Grand Canyon Education, Inc. (NASDAQ:LOPE) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call May 2, 2023 4:30 PM ET

Company Participants

Dan Bachus - Chief Financial Officer

Brian Mueller - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Conference Call Participants

Jeff Meuler - Baird

Jeff Silber - BMO

Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call for Grand Canyon Education Inc. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I will now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Chief Financial Officer, Dan Bachus. Please go ahead.

Dan Bachus

Joining me on today’s call is our Chairman and CEO, Brian Mueller. Please note that many of our comments today will contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Various factors could cause our actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied by such statements. These factors are discussed in our SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K. We undertake no obligation to provide updates with regard to the forward-looking statements made during this call, and we recommend that all investors review these reports thoroughly before taking a financial position in GCE.

And with that, I will turn the call over to Brian.

Brian Mueller

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining Grand Canyon Education’s First Quarter Fiscal Year 2023 Conference Call. GCE had a very good quarter, exceeding enrollment expectations, exceeding consensus revenue estimates at mid $0.06 producing a $0.04 beat in adjusted diluted earnings per share to consensus. Given how most of higher education is coming out of COVID years, these are excellent results. Most importantly, GCU online produced significant new enrollment growth for the third consecutive quarter over prior year, and that momentum is expected to continue into the second quarter of 2023. I want to begin again by taking a step back and explaining why this is happening and briefly over review what has happened since the GCE-GCU transaction took place almost 5 years ago. I’ve often said that the past [indiscernible] small in Elite has won a day in higher education, especially areas like U.S. News & World Report rankings.

In the future, it will be institutions who are large, scalable and flexible in how they offer higher education. We expect to impact adults across the life span using technology to build platforms that take into account the life situation of the student and the nature of the content deals that need to be learned. GCE has invested approximately $300 million, producing its old learning management and administrative system that allows it and its partners to manage our 7,000 old-time and adjunct factory numbers 112,600 students and over 320 academic programs, emphases and certificates across 4 delivery platforms. This system has automated processes including admissions, transport collection and evaluation schedule building, financial aid processing at the recruit fatty assignment and payroll content acquisition, assessing learning outcomes, student teacher placement, counseling and social work internships and the list goes on.