And so those agreements help us rank order the compelling nature of people that are gaining access to our students. They also allow the employment community to understand what the landscape of, because these are not private documents. These are something we make public all of the students and the employers can see it too. What their competitors are offering. And so what we see is people in order to get more favorable position of accessing our graduates are putting together more competitive offers, and that’s what we want to do for our graduates. We want to give them a very high quality industry aligned education, and then we want to get them the best jobs that we possibly can. And so these trip agreements, I think, are a great example of things that are actually heightening the competition between those who are gaining access to our to our students on that side of an aisle.
This is upside for Concord because prior to us owning them last year, they did a very, very good job of cultivating local opportunities for their graduates. And as you know from what we’ve been talking about healthcare opportunities, they dwarf transportation trades and energy in terms of the magnitude of need out there on the market. And so now we’re starting to evolve the conquered organization with some of that same organization and we expect that we’ll see some of the same results out of that.
Steve Frankel: And then another challenge, especially when inflation was at its peak, with convincing students to relocate. Have the incentives that you are offering worked and kind of change the capacity situation at those big campuses like Orlando?
Troy Anderson: Yes. Hey, Steve. This is Troy. Look, we’re still seeing, I would say it’s been moderated the last few quarters. So we haven’t seeing it turn. So we’re still seeing really strong progress on the local side, continuing to penetrate more deeply in the local space, especially with the new program offerings, helping to drive that relocation. We’re making good progress. We’re generating the leads. And again, I think it’s stabilized, but some of the campuses where we have a much higher relocation, concentration, you know, we’re still we’re still trying to work with those students to find, you know, the right mix of things to bring the most students possible in there.
Steve Frankel : And then, the last one, at least relative to the way I modeled it, the revenue per head at the core UTI or the legacy UTI business was a little or than I thought. Was there anything that led to that that you would call out?
Jerome Grant: Well, we have a traditionally Q1 dips because of the holidays. We’re closed for a week in December. So that may apologies if we didn’t convey that in any of our prior conversations. But we do see a dip and then it bounces back up and you see your kind of traditional growth trajectory, few points of growth based upon tuition escalations.
Operator: The next question comes from Raj Sharma with B. Riley.
Raj Sharma: I wanted to understand better the starts, they are slightly higher than expected is my understanding, is most of the starts gain that you expect for the year in the second half still?
Troy Anderson: So the guidance we gave back in November was we would have very strong growth first half of the year, double digits and then we would see that moderate in the back half of the year. I commented on that in my prepared remarks that is still our expectation. So again, 17% for UTI in the quarter, about half of that new programs and half of that same campus, same programs. And then, of course, Concorde, I commented on a pro forma basis. This will be the last quarter where there is a partial quarter, but that was 12%, a little over 12% on a pro forma basis. So good growth there as well. But as we get into the back half of the year, we’ll start lapping over or anniversarying over some of the improvements we implemented last year as far as grant programs, some of the marketing initiatives, and of course the program expansions on the UTI side. So that’s why we expect to see something more in the low to mid-single-digit range in the back half of the year.
Raj Sharma: And then just across the board with student starts, the high school and adults were pretty consistent. Military, was higher than usual. Is that an anomaly or is that just small numbers to going to…
Troy Anderson: It is a bit of small numbers. We also have talked about some of the improvements Jerome hit on high school previously, the staffing in high school, we had done the same thing in military. It’s a smaller team, much smaller team, but it’s about 2 dozen now. We increased that almost by 50%, including some of the attrition that we had seen over the last year or 2. So that’s a pretty fully staffed team. We also centralized our financial aid support for our prospective military students to make that process much more streamlined and efficient. So you have the reps and a core group of financial aid representatives working together across the whole portfolio of prospective students and we’re seeing the benefits of those actions in the military growth rate. It will bounce around a bit from quarter to quarter, again, because of smaller numbers, but we have been very pleased with the military growth certainly in the last several quarters.
Raj Sharma: And then just on the numbers, I know that starts would be low to mid in the second half, but there is a big jump in the top line and also especially EBITDA in the second half. The first quarter, Q1, there was a big beat on EBITDA. Where is and I see that the operating expenses are 400 basis points about lower than last year. Most of these gains in EBITDA are coming from operating leverage then?
