Stride, Inc. (NYSE:LRN) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

It has zero material impact on our growth prospects. It has almost — is negligible impact on our profitability profits or margin prospects. And our MedCerts certificate business continues to perform very well and we see sort of very long runway of growth for that business. But yes, on the technology side, specifically in a very small portion of our revenue, there is a little bit of softness.

Thomas Singlehurst: That’s very clear. Thank you very much.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Steven Sheldon with William Blair. Your line is open.

Matt Filek: You have Matt Filek on for Steven Sheldon. Thank you for taking my questions. Wanted to start with one on enrollment trends. Can you provide a little more color on the enrollment trends, particularly when it comes to new student enrollments versus that students that re-registered? And did either of those come in differently than you would’ve expected?

James Rhyu: Yeah. So both performed well. Our re-reg cohort — if you take away the pandemic year, because obviously that one year was very, very anomalous. We basically had on both sides of it near record breaking years. And so I think both continue to perform strong. I think it speaks to one, the strength of our program is increasingly sticky with our customers. We have worked really hard to provide programs that really meet the needs of our customers at their point of need. And our outcomes are also improving. Meaning, you can see our academic outcomes improving, our state scorecard outcomes are improving. And so I think all this sort of translate — our net promoter scores are high. So all this is translating into higher year-over-year retention.

We also see new enrollment demand continue to be very strong. And I think more importantly than the strength in new enrollment demand is our ability to convert new enrollments also continues to improve. And we learned some things in this past season about — both demand gen on the new enrollment side, but also conversion that we think are going to translate into future gains. So it’s really across the board. We don’t see a lot of soft spots in either re-registration, withdrawal rates, or new enrollment trends. And in fact, I’ll say one other thing now through 24 days of this month, if you remember last year at this time we said that — while count date enrollments last year were soft, our in year enrollment trends were looking strong. That was last year.

This year — and again, it’s only through 24 days or actually 23 days, I don’t have today’s data yet, but through 23 days, we are outperforming last year. So we just — we see a lot of strength in our business. We see a lot of demand. I think that the one thing the pandemic structurally for our business did change a little bit that is new and a benefit to us is that families feel like they have just a lot more flexibility in their choices. And part of that translates into families don’t feel as rushed to have their kids start school actually on time as much anymore. And we’ve got a lot of family situations where that’s important to them for whatever reason, and we’re able to meet their needs there, and they’re coming to us increasingly through the in-year period.

So that’s also really important I think that from an overall structural demand perspective going forward.

Matt Filek: Thank you, James. That’s super helpful color and great to hear as well. And then had a one on revenue per enrollment as well. Sounds like you’re expecting revenue per enrollment growth in the range of 4% to 6% for the full year. And was just wondering if you could talk about some of the factors that could push the revenue per enrollment growth to either end of that range, and if you would consider that range to be on the more conservative end of the spectrum.