Operator
Operator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Grand Canyon Education's Second Quarter Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Brian Roberts, General Counsel. Sir, you may begin. Brian M. Roberts - Secretary, Senior Vice President & General Counsel: Thank you, operator. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today on this conference call to discuss Grand Canyon's 2016 second quarter results. Speaking on today's call is our President and CEO, Brian Mueller; and our CFO, Dan Bachus. This call is scheduled to last one hour. During the Q&A period, we will try to answer all of your questions. And we apologize in advance if there are questions that we are unable to address due to time constraints. I would like to remind you that many of our comments today will contain forward-looking statements with respect to GCU's future performance that involve risks and uncertainties. Various factors could cause GCU's actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These factors are discussed in GCU's SEC filings, including our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2015; our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q; and our current reports on Form 8-K. We recommend that all investors thoroughly review these reports before taking a financial position in GCU, and we do not undertake any obligation to update anyone with regard to forward-looking statements made during this conference call. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Brian. Brian E. Mueller - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Good afternoon, and thank you for joining Grand Canyon University's second quarter fiscal year 2016 conference call. In the second quarter of 2016, enrollments grew by 7.1% and revenues grew by 9.5%. New online enrollments grew in the high-single digits. Operating margins are at 23.4% for the quarter. Our faculty and staff continue to bring amazing creativity and innovation to their work as they inspire, teach and serve our students. I again want to thank them for everything they are doing to produce these results. We are extremely excited to start school year. We will begin the 2016-2017 year with approximately 17,500 students on our traditional campus. The average incoming GPA of our new students will be approximately 3.5. There will be about 1,200 students in our honors college and their average incoming GPA will be approximately 4.1. We now have nine colleges and 200 academic programs and certificates. We started the third quarter with approximately 62,000 students attending our online campus, which is 7.5% over the prior year. 48.6% of these students are studying at the graduate level which is up 140 basis points from a year ago. 62.6% of our students are studying in areas produce the highest graduation rates. Our second quarter online persistence rate was 91.8% which is 10 basis points over second quarter of the prior year. I want to remind you that when we arrived in 2008 the online persistence rate of students was in the mid 70%s. To this point in the 2016 calendar year 11.7% of new students starts are in academic programs rolled out in the last two years. Important part of our strategy is to recognize the direction of the economy and to create academic programs that will prepare students to pursue careers that impact the changing economy. We will continue to make a significant investment in new program development. This calendar year alone, we will initiate 40 new programs and certificates, which will allow us to continue to grow the online campus at between 6 percentage points and 8 percentage points per year. When students arrive on campus the next few weeks, they will be greeted by $162 million of additional educational infrastructure. Our CapEx expense reached an apex this year and will go down to under $100 million next year. This year we have completed three new apartment style residence halls, 170,000-square foot engineering building, two parking garages, a student life building and three new athletic facilities that will be finished in the spring semester. A new online administration building, which we have decided to keep on our balance sheet, will be completed December 1 of this year. In addition to the physical infrastructure, the students will be introduced to unprecedented levels of academic support. We continue to teach our students in small class sizes, averaging less than 25 on our traditional campus and less than 15 in the online campus. We have eight academic excellence centers spread throughout our 300-acre campus. The centers are open 8:00 AM till midnight Monday through Friday 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM on Saturday and 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM on Sunday. Students can get academic help from professors, professional tutors and peers in each of these centers. We also have two virtual learning networks, 24 special learning communities and the nine colleges will meet with all their students once a year to talk about special academic opportunities, internships, and potential career opportunities. Co-curricular participation will reach an all-time high this year. There will be five major theater productions, four dance concerts, and seven major choir concerts. Our debate team will participate in six high level national competitions and try to improve on their remarkable top 30 in the country ranking. We expect over 9,000 students will participate in intramural sports, and 800 students will participate in club sports. We are entering the fourth year of transition to Division I athletics and just recently received a favorable response to the report we submitted. And we were moved to successfully to the fourth year of transition. This year's basketball schedule includes games against national powerhouses like Duke and Arizona on the road and Louisville and San Diego State at home. Now turning to the results of operations. Net revenues were $191.3 million in the second quarter of 2016, an increase of $16.6 million, or 9.5%, from the $174.7 million in the prior-year period. Operating margin for second quarter of 2016 was 23.4%, compared to 24.2% for the same period in 2015. Net income was $27.6 million for the second quarter of 2016, compared to $25.8 million in the prior-year period. After-tax margin was 14.4% compared to 14.8% for the same period in 2015. As we have discussed previously, we anticipate that our margins in the second and third quarters will decline on a year-over-year basis as ground enrollment continues to grow as a percentage of our total enrollment as a majority of these students do not attend courses during the summer months, May through August, and a large percentage of our expenses are fixed during that time. Instructional costs and services grew from $75.4 million in the second quarter of 2015 to $84.6 million in the second quarter of 2016, an increase of $9.2 million, or 12.3% increase. This increase is primarily due to the increase in the number of faculty and staff to support the increasing number of students attending the university and increased benefit costs between years. In addition, we continue to see an increase in occupancy costs including depreciation and amortization as a result of us placing into service additional buildings to support the growing number of ground traditional students and an increase in dues, fees, subscriptions and other instructional supplies primarily due to increased licensing fees related to educational resources and increased food costs associated with a higher number of residential students. As a percent of revenue, instructional costs and services increased 110 basis points to 44.2%, due to the factors described earlier. Admissions, advisory and related expenses as a percentage of revenue decreased to 15.1% from 15.7%, primarily due to our ability to leverage our admissions advisory personnel across an increasing revenue base. Advertising expenses as a percent of net revenue increased to 110 basis points from 10.5% in Q2 2015, to 11.6% in Q2 2016, as we expanded our media advertising campaign. The early results of this are very encouraging. Marketing and promotional expenses as a percent of net revenue increased 10 basis points from 1% in quarter two 2015 to 1.1% in Q2 of 2016. When we first started talking about University's goals, we were talking about margins that would not exceed 20%. Without raising tuition on the traditional campus in eight years and with very minimal tuition increases on our online campus, we have significantly exceeded our margin expectations. The students, both ground and online have benefited significantly from the financial performance of the institution in many ways, especially as we compare our students' average debt levels to students at both private and public universities. We are going to make fairly significant investments in three areas in the upcoming year. First is in the program development which we discussed earlier. Second, our advertising budget will continue to be approximately 100 basis points higher than prior years in order to continue to build the unique brand of the institution. We think this is important because of the number of factors that are changing in the overall higher education landscape. Third, the entire range of counseling services that we are providing students has been a major factor in the University's success. We will continue to increase the investment we are making in our people. In this case, the investment will impact our employees that provide counseling services to students. This will provide them with more significant career opportunities and we believe will increase our already high employee retention rate. As Dan will discuss in the guidance section, this will impact margin slightly for the rest of the year. Continuing to invest in program development, building the University's brand and building greater levels of tenure in our counseling force will allow us to continue to grow the University at the rates that we've established. With that I'd like to turn it over to Dan Bachus, our CFO, to give you little more color on our 2016 second quarter, talk about changes in the income statement, balance sheet and other items as well to provide detailed information on our guidance for the second half of 2016.