Mr. Paris: I cover the postsecondary education sector and corporate training sector. I don't do K-12 at this point. And the reason I don't is bad experiences in the past. You can have the best mousetrap out there, but if your customers don't have the money or the inclination to buy your product, it's going to be a disaster. When you are selling into the K-12, you are dealing with local politics; you are dealing with teachers' unions and, depending on the state of the economy, you are dealing with constrained budgets. So I focus on postsecondary education first because that's a self-pay model with a great financing mechanism. A person who chooses to go to college pays for him- or herself, whether that's with money from mom or dad, with money earned from a part-time job, a credit card or, more often than not, a federal guaranteed government loan and/or grant. You have a great mousetrap and your customers do have the ability to pay for it, thanks to the financing mechanism. And there is a terrific return on investment. When I looked to branch out of postsecondary, rather than looking at K-12, I just started to look to corporate training, because corporations tend to have money and there is a terrific ROI on money spent on training. And in the long run, a corporation cannot do without training; in the short run, they can, so it is cyclical. What I have at the end of the day is two education- and training-related sectors that are countercyclical to one another. My coverage is heavily slanted towards the postsecondary education, and I cover virtually all the companies out there with the exception of Career Education (CECO), Corinthian Colleges (COCO), and Universal Technical Institute (UTI). I cover the rest, Apollo (APOL), DeVry (DV), ITT (ESI), Strayer (STRA), Lincoln Educational (LINC) and then the online- focused players like American Public (APEI), Bridgepoint (BPI), Capella (CPLA) and Grand Canyon (LOPE).
Tickers included in this excerpt: APEI, APOL, BPI, CECO, COCO, CPLA, DV, FSI, LINC, LOPE, STRA, UTI
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