We do anticipate the University of Phoenix will end fiscal year 2015 with roughly 220,000 students plus or minus a few percentage points. With respect to new enrollments, similar to prior year, December is our seasonally softest month of the year and therefore, the quarter is generally very back end loaded. Therefore, it’s too early to comment further where we think we’ll end the second quarter. Our goal remains to improve the rate of decline in new enrollments in fiscal year ‘15 versus ‘14. Our outlook for 2015 reflects a reduction in our cost base of atleast $50 million as compared to 2014. We are focused on being as efficient and effective as possible while continuing to innovate and invest in our students with very long-term success. Excluding the impact of special items and the potential release of uncertain tax positions, we anticipate our tax rate to be about 43% for the full year of 2015 with the second quarter benefit in the mid-30% range due to our expected operating loss and the mix of U.S. and foreign earnings.
As we discussed on our last conference call, we continue to expect our 2015 financial results to be weighed in more towards the back half of the year. This is primarily due to the expected timing of the University of Phoenix recovery along with the full year impact of our 2014 acquisitions and the anticipated timing of the growth in our professional development business. We continue to expect third quarter to be our strongest quarter in 2015 with the second half of 2015 representing about 80% of our annual profit. Our goal is to address our operational challenges in 2015 and work towards getting back to our original plan of growing Apollo Education group in 2016 and beyond.
And with that, I will turn the call over to the operator and we’ll take your questions.
Question and Answer Session:
Operator
Certainly. (Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Peter Appert with Piper Jaffray. Your line is open.
Peter Appert, Piper Jaffray
Thanks. Greg, can you give us anything more tangible and specific in terms of the steps being taken to address the problems and maybe just what gives you confidence that you can get those things fixed on a relatively near-term basis?
Greg Cappelli, Chief Executive Officer, Apollo Education Group, Inc.
Thanks, Peter. We are going to get it fixed. The very structure of the University of Phoenix continuous enrollment 25,000 plus faculty, obviously thousands of courses across nine colleges,make developing anything new a pretty healthy challenge. As I said, they haven’t had this kind of major platform upgrade in years to the online classroom. We have been assured that the structure and architecture of the new platform is solid from outside experts but we have moved from a system that generally use centrally developed content, was completely controlled from the inside to one that frankly is much more dynamic. It allows faculty and students to access and bring all kinds of slightly new content from third parties and outside providers and every time there is an update to a browser or third-party link or other areas that can change, our own system has to be capable of upgrading along the way.
Basically, in every course we offer — and those are the major fixes that are being made –our teams thought they had a cover. We obviously learnt some valuable lessons on the way, but we put every necessary asset on it. It is our number one area of focus. It has obviously caused disruption. We are meeting the timelines or the deadlines we have set to fix the issues in hand and expect better results going forward and we have a lot of data, right? We’re not guessing in terms of how this emanated, where the problems are, what it did to NPS score or to student disruption. We have lots of communications going out to faculty and students about timelines and data so that they feel comfortable that this has been addressed, fixed, and it won’t be disruptive going forward.
