Strategic Education, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to Strategic Education's fourth quarter 2022 results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. I would now like to hand the call over to Terese Wilke, Director of Investor Relations for Strategic Education. Mrs. Wilke, please go ahead.

Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Strategic Education's conference call in which we will discuss fourth quarter 2022 results. With us today are Robert Silberman, Executive Chairman, Carl McDonald, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Daniel Jackson, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Following today's remarks, we will open the call for questions. Please note that this call may include forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The statements are based on current expectations and are subject to a number of assumptions, uncertainties, and risks that strategic education has identified in today's press release that could cause actual results to differ materially. Further information about these and other relevant uncertainties may be found in Strategic Education's annual report on Form 10-K to be filed, the most recent 10-Q, and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as Strategic Education's future 8-Ks, 10-Qs, and 10-Ks. Copies of these filings and the full press release are available for viewing on the website at strategiceducation.com. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Rob. Rob, please go ahead.

Thank you, Therese. I just want to make sure everybody can hear us. We're actually doing this call from Sydney, Australia, and we've had a little bit of telephone difficulties. Please bear with us on that. But good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Before I turn it over to Carl to report on our Q4 and full year results, I just wanted to make a couple of comments at a high level on our capital allocation in 2022. We started the year with roughly $310 million of cash in marketable securities and $140 million of outstanding debt drawn on our bank revolver. We generated $150 million during 2022 in pre-tax cash from operations. We used that cash as follows. We paid $24 million in taxes and we invested $44 million in capital expenditures. Out of our remaining owner's distributable cash, we paid $60 million in common dividends. We took the opportunity to repurchase $40 million of our stock at an average price of $65 a share. We further paid down $40 million of our outstanding debt. That left us at year-end 2022 with $250 million of cash in marketable securities, $100 million of debt, and 23.9 million shares outstanding. We are fairly confident that 2022 will turn out to have been our trough year for earnings. So we feel our balance sheet is well positioned to support all of our opportunities, as well as to continue to return capital to our owners through our common dividend. And with that, Carl, can you walk everyone through our operating results?