Earnings call transcript: Strategic Education Q4 2024 misses EPS forecast

Strategic Education (NASDAQ:STRA) Inc. reported its fourth-quarter 2024 earnings, revealing an earnings per share (EPS) of $1.27, falling short of the analyst forecast of $1.43. The company also reported lower-than-expected revenue of $311.5 million against a forecast of $315.58 million. Following the earnings announcement, the company’s stock price dropped by 13.97%, closing at $84.26. According to InvestingPro analysis, the company maintains a GOOD financial health score, with several positive indicators including strong cash position and consistent dividend payments. The stock currently appears undervalued based on InvestingPro’s Fair Value model.

Key Takeaways

• Strategic Education’s Q4 2024 EPS of $1.27 missed forecasts by 11.2%.
• Revenue for the quarter was $311.5 million, below the expected $315.58 million.
• Stock price fell sharply by 13.97% post-earnings announcement.
• Full-year 2024 revenue increased by 8%, with operating income up by 26%.
• The company ended the year with nearly $200 million in cash and marketable securities.

Company Performance

Strategic Education reported a robust performance for the full year 2024, with revenue increasing by 8% and operating income rising by 26%. The company highlighted its ability to generate 200 basis points of operating margin expansion and a 31% increase in adjusted EPS to $4.87. InvestingPro data shows impressive gross profit margins of 47.38% and a strong Altman Z-Score of 6.28, indicating solid financial stability. Despite these strong annual results, the fourth quarter saw a shortfall in both EPS and revenue compared to expectations, contributing to a negative market reaction. For deeper insights into Strategic Education’s financial health and growth prospects, investors can access the comprehensive Pro Research Report, available exclusively on InvestingPro.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $311.5 million (below forecast of $315.58 million)
• Earnings per share: $1.27 (below forecast of $1.43)
• Full-year revenue growth: 8%
• Operating income growth: 26%
• Adjusted EPS for the year: $4.87 (up 31% YoY)
• Cash and marketable securities: nearly $200 million

Earnings vs. Forecast

Strategic Education’s actual EPS of $1.27 missed the forecast of $1.43 by 11.2%, indicating a significant deviation from expectations. The revenue of $311.5 million was also below the anticipated $315.58 million, reflecting a shortfall in achieving projected financial targets for the quarter.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings release, Strategic Education’s stock experienced a notable decline of 13.97%, closing at $84.26. This movement places the stock near its 52-week low of $83.62, reflecting investor concerns over the earnings miss and its implications for future performance. Notably, InvestingPro analysis indicates the stock historically trades with low price volatility (Beta: 0.59), making this decline particularly significant. The stock’s current valuation metrics, including a P/E ratio of 15.72 and strong cash flow generation, suggest potential value opportunity for long-term investors.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking forward, Strategic Education anticipates a 200 basis point expansion in operating margins for 2025 and projects mid-single-digit enrollment growth. The company maintains an expense base of $271 million for the year, aligning with its strategic plans outlined in the Fall 2023 Investor Day. Future EPS forecasts for 2025 range from $1.13 to $1.64 per quarter, with full-year expectations of $5.54.

Executive Commentary

CEO Carl McDonnell emphasized the importance of corporate partnerships, stating, "More than 70% of the incremental total enrollment that we had in U.S. Higher Education last year came through our corporate partners." Chairman Robert Silverman highlighted the company’s commitment to affordability, noting, "We don’t see ourselves as big price takers. Our objective is to drive down the cost of education for our students."

Risks and Challenges

• Regulatory changes in international student visa processes could impact enrollment numbers.
• Economic fluctuations may affect corporate partnerships and enrollment growth.
• Competitive pressures in the education sector could influence market share.
• Potential changes in government workforce policies may impact strategic initiatives.
• Cost management remains critical to sustaining margin expansions.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the potential effects of government workforce changes and the new approach to Australian international student visa processing. Executives clarified their expectations for expense management and margin expansion, reiterating confidence in the company’s strategic direction.

Full transcript - Strategic Education Inc (STRA) Q4 2024:

Conference Call Operator: Welcome to Strategic Education’s Fourth Quarter twenty twenty four Results Conference Call. I will now turn the call over to Therese Wilkie, Senior Director of Investor Relations for Strategic Education. Ms. Wilkie, please go ahead.

Therese Wilkie, Senior Director of Investor Relations, Strategic Education: Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Strategic Education’s conference call, in which we will discuss fourth quarter and full year twenty twenty four results. With us today are Robert Silverman, Chairman Carl McDonnell, President and Chief Executive Officer and Daniel Jackson, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Following today’s remarks, we will open the call for questions. Please note that this call 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 Strategic Education has identified in today’s press release that could cause actual results to differ materially. Further information about these and other relevant uncertainties may be found in Strategic Education’s most recent annual report on Form 10 ks to be filed, the most recent 10 Q and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as Strategic Education’s future eight Ks, 10 Qs and 10 Ks. Copies of these filings and the full press release are available for viewing on the website at strategiceducation.com. And now, I’d like to turn the call over to Carl. Carl, please go ahead.

Carl McDonnell, President and Chief Executive Officer, Strategic Education: Thank you, Therese, and good morning, everyone. We were very pleased with SCI’s twenty twenty four full year results that we reported this morning, which reflects strong performance consistent with our notional operating model, which we highlighted during our fall twenty twenty three Investor Day. For the full year 2024, our revenue increased 8% and operating income increased 26% generating almost 200 basis points of operating margin expansion. Our adjusted earnings per share grew 31% for the year to $4.87 Our operating performance was strong across all three segments. U.

S. Higher Education grew average total enrollment by 6% in 2024 and employer affiliated enrollment grew faster, increasing 16% for the full year reflecting the ongoing strength of our corporate partnership. Student retention in U. S. Higher education remained stable at approximately 87%.

U. S. Higher education revenue increased 5% in 2024, but was down slightly in the fourth quarter due to higher scholarships and the mix shift of employer affiliated students. Our ongoing focus on productivity and disciplined cost management enabled us to keep expense growth well below revenue growth at U. S.

Higher Ed and enabled almost 30% growth in operating income for the full year. Our Australia and New Zealand segment grew average total enrollment 5% for the year. The higher enrollment was driven predominantly by strong continuing student enrollment. Australia and New Zealand segment revenue grew 11% in 2024 on a constant currency basis, driven by enrollment growth and higher revenue per student, which was aided primarily by students taking more courses per term as well as a small tuition increase. On a constant currency basis, ANZ operating income increased 3% in 2024.

We continue to monitor and adapt to the evolving political and regulatory environment in Australia. The previously proposed international student caps were recently replaced with a new regulation that will attempt to govern international student immigration through the use of visa processing speed. Though we believe this change is more favorable than the previously proposed enrollment caps, we’re still studying the issue and its potential impact on our ANZ enrollment moving forward. Our Education Technology Services segment had a record year growing revenue by more than 30% to over $100,000,000 and operating income by almost 50%. Sofia Learning, our direct to consumer portal college level classes exceeded our expectations last year, growing both subscribers and revenue by 35%.

Workforce Edge also had a great year adding another 11 corporate partners for a total of 76, collectively employing more than 3,800,000,000 employees. In the fourth quarter, the Workforce team Workforce Edge team launched our largest ever employer partner, which includes a newer higher touch employer support model. During the fourth quarter, our operating expenses were higher as a result of several one time implementation related costs associated with this new partnership. We also expanded our more than decade old partnership with Best Buy (NYSE:BBY), converting it from a more standard tuition discount program to an all inclusive Strayer University’s Degrees at Work program, which offers eligible employees the opportunity to earn a certificate such as bachelor’s or master’s degree from Strayer University at no cost to the employee. Our network of corporate partners remains one of SCI’s major competitive strengths.

In fact, more than 70% of the incremental total enrollment that we had in U. S. Higher Education last year came through our corporate partners and we expect these partnerships will be a major driver of ETS revenue and income growth over the next five plus years. Lastly, regarding capital allocation in 2024, we generated about $217,000,000 pre tax cash from operations. We paid $48,000,000 in taxes and invested $41,000,000 in capital expenditures leaving us with $128,000,000 of distributable free cash flow.

We used this cash and our existing cash balance to return about $75,000,000 to our owners through our $2.4 common dividend and roughly $15,000,000 in share repurchases. We then repaid $61,000,000 balance on our revolver and refinanced a $250,000,000 revolver leaving us with just under $200,000,000 of cash and marketable securities at the end of twenty twenty four. Overall, we were very pleased with our performance in 2024 across the board and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of my colleagues here at SCI for their ongoing commitment and support on behalf of our students. And with that, Sherry, we’d be happy to take questions.

Conference Call Operator: Thank And that will come from the line of Jeff Silber with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Jeff Silber, Analyst, BMO Capital Markets: Thanks so much. I want to first focus on enrollment trends. I know you don’t guide to a specific enrollment number, but growth did slow to some extent in the back half of the year and was a little bit weaker than we had thought in 4Q. Was it just because the comps got tougher, is there anything specifically going on either from a new enrollment or retention perspective?

Carl McDonnell, President and Chief Executive Officer, Strategic Education: Good morning, Jeff. No, I’d say that as you heard in my prepared remarks, certainly our corporate partnership enrollment remains strong. Our non affiliated enrollment, the demand environment there continues to be strong. You may recall beginning really, I think in the middle of last year when our enrollment was in the high single digits, we thought that at some point it would normalize to our long term trend and notional operating model average of about 5%. So it’s going to move around in any one quarter.

Some quarters it will be above that. Other quarters it might be slightly below. But over the long term, we expect that our enrollment would be in that mid single digit range, which is reflected in our notional model that we presented at our last Investor Day.

Jeff Silber, Analyst, BMO Capital Markets: Okay. I appreciate that. Can we shift gears to Australia and New Zealand? Can you give us a little bit more color from a regulatory perspective exactly what the changes might be?

Carl McDonnell, President and Chief Executive Officer, Strategic Education: So the liberal government had proposed these labor government, sorry, had proposed these international student caps, which did not have enough support to pass parliament that was necessary to be implemented. So instead they issued what’s called a ministerial direction, which has the effect that instead of having a hard cap through legislation, the government has indicated they’re just going to use Visa (NYSE:V) processing time to effectively get to the same level of international enrollment. So, it remains to be seen in any one quarter or throughout the year what the timing may look like. But for the purposes of our own internal modeling as though those caps would be in place because the government has actually said they’re going to level out the foreign migration into Australia at those levels.

Jeff Silber, Analyst, BMO Capital Markets: And from a timing perspective, has that started already? Is that something you expect to happen over the next few months?

Carl McDonnell, President and Chief Executive Officer, Strategic Education: It has not yet, but that’s because when they issued this ministerial directive, they said that all enrollment up until you hit that cap, those visas would be approved kind of at normal speed and that’s where we’re at since we’re at the very beginning of the year. It wouldn’t be until later in the year as our enrollment starts to buttress up against that cap number that we may start to

Unidentified Speaker: see the visa slowdown. The international student enrollment, enrollment.

Jeff Silber, Analyst, BMO Capital Markets: Yes. Okay, great. And if I could shift gears to the U. S. Government, obviously, a lot going on in Washington, D.

C. These days and you guys are physically there. Any potential impact on your business in terms of what Doge is doing? You think you might be able to get some potential students from folks that might be being let go?

Carl McDonnell, President and Chief Executive Officer, Strategic Education: Well, we’ve always had a large presence of federal government employees, particularly at Strayer University over the last fifteen plus years. So that is something that we’ve seen before and could certainly continue. In terms of impact from the new administration, obviously the new political appointees are still in the process of being confirmed. So we’re continuing to monitor what’s happening and we’ll just continue to update any comments that we have as more policy takes shape.

Jeff Silber, Analyst, BMO Capital Markets: All right. I’ll get back from you. Thanks.

Conference Call Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. And that will come from the line of Alex Paris with Barrington Research. Your line is open.

Alex Paris, Analyst, Barrington Research: Thank you and thanks for taking my questions. I have a quick follow-up on ANZ. I read about the new ministerial directive 111. I heard your response. As I recall, Torrance is roughly fiftyfifty domestic international.

First of all, is that correct? And then second, what will you do later this year when your enrollment gets closer to that notional cap?

Carl McDonnell, President and Chief Executive Officer, Strategic Education: Well, Alex, over the last year, we’ve really worked to pivot with our marketing and advertising dollars to emphasize our domestic student enrollment, right? Historically, it’s been about fiftyfifty. But honestly, since the country reopened a couple of years ago, we’ve been dealing with Visa lag times for a couple of years now. So that’s something we are used to. Torrance has a great reputation in Australia, high quality academic programs.

We intend to market more than we have in the past to the domestic Australian market. And we’re confident that notwithstanding whatever the delays may exist, we’ll be able to continue to grow the Australian enrollment over time.

Alex Paris, Analyst, Barrington Research: Great. Helpful. And then adjusted operating expense came in at 2.71% up about 10% year over year, pretty much in line with expectations. And then I look at the operating income from U. S.

Higher Education ANZ and ETS and see some impact there. I’m wondering, number one, the incremental expenditures for growth in ETS and to a lesser extent U. S. Higher education and ANZ, to what extent did those incremental investments impact adjusted operating income generally this year. I do realize that the AOI margin was up 190 bps, which is pretty close to where you had forecast at the beginning of the year.

And should we expect 200 bps based on the notional model of adjusted operating income margin expansion in 2025, ’20 ’20 ’6, ’20 ’20 over the foreseeable future?

Daniel Jackson, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Strategic Education: Hey, Alex, this is Dan. The fourth quarter happened almost precisely how we expected it. And yes, a big portion of the increase in expense was ETS related as we’ve talked about several times this year and definitely had an impact on their operating income. I think the expense base of $271,000,000 is about where we need it in 2020. Obviously, there’ll be some seasonality with marketing investment, which is typically concentrated in the middle two quarters.

But we think the expense base right now is in pretty good shape even with the additional investment in ETFs continue through this year.

Alex Paris, Analyst, Barrington Research: Okay. So just to be clear, the $271,000,000 in adjusted operating expense in 2024 is approximately where it ought to be in 2025 based on need and requirement?

Daniel Jackson, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Strategic Education: Yes. But again, it won’t be uniform throughout the four quarters. The two middle quarters, Q2, Q3 are typically where we have more investment in marketing and are also the higher expense periods for ANZ given that those are their two bigger quarters.

Carl McDonnell, President and Chief Executive Officer, Strategic Education: Sorry, just to address the other part of your question on 200 basis points that’s in our notional model. That is what we expect over the next several years.

Alex Paris, Analyst, Barrington Research: Great. And then while we’re on this guidance thing and perhaps you’re feeling generous, how should we be thinking about enrollment and revenue growth in 2025? I think enrollment growth at U. S. Higher Education and ANZ were up about 3%, roughly in line with the notional model.

I think U. S. Higher education a little low and then ANZ at the lower end. And I think the long term forecast is mid single digits for U. S.

Higher Education and high single digits for ANZ. Should we expect acceleration in enrollment in 2025 versus 2024?

Carl McDonnell, President and Chief Executive Officer, Strategic Education: Well, obviously we don’t know what the enrollment is going to be in 2025 and beyond other than just given our history over many years, we’re confident that we can grow the business at roughly mid single digits over the long term. It wouldn’t surprise me if that were the case in 2025. Dan just gave you a pretty good direction on operating expenses and I reiterated our notional model of roughly 200 basis points of margin expansion. It remains to be seen obviously what’s going to happen with revenue, but I personally feel good about the five year plan that we laid out at our Investor Day in 2023.

Alex Paris, Analyst, Barrington Research: Great. That’s super helpful. Thank you. And I’ll get back in the queue.

Jasper Bibb, Analyst, Chua Securities: Thanks, Alex.

Conference Call Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. And that will come from the line of Jasper Bibb with Chua Securities. Your line is open.

Jasper Bibb, Analyst, Chua Securities: Hey, good morning guys. I apologize as my line has been cutting in and out, so I hope you can hear me clearly. Just wanted to level set on the framework for ’25. And I know there’s been a couple questions discussing this, but just can you clarify, so the framework is 25. It sounds like that’s revenue growth consistent with the notional model and 200 basis points of adjusted operating margin expansion.

Do I have that right? And is there any other, I guess, detail on what we should expect for 2025 you’re prepared to provide on the call today? Thank you.

Carl McDonnell, President and Chief Executive Officer, Strategic Education: Yes. Well, as you know, we don’t provide any specific guidance. We did introduce a five year plan back in the fall of twenty twenty three. We have a pretty good handle of expenses. We made a lot of the we needed to for TS in the back half of twenty twenty.

So to Dan’s earlier point, kind of the current run rate on expenses seems pretty good for the year. We’re not trying to be coy. We just don’t know what the revenue is going to be other than that we’re disciplined cost managers such that we feel good about the 200 basis points of margin expansion because we can keep all expenses up or down based on the actual volume of enrollment and revenue that we do see. But yes, are we confident in that notional model over five years? We are.

Unidentified Speaker: Okay.

Jasper Bibb, Analyst, Chua Securities: Thanks. And then wanted to ask about the cadence of operating margin expansion, maybe we should assume in this ’25 plan? I guess hoping you would comment on planned growth investments and what we could expect for a first half, second half split as maybe the normal seasonality has been a little bit off in the past few years with some of the growth investments you’ve made?

Daniel Jackson, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Strategic Education: Hey, Jasper, it’s Dan. The quarterly margin is a little bit harder to peg. What we’ve anchored on is our notional model of 200 basis points. I think it’s probably fair to assume that the margin will improve throughout the year, but to try and give you detailed quarterly would be beyond that requires a little bit more view on revenue and enrollment.

Jasper Bibb, Analyst, Chua Securities: Okay. Last one for me. I guess the revenue per student decline at U. S. Higher Ed was a little steeper than we expected in the quarter.

Could you maybe explain the drivers of that decline? And then how we should think about revenue per student for U. S. Higher Ed in 2025 if the employer channel continues to drive the growth there?

Daniel Jackson, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Strategic Education: Yes. It was about what we expected, Jasper, driven mostly by the continued shift to employer, but also scholarships at U. S. Higher Ed were higher than we would typically expect. The ’25 revenue per student, U.

S. Higher Ed is likely to be pretty stable, maybe slightly up, but pretty stable. I mean, Jasper, this is Rob.

Unidentified Speaker: At the broadest level, we in U. S. Higher ed, we don’t see ourselves as big price takers. Our objective is to drive down the cost of the education for our students. The individual programs may have some variability and some opportunity on tuition.

But in general, when we think of opportunity on tuition, it’s to drive it down. Okay. Thank you, guys. Thanks.

Conference Call Operator: Thank you. I’m showing no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Carl McDonald for any closing remarks.

Carl McDonnell, President and Chief Executive Officer, Strategic Education: Thank you, everybody. We look forward to updating on next quarter’s results in about

Conference Call Operator: three months. This concludes today’s program. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.