Lincoln Educational at Midwest Ideas Conference: Growth Amidst Challenges

On Wednesday, 27 August 2025, Lincoln Educational Services (NASDAQ:LINC) presented at the 16th Annual Midwest Ideas Conference, highlighting its robust growth strategies and financial health. Despite facing potential regulatory challenges, the company showcased a strong performance with significant revenue growth and plans for strategic expansion.

Key Takeaways

• Revenue increased by 15%, with a 22% rise in student starts.
• Lincoln Educational aims to be debt-free by year-end, with $13 million in debt currently.
• The company is expanding through new campuses and strategic acquisitions.
• A focus on skilled trades education aligns with industry needs and market demands.
• Lincoln Educational is exploring AI to reduce costs and enhance operational efficiency.

Financial Results

• Revenue rose by 15%, driven by effective marketing and increased interest in skilled trades.
• The company ended the quarter with $13 million in debt, expecting to be debt-free by year-end.
• Forecasts for 2027 include $550 million in revenue and $90 million in adjusted EBITDA.
• Cost per student start decreased by 14% in the second quarter.

Operational Updates

• New facilities were opened in Nashville and Levittown, with expanded program offerings.
• The Houston campus opened earlier than expected, featuring various trade programs.
• A new campus is planned in Hicksville, Long Island, set to open in 2026.

Future Outlook

• Lincoln Educational plans to replicate successful programs across campuses and explore acquisitions.
• The company is targeting new campuses in the South and West, including potential locations in California and Florida.
• Emphasis on a blended learning model and AI integration to enhance educational offerings.

Q&A Highlights

• Lincoln Educational differentiates itself from competitors with more hands-on training and a family-focused approach.
• Digital marketing strategies have effectively reduced costs per student start.
• New campuses are expected to become profitable within 20 months, contributing significantly to cash flow.

In conclusion, Lincoln Educational Services remains committed to expanding its footprint and addressing the skills gap in the trades industry. For more detailed insights, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 16th Annual Midwest Ideas Conference:

Operator: Trading under NASDAQ on under the symbol l I n c. From the company, we have president and CEO, Scott Shaw.

Scott Shaw, President and CEO, Lincoln Tech: Thank you and a good afternoon. Just quick question. How many of you by chance sat through the UTI presentation just so just oh, three. Okay. So almost everyone.

So it’s gonna be a very similar story, very similar type company. So you’re not gonna hear anything probably too different, but maybe with a different twist. So, Lincoln Tech, next, you’ll celebrate our eightieth year. We are a leader in skilled trades. This is all we’ve done in our eighty eighty years of existence.

We started off training people to be auto mechanics, fixing automatic transmissions, and installing air conditioning in homes. That started to happen really after World War two. Today we have about 30% of our students are in transportation programs, 40 are in skilled trades, and about 30% in health care. And we’re usually number one or number two in each of our markets that we serve. We are growing and that’s a really good thing because typically trade schools like ours only grow during recessionary periods, but we’ve been growing quite robustly with unemployment still near fifty year lows hovering around 4% because of a shift that’s taken place which I’ll talk about more going forward.

We have a very good operating model so that as we fill up, just like if we filled up this office, venue today with more seats and everyone was paying me an extra dollar, I’d have a lot more dollars in my pocket. At the end of the day, the same is true with our schools. As we put more students into each classroom, we get a lot of operating leverage. It’s it’s the same classroom, same training stuff, same faculty member, but each of the additional dollars drop to the bottom line because unlike an airline, we’re not discounting those additional seats. Everyone’s paying the same amount.

And so therefore our profitability is growing. We have a nice solid balance sheet. We finished the quarter with about $13,000,000 worth of debt, but we’ll be debt free by year end. We have about a $60,000,000 credit facility with a $20,000,000 accordion feature if you wanna make an acquisition, so we have tons of liquidity. And we are increasingly making our model more and more efficient.

Several years ago we moved to a blended learning model which we call Lincoln 10 o and we’re continuing to look for ways, especially using AI, to help eliminate costs and operational expenses in our organization to further drive up our operating margins. So we had a really good second quarter even though our stock went down, but that’s for you all to figure out. All I’m gonna do is continue to grow our business and things are looking good. So revenue is up 15, starts were up 22%, profitability was up nicely. We increased our guidance both the lower end and the higher end of it.

We feel very good about where we’re going and we have a lot of good things happening. We just moved in March into a new facility for our Nashville campus. That new facility will enable us to add electrical and HVAC programs which will start, next month. Actually, no, it’ll start in October. In August 1, we moved from our old Philadelphia facility into a new facility in Levittown.

Philadelphia today is a solo discipline school with just automotive. It moved into Levittown and next month it’ll start offering HVAC electrical and welding in addition to it. And then, also next month we’re gonna open up our Houston campus which is a month earlier than we thought. It’s a new market for us. It also has HVAC, electrical, and welding, and automotive.

And that campus also has about another 18,000 of, square feet that we haven’t developed so that we can offer new programs in the future and continue growing down there. We opened our first new campus last year in March, which was the first new campus in eighteen years. That campus was in East Point in in Atlanta that has automotive electrical welding and HVAC just like all the other programs campuses I just mentioned. That campus cost us about $18,000,000. That’s including operating losses and we forecast that by the end of this year for the twelve months in 2025 that campus should generate $7,000,000 of cash flow for us.

So a good quick ramp up and I’m anticipating that, our Houston campus should perform similarly. So we did put some guidance out there a couple years ago for 2027 showing about 550,000,000 in revenue and 90,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA. We mentioned during our last earnings call we will update these forecasts at our, November earnings call after our third quarter. And then also next year in March, probably in the March, we’ll have another Investor Day where we’ll give guidance out to 02/1930. But basically our plan is to grow organically.

We can grow our existing business. We got good momentum, lots of interest in the trades. Our marketing has become very effective. We, didn’t announce on the second quarter that the cost per start in the second quarter for us went down 14%, which means we’re getting good return on our investment. We can continue to spend money in marketing to continue to drive our core business.

We will also though grow through replicating new programs into our campuses. Last year we replicated four programs and had one program expansion. This year we have four programs being replicated with two program expansions. You know, next year we’ll probably have only maybe two program replications. But that’s a case in point.

Here in Chicago, we have a campus in Melrose. I was just there yesterday. We’ll start and launch our HVAC program in that campus, next month. We had some space that we had we’re utilizing for collision repair. We had maybe 60 students in the collision repair program, so we decided to exit that program.

And in that same space, we added 25 welding booths we’re adding, which will be 75 students. We added a vac program which will add 225 students. And we also built out our third Tesla training center all in that same space. So it’s a way for us to better get better utilization out of that space. And then we also will grow through opening up these new campuses that I mentioned.

Houston is the next one. And then we’ve also announced that we’ve signed a lease for a property in Hicksville, Long Island. We’ll start construction on that property, in the fourth quarter, and that will open in the 2026. And that also will have HVAC electrical welding and automotive. We’re already in the New York City market, very dense market as you can imagine.

This is just moving out further on Long Island. Our campus in Queens, New York is quite populated this will just give us opportunity to expand in a market that already knows our brand frankly for eighty years. So it should be good. And then finally there in in red are acquisitions. We do look at acquisitions.

When I joined Lincoln twenty four years ago we made lots of acquisitions between 2001 and 2010 or 02/2009. We haven’t made an acquisition since 2009 but we probably look at 12 different opportunities a year, and we continue to look at it to find the right property. What we’re looking for is either an entrance into a market that we want to get into and the school that we would buy would be basically a buy versus build. It would have programs that we’re looking to offer in that market. Or we might buy a school that has programs that we would like to expand into such as nursing, an RN program, or let’s say aviation mechanics, or we’re just looking for opportunities to expand our business overall just replicating what we have on a grander scale.

But we’re not gonna get into other programs that are not involving your hands because that’s one of our, I think, advantages. Students and parents realize that AI is not gonna take away the jobs that we’re offering. AI might help our mechanics better assess and evaluate a car or an HVAC system, but you’re still gonna need someone to go in there and fix it, take away take away the broken part, put the new part in, or use your hands. And we find that we think that’s a very safe long term career opportunity and more and more people are coming to that same conclusion. So this is our model for opening up and buying a new campus.

When we sign a lease it takes us about eighteen months to twenty months to get the campus open. That’s between building out the classrooms and buying all the equipment and getting all the regulatory approvals. And then shortly thereafter the campuses start becoming profitable. As I mentioned, the campus that we opened last year within let’s say that year two proposition is gonna make us $7,000,000 on that $18,000,000 investment. And the new campuses going forward, they do cost a lot.

They’re 18 to $25,000,000 worth of capex. We do build very nice campuses. While the community colleges are our number one competitor and they’re not very good competitors from the standpoint, they’re certainly not gonna take away business from us. They do build sometimes very nice facilities where they get a lot of grants and a lot of money. They just don’t know how to run a very effective school and they don’t do marketing.

So I wanna make sure that our campuses are just as attractive if not more attractive than theirs. Then you complement that with our very customer service approach and much richer, deeper curriculum and you have a winning combination in my mind. Since COVID, this is one of the other reasons why more people are interested in the trades. It’s all being elevated. Our students that were employed remained employed during COVID because we needed nurses in the hospitals, we needed people fixing HVAC systems and electrical systems in hospitals in in your homes, and in delivery situations.

All the Amazon trucks needed to be up and running. So all these students became called essential workers and that’s the market that we focus on. This repeats a lot of things. The only point I’ll put out here is this was done on June 30. You’ll see that the stock price at that point was $23.

We had our earnings call announcing all of our great earnings. Our stock went down so our stock today is around 15% below this number, but I’m very confident just as we had on earnings call, we raised our guidance. Nothing’s really changed. I don’t understand the stock market. That’s your job.

I just run the business and I feel really good about where it’s going. So we have lots of opportunity. Lincoln started in Newark, New Jersey, so we have a high concentration in the Northeast, but we’re also not in a lot of the growth areas, especially in the South and the West. We’ll eventually get to California. It’s not number one on my list, very unfriendly regulatory environment, but there’s plenty of places for us to grow.

We’re not in Florida. We’re just opening our second campus in Texas, in Houston. Lots of opportunities for further penetration. You can see we have a lot of schools around New York City and we’re even adding that Hicksville campus. We don’t we only have one campus here in Chicago.

There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have more. Only one in Dallas, only one in Philadelphia, only one in Houston. So even in those markets that we already exist, there are opportunities to add more campuses. It was basically most of our students come from a thirty minute drive around the campus. And the average age of our student is 25, we’re appealing more to the working adult, but we get about 20% of our students right out of high school as well.

And everything we’re focused on are the middle skills which are skills that aren’t going away as of yet. Low skills, this is skills that don’t require anything behind a high school. One would argue a lot of technology is coming into play. That’s why when you go to Target or to your supermarket you don’t have checkout people but machines doing things. And then the higher skills are obviously people with bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees and doctorate degrees that all thought they were safe but maybe AI might eat into that, in the future.

And then middle skills are those that require more than a high school level education but less than a bachelor’s degree. So, obviously everything that’s happening in the world is there’s technology involved so everyone needs some form of training these days to do their job and that’s the place where we play. There’s this huge imbalance that’s certainly very much in the news, over the last twenty four months. We’ve known about it just because the employers have been coming to us for years, frankly haven’t been able to find people. But back in the eighties we made that decision, everyone should go to college to help accommodate that.

We eliminated shop classes and things like that at a lot of high schools to dedicate more time to academics to hopefully prepare more people to go to college. Obviously the results are, if you look at them, only sixty three percent of people graduate from college in six years. And I’m sure we all know people who graduate from college that don’t have a job and really don’t have skills that the market wants. So people are really rethinking that. And just as the baby boomers are retiring and companies haven’t really replenished their workforce, there’s this huge gap that’s forming.

As I mentioned, everything requires technology today. The sectors we service, whether they are manufacturing, health care, transportation, construction are all growing. And given the trends that are out there, the military needs to rebuild all of their ships and all their submarines. They’re anticipating they’ll need a quarter of a million people just to do to do that. They’re not quite sure where they’ll come from.

Our our electric grid was already weak. Then you add on top of it all the demand from AI. You’re only gonna have to redo the electrical grid but build more power plants. Our infrastructure is old and aging. Everything built in the sixties and seventies needs to be redone.

They wanna reassure all this manufacturing, so facilities need to be built, then have to be maintained. Everything is speaking to increased need and demand out there for the skilled trades. And then when you look at how many jobs today are out there, this is BLS data of how many new people need to be hired in all these fields. These are the fields that we train people for and if you just simply look at how many graduates we have versus what the need is out there, you know, have less than 2% market share. Obviously in certain markets it’s higher but the point being it’s a very fragmented market out there with lots of opportunity for us to continue to grow.

As any competitive company needs to have a good product, and I think we do have a superior product, out there, both superior to the community colleges and frankly superior to most of our peers, if not all of our peers out there. Our programs are designed to get people into the workforce as quickly as possible with skills that make them employable. So twice a year we invite employers to come in, tell us what’s good about our programs, what’s bad about it, where’s the industry going, how do we make our programs better so that our students are in demand by you and more productive by you. All of our faculty members are from industry, they’re not academics, they’ve all done the job and now they’re coming back to share what they’ve learned and how you as a young person could be as successful as they are and enjoy the trades going forward. I mentioned earlier we build very robust learning environments to replicate the professional environment as much as possible, to give them all the same equipment that you would have if you walked into a BMW or Mercedes shop or walked into any, major corporation that needed someone to do electrical work or HVAC work or become a welder.

We have them in uniforms, we buy all the same equipment, they get all the same professional tools, they’re not getting tools from Sears, it’s all whatever that industry standard is out there. And then we’re very much focused on being very customer service oriented. Our students as I mentioned are working adults. They’re usually first generation folks. They usually don’t have a lot of support systems both from an emotional standpoint or financial standpoint.

Many have family, many have a job, many have family, jobs, and are trying to get an education. So life does get in the way for many of them at times and it’s a lot easier just to pull the plug and not continue. It’s obviously in our best interest that as many of them as possible graduate and we want that to happen. That reflects better on us. So we do provide a lot more care and support I would say than what you would get at a traditional school whereby the mentality is more sink or swim.

If you get through us that’s proven proof of your mettle and your ability to succeed. While that might be true, we have a different philosophy of how we approach it. And that’s why our graduation rates are twice those of the community college and our placement rates are about eighty two percent. And that’s eighty two percent in the field which they studied. If they went to us and got a degree, not degree, certificate in automotive but then worked at an Amazon warehouse, that wouldn’t count for us

These are only placing people into what they studied. So as a company that started in Newark, New Jersey and as you saw from that earlier map, high concentration in the Northeast, We’re the largest provider of students in the trades and automotive area coming out post secondary education, basically on the East Coast. And then we’re six on the West Coast. Our goal though is eventually to be national. Obviously when we open up another campus in Houston that will be helpful and we’ll be opening up other campuses in that gray section as well as opening campuses in the red section.

So there’s lots of opportunity for us. Due to our longevity and the success of our programs and the scale of what we offer and the quality of what we offer, we do attract a lot of companies become partners of ours. These companies partner with us in different ways. Some donate equipment so that our students become more facile with what they offer as well as introduce them so that they’ll use the equipment at whatever employer they have. Others we’re providing kind of like a graduate level of programming.

They’ll graduate from our electrical program let’s say and then we train them on Johnson Controls specific equipment with Johnson Controls training manuals so they can after three months go right into Johnson Controls as a already trained technician. So there are different models out there and we’re constantly adding new partners, not very many but we’ll add a handful every year and this is an opportunity for us to strengthen our brand, give greater job opportunities to our students and somewhat it’s another revenue stream. It’s very small for us, it’s $6,000,000 of revenue. It’s something that could grow. It’s a bit different cell though, it’s a b to b cell versus a b to c.

We’re obviously not that good at the b to b right now but it’s something that we’re working on. I mentioned some of these statistics. We’re a highly regulated company, highly regulated industry, and we strive to be at the top of every metric that we can. Ninety ten is a metric that says that you can’t receive more than 90% of your funding from the federal government. Overall around 82%, so safely below the 90% threshold.

CDR is cohort default rates. And this is zero because since COVID up until the Trump administration you did not have to repay any student loans, interest or principal. However, that’s now changed. You now have to repay your loans, so cohort default rates will be start just reappear again in probably 2027, was they look two years back. But just to put you in perspective, prior to them, no longer requiring repayment, our cohort default rate is around 9% which is this industry average for all education.

So I’m anticipating the core default rate will be frankly much higher than that when it stops, when it starts up again because if you have five years of telling people you don’t need to repay loans, it’s gonna take them a while to kinda get back in that habit. But I’m I’m confident that we’ll get our numbers down quickly. And at the bottom there, these are our most recent statistics that we have to supply to our creditor with seventy percent graduation rate and eighty two percent placement rate. This is again summary of kind of the strong second quarter that we had, just reiterating that we have a strong balance sheet with lots of liquidity to help us execute our growth plans going forward. And again this just kind of shows you our progression over the last four years looking at the second quarter numbers, revenue margins all increasing quarter over quarter, all increasing six months over six months, all going in the right direction.

And then this is looking at with starts, the same sorts of things. You can see on the six month numbers there is some acceleration of the starts year over year. We are though forecasting about 13% growth in our starts for the full year. Just to reiterate, we did announce that our starts will be flat in q three and then ramp up again in q four to be more in line with the first half of the year. But that’s all we’re looking for is low teens types of growth going forward.

We are very seasonal though as a business. Our busiest time is right now since we do have some high school students they all start in the summertime. Some of our programs, most of our programs are about a year in length, some go up to thirteen, fourteen months. So basically we have peak population starting in October, well actually halfway through September up until let’s say November 1. So you have peak population, same cost structure, so a lot of profitability drops to the bottom line.

So we get 60 to 80% of our profits in the last five months of the year. And then in summary, again we are a leader in the trades. We’ve been doing this for a long period of time. We’ve been experiencing very robust organic growth and we have the opportunity to do inorganic growth which we haven’t done yet but we’re constantly looking. The skills gap is real.

You can see it all the time in the news about the need for more tradespeople. And if there ever is a recession again, those are periods of time that we do even better just because there’s that many more people with time and interest, to go back to school. We will continue to take advantage of our strong financial health, to expand our footprint, which I shared with you earlier, because there’s lots of room for growth, and, we have just overall we will remain focused on providing a quality product that attracts more students, keeps you compliant, and who doesn’t want to be the best. And that’s my presentation. Any questions?

Yes sir?

Unidentified speaker: You spanned on the government’s role in financing Yep. The education.

Scott Shaw, President and CEO, Lincoln Tech: Sure. So we’re an accredited institution. So just like the University of Chicago, their students fill out the FAFSA, the free application for Financial Aid. Our students do the same and then they get certain amounts of aid. We have a large, I’ll say underserved population, so we get, a lot of our students get Pell Grants, so that’s free money from the federal government.

Out of our 400 and what are we saying 80,000,090 million of revenue this year, we’ll probably get a 105,000,000 in Pell Grants and then we’ll get several 100,000,000 in title four loans. And then the gap is funded either through loans that we provide, about a third of our students could get a loan from us. When I say a loan, we’re not giving them money, it’s just credit to their tuition. And then they might get some scholarships, they might have third party loans. We also have students who pay for their education while in school on a monthly basis.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Title four had nothing nothing slowed down as of yet. They have cut a lot of people. Everyone that we used to deal with in the in the Department of Ed is gone because they got rid of the whole sector that dealt with large companies like ourselves.

With that said, we haven’t missed a beat yet. Doesn’t mean that we’re not gonna miss a beat going forward. If we were to do an acquisition, that requires more, I’ll say, effort on the Department of Ed, so that could be a slower process than it would be in the prior period of time. You know they’re talking about moving Title IV out of the Department of Ed. They said the Small Business Administration they legally can’t do that, and Congress would have to approve it.

They might move it to Treasury. Who knows which way it’ll go? Obviously the government doesn’t do things very well, so if it does get moved, I’m sure there’ll be some dislocation, which is obviously a concern. Not much I can do besides just be prepared for it if it happens, but things are kind of being held up. They do talk about still eliminating more people from the Department of Education, so that could impact us trying to do new things, but all I can tell you is that everything that we have in place today and everything that we’ve been executing on has been better in this administration than the prior administration.

Unidentified speaker: And does the credit swap offers? Does the credit that you give for tuition, does that show up on how does that show up on your financial savings?

Scott Shaw, President and CEO, Lincoln Tech: Oh, it’s in receivables. So if we give them a loan and we haven’t collected on it yet, it’ll show up on the receivables. Correct. So it’s a receivable and then we reserve against it. So whatever’s on the balance sheet’s already been reserved for.

We I’m not sure. I think we do as I know from with our one of my CFOs here. So basically about a third of our students take out those loans and the average loan is around $7,000. And just in general, so the average student who graduates from Lincoln graduates with about $14,000 worth of debt, which translates into about a $150 a month, which these are ten year loans. The interest rate we charge is only one percentage point higher than what the government charges because we want them to take out the government loan first.

We’re not in the loan business. But in over between our loan and the government loan, it’s $14,000 at a 150 a month. Not a small number but also not a huge overwhelming number either. Yes sir?

Unidentified speaker: Do you overlap much with UTI? Yep. Looks like you’re more north.

Scott Shaw, President and CEO, Lincoln Tech: We’re overlapping more and more.

Unidentified speaker: And so what, how do you compete?

Scott Shaw, President and CEO, Lincoln Tech: Well we’re better. So we could the difference is comes down to people in many regards. Also our program is a little bit different than theirs. Their program is now fifty fifty, meaning 50% on campus, 50% online. Ours is 70% on campus, 30% online.

So I would argue we provide more hands on training and I’d argue that’s what students come for is hands on training. Also you know, I would say that we are more family focused oriented and they’re more corporate. That’s what I’ve been told from people that

Unidentified speaker: Just the

Scott Shaw, President and CEO, Lincoln Tech: feel. The feel that come.

Unidentified speaker: And how do you market and what’s your cost to those

Scott Shaw, President and CEO, Lincoln Tech: Yep. We mark everything now. When I started it was yellow pages and TV and now it’s all Google for the most part and social media. So it’s 90% digital. You’re putting just buying keywords like how do I become a electrician?

How do I become a welder? Tell me top automotive schools. So you’re just buying keywords, trying to get people to come to your website, and then having very effective admissions folks that can tell the story, interview the students, figure out why they’re coming, make sure this is the right decision for them to come, and you take it from there. And then our acquisition cost, we don’t give out the specific number, don’t think. I just never know what I say, where I say it.

But I can we did say on the earnings call our acquisition cost in the second quarter was down 14% per student just because it’s a very receptive market. So now out of two out of 10 people that hear our message, we’re getting four out of 10 as an example responding. It’s the same thing that happens when there’s a high unemployment rate. It’s a lot easier to attract people. Yes sir?

Unidentified speaker: Yep. Yep.

Scott Shaw, President and CEO, Lincoln Tech: So as an example, the East Point campus since that’s the first one that we’ve opened, was including the capex $18,000,000 so about $16,000,000 of capital and about 2,000,000 of operating losses before it turned profitable. So we signed a lease roughly in the case of East Point I think twenty months later we opened the campus which was in March and then twenty months after that in the trailing twelve months that thing’s generating 7,000,000 of cash flow. I can’t promise everyone will be that efficient and effective but we’ll be close to that in that ballpark if that helps you. I can tell you that the Houston campus is the next one we’re opening. The population that’s within that thirty minute drive of the campus is twice as large as what East Point was.

So should have good economics.

Unidentified speaker: What’s the operating leverage in? Is it

Scott Shaw, President and CEO, Lincoln Tech: It’s yeah. It’s like filling up the classroom. I have you know one you have a class of 10 students or I have a class of 25 students. Same classroom, same teacher. That’s where most of the operating leverage comes from.

Yes. Well we built probably East Point too small. We’re just about to take down another 10,000 square feet in the neighboring building so that we can accommodate more growth. But we are building them smaller overall because with the blended learning model we can do it in a smaller footprint. But we also have capacity.

So at both Philadelphia and Houston, our two most recent campuses, we have an additional 18,000 square feet at both campuses that are just virgin warehouse space that we didn’t develop as of yet, to figure out where the market’s going. It could be we might put health care in there in the future, we might add more skilled trades if what we have is growing, or we might bring in let’s say an industry partner. It’s all the cost for the rent is already factored in and we can make our numbers with it and it just adds for future growth opportunity. But I’d rather have situations like East Point where we need to take down additional space to meet or match industry demand than build something too big where I’m struggling to get the capacity utilization I want to drive for the margins I want. Well, population demand for jobs in that marketplace is we have to place the students and that’s gonna drive interest.

And then we do Google searches, how many people are in that market looking for the trades we’re offering. We look at how many students are already graduating from other schools or other systems in that marketplace and find the one that has the biggest gap. Anything else? And if you’re in the Chicago area or any area, I welcome you to come visit a school. You have a much better appreciation for what we do and how we do it and see students, talk to faculty.

Yes, sir?

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. You said you have an acquisition in the sense of not

Scott Shaw, President and CEO, Lincoln Tech: Correct.

Unidentified speaker: Are you would you say more open, active, and looking at acquisitions now given or is it We an answer to your priorities.

Scott Shaw, President and CEO, Lincoln Tech: Always open. We’re just far more disciplined in what we want to buy than we were back twenty years ago when I first joined. There are lots of things we would have bought in the past, but then we would have grown, had more profitability but over time as one of my former board members would say have a hodgepodge of programs that you then have to manage. Right now we basically have seven eight programs that represent 90% of our students. So we just wanna kinda stay focused, become the best in those, a lot easier to manage.

You might add a program or two over time but kind of have that model versus be like a small community college type model. Yeah. Anything else? Great. Thank you for your

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