American Public Education, Inc. (NASDAQ:APEI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

I’m pleased to say that all five of our enrollment and operations folks have at least 10 years each experience with the university and have been able to step up and step into new roles. And so we’re allowing people who have deep expertise at Rasmussen to rise up into the next level and really perform. We have seasoned academic leadership as well. Our Provost is probably one of the least experienced inside of Rasmussen, at the university, having been here just about a year now. But I have very — I have a lot of confidence in this team. And our open search for the President is something that is a high priority and we will continue to do that very actively and aggressively. In the meantime, I spend a really important amount of my time really focused on the performance improvement at Rasmussen and also making sure I’m hearing from the team, the ideas that they have for growth as well as many of the obstacles that they may suggest that we need to remove in order to help them get there faster.

Raj Sharma : And then just lastly, can you please talk about maybe Rick can. Can you talk about the preferred, the thinking behind the preferred. What was the need for the rationale for and the terms around it?

Richard Sunderland : Yes. Thank you, Raj. Really to replace debt with some equity for purposes of our once-a-year calculation on the composite score, we wanted to combine the proceeds from the preferred, again, replacing equity with debt — with equity with incremental debt pay down to really, I guess, shore up the composite score at the 1.5 or above level.

Operator: Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, it appears that we have no further questions today. So that will bring us to the close of APEI’s fourth quarter 2022 results conference call. Again, I would like to thank you all so much for joining us today and wish you all a great afternoon. Goodbye.