ATGE
#Thank you for that.
Sure, <UNK>.
It's true.
I think we're in a period here of cyclical weakness.
It seems like a long cycle, but it is particularly having an impact ---+ it's having an across higher education, but particularly it appears to be impacting the segment of the population that's in the middle or the lower income strata.
Many of these prospective students, even though many other people have seen maybe getting jobs, but they're not and they're lacking confidence in the job market.
They're a little hesitant to make that commitment to make that investment.
And we're seeing that not just in private sector institutions.
We're seeing that in community colleges and in other four-year institutions at the independents and public sector as well.
So, it is a, we think, a near-term factor.
And as we move along, some of the reasons that give us optimism for maybe the mid term as well as the long term is we do start to see consumer confidence coming back slowly, but starting to see that.
And then the other is, just this recognition and research shows that there's over 30 million people who, in the last couple of decades, enrolled in college, but they left without completing.
And we serve those students very, very well.
So, for DeVry University, that's an example of an opportunity.
The other thing that helps us is this diversification strategy that really gives us the resources to continue to invest even though at DeVry University, we're down right now, we're going to continue to invest in this strategy, we've got a lot of confidence in it, and get this turned around.
Sure.
Because we're committed to maintaining positive economics here in the near term.
Also, we found based on this deep dive research that our team did, and with some outside help, that these markets that we're focusing on are those where we really do have the strongest competitive position, that right to win that sometimes people talk about.
And so, we're doubling down and focusing on the markets and on the programs where we have that competitive right to win.
We just think that that's the most efficient way to serve our students.
It's the most efficient way to deploy our fellow owners' capital.
So that's the near term.
But I do think that it is cyclical in that, in other words, it's not seminal.
It's not that college is just going to go away and go down forever.
So even though we've seen enrollments in the United States go down, among working adults, do we think that goes down forever.
No, I think it's cyclical, it's not seminal.
Well, we're certainly watching the consumer confidence figures.
We watch the employment and unemployment and all those kinds of macros.
And then internally, we look at our own the inquiries we get from prospective students.
We look at the conversion of those inquiries to an application.
And what's interesting is, right now, the team is doing a very good job when someone does inquire with DeVry University, Keller Graduate School of Management, of the process of moving them along to apply.
So in other words, when someone expresses interest and engages with us or visits one of our campuses, those prospective students are liking what they see at a greater rate than they were the year before.
That's very encouraging for us.
We know we have a strong value proposition.
We do need a little bit more at the top end of that process.
So that's what we're looking for.
In general I would say that it's many, if not, the majority of the course taking behavior in those campuses is already happening online.
I don't have that figure at hand.
I'm not sure we're ---+ but we can sort of certainly follow up.
But you're on to the right track there that it should have sort of that disproportionate impact, but give us the ---+ free up the resources from the infrastructure and so forth that allow us to differentially invest in the remaining 60-plus campuses where we're focusing.
No, no real milestones there.
We're certainly fully cooperating with the folks over there and having dialogues with the staff.
And our intent is to show them the quality of our processes and that the investigation should come to its logical close.
So we just point you to our other disclosures and that's about all we have to say about the matter right now.
