for the next 10 years. Each year for the next 10 years, there is a supply-demand gap of 200,000 open nursing positions, and our students will fill five percent of that supply-demand gap. And I'm here to tell you that the hospital system tell us repeatedly that the hardest positions to fill are those at the bedside. Most of the BSN four-year degree students are much happier doing administrative leadership roles, working in tech, and are less interested primarily in doing bedside care. So we are providing that critical need at the bedside. What's also very important about bedside care care, is that chances are we won't see a robot delivering meds in the next five years. So we believe this is a pretty safe space, at least for the next five years, in a market confused about how AI is going to take jobs. Bedside care, we believe, is going to persevere and grow over the next five years. So let me talk about a couple of exciting things that we discussed at Investor Day in November. The first, this is kind of a confusing chart, but I'll tell you what it means. Of the 27 campuses, we grouped them into three markets. All right, major markets have a single campus in a market. Think Cleveland, think Cincinnati, Toledo, et cetera. Our super school clusters have markets so large that we can actually have multiple campuses there. Think Tampa, Orlando, Detroit, Minneapolis, all right? And then our small markets are really what I would call some of the legacy campuses that we've had and inherited over the years. The green is the capacity that we currently educate students with. The blue are the open seats. So, with the campuses we already have in our portfolio, we can educate an incremental 6,000 students in the next four years. Each nursing student generates about $20,000 of annual revenue, so quick math means that $120 million of incremental revenue can be generated out of campuses we already own. Certainly, there's some step fixed costs associated with faculty and other resourcing, but the margin expansion opportunity in our health plus business is very substantial as a result of this capacity utilization initiative that we call fill the back row. It's one of the most exciting things we have going in our health business. The next thing I want to talk about is our campus expansion. So our four-year trajectory anticipates that we will open eight campuses. We've already opened one of those in Orlando, just starting for education in this quarter. We have already announced our second, which is Detroit 2. Again, those markets that can house multiple of our campuses. And we have six additional campuses we plan to open in the next three years. I can tell you that while those are important for our future growth those are not a substantial part of the next four-year revenue because it takes a while to ramp so if you look at this slide on the right hand side it takes us 18 months to get to break even the cost per campus I just for those of you who follow higher ed and campus-based higher ed may be surprised to see that the cost per campus of our investment is about 3.5 million dollars to open a campus. And we believe that we can get to full run rate and 35% EBITDA margins in a matter of four years. And we've had examples of getting there much faster. In fact, Detroit is one of those examples where we were there within less than two years. So the returns are real and achievable. And because we're pacing these campus openings each year for the next four years, you can see that the tail on some of those campuses we're going to enjoy the benefit of, you know, outside that four-year time horizon of 2029. So I want to just jump then to, I would say, the big punchline from Investor Day. So as I said, we're about a $650 million business right now, generating $85 million dollars of EBITDA. By 2029, we expect organically we'll be at 890 million to 925 million of revenue, 8 to 10 percent CAGR. We'll have 20 to 21 percent EBITDA margins, which will take our EBITDA dollars from 85 million to about 180 to 200 million of EBITDA expansion in the in the next in the next four years what you can see here in the details if you remember I said at the beginning of the meeting military plus health plus they're about the same size you can see where the growth is coming from here military is going to grow to about 405 to 420 and our health plus business is pacing to grow substantially faster than that at 485 to 505 and as we discussed, the Military Plus business has been this legacy business that has very, very nice 30% plus EBITDA margins. And we expect the Health Plus business to move from where it is in single digit EBITDA contribution in 2025 to 18 to 20% EBITDA margins by 2029, largely because of that initiative I talked about, which is called fill the back row. And then the final thing I will share again is we have $221 million on the balance sheet today. We expect from that growth plan, if we do not do an acquisition, to add $300 to $400 million of cash to our balance sheet by 2029. And as you can imagine, one of the questions we often get is, well, what are you going to do with all that money, right? First, we're investing behind intelligent systems. We're going to modernize, we're going to embed AI into our every aspect of how we teach and learn to make sure that the student experience is something that retains students and compels new students to join us. We are modernizing our campuses and we're really focused on investing that next dollar of profitability where it makes sense in marketing because top-line growth will allow us to continue to pull the business forward. We're also focused on opening new campuses organically. We talked about the eight campuses we're opening and we're adding
some new programs. We believe that we can use that cash very effectively for tuck-in acquisitions.
There's no suspect right now. I know he's going to ask me that question, so I stole one of your questions from you, Stephen, but right now we're looking carefully at tuck-in acquisitions. They will be nursing or health healthcare acquisitions predominantly, and an acquisition will allow us to enter states that are very difficult otherwise from a regulatory perspective to actually enter organically. It's very tough to enter some states. Boards of nursing sometimes require two or three years of operation before they will actually allow you to operate at full capacity. It's a very costly endeavor. So buying into states in some cases is much more thoughtful than it is to try and do a ground up stand from the start. And then, of course, we announced a share buyback at the beginning of 2026, and we've been continuing to execute on a share buyback and return to shareholders. So, we are really excited about APEI. There's a lot of material in here, but I just want to thank you very much for your interest in APEI, and I know we have a post-presentation breakout, which we'd be happy to entertain any questions or visits from any of you. So thank you very much for your interest in APEI.
And maybe we'll just take a, maybe a couple questions here. Yeah, I know we started late too. So, but maybe just as we think about the nursing, I mean, it seems like the 2029 plan, a big part of this is filling the back row. You showed all the capacity you have at the existing campuses. what's some of the what are some of the biggest blocking and tackling you know kind of the execution items that you guys need to really perform well on to to drive that campus utilization up and I guess what are the biggest risks of not being able to get utilization higher yeah so I
like when you say blocking and tackling because we believe to get to the 2029 goals it is really one foot in front of the other execution there's no crazy hockey stick there's nothing you know We've carved out the acquisition separately so that we aren't setting up a goal for ourselves that opportunistically we can't find an acquisition that makes good sense. How do we fill the back row? The prerequisites are we have to make sure we have enough faculty and we have enough clinicals. Getting out ahead of that enrollment growth is really about making sure we have sufficient faculty staffing and the clinicals, which is an important part of the student's educational experience, kind of like a mini internship. They go to the hospital, they go to ER, they go to labor and delivery, and they work side by side with practicing healthcare providers to really get a sense of what that experience is like. And so having those two things in place is critical, number one, and number two is retaining our students, right? We are being very successful right now in attracting new students and making sure that we can continue to grow our new student enrollment. And what we want to make sure we do is that for students who come in, that we are able to give them an educational experience that allows them to finish and become a new nurse. And I think those are the two important things. Because once you get them in the door, in order for you to see the revenue associated with those students, you you have to make sure that they can progress through their five quarters or nine quarters of education.
I might be wrong on this, but it seems like I haven't heard you talk as much as you did today about military families and the opportunity there. Is that something that you do need to get traction with something like that to hit the 2029 targets, or is that something that if you get traction there, maybe it is a new area of the TAM, something you guys haven't done before, it sounds like it could be a very attractive offering. Maybe just talk about what that could mean for the business. You bet. So it is, you're
right, early days. We've been tackling that really for the last, you know, 18 months, right? And we've been very pleased with the momentum we're seeing there. If you think about higher ed, sometimes students will say, I want to get an MBA. Let me go search and figure out where I can get it. That's not our military or military family students, they come to, they first say, wow, AMU was the place where my brother, father, you know, grandfather got their degree, and I want to go to AMU. And then they look for what kind of program can I find there that is going to suit me. I get a tuition, I get a premium tuition discount. I know that it's flexible because I can take one class at a time. I can do it all online, so that the operating model of APUS is very attractive to military families. And what has been one of the most interesting things, Stephen, that we've seen is that we have two brands inside of APUS. We have American Military University. You can get your diploma that says AMU, or we have American Public University, and you can get your diploma, and it says APU. Seventy-five percent of our military families want an AMU degree. And what that tells us is that they are very attracted to the brand value of American military university. And that has been a real positive tailwind, we believe, in terms of people having brand affinity to the American public university story.
Well, I think we'll end it there. Thank you so much, Angie. That was fantastic. The breakout is going to be upstairs in Burnham Beach. So if you want to dig in more, head upstairs.
Thanks all. Look forward to seeing you again. Thank you very much.