Analyst: You've said twice now that you inherited this. Can you set the timeline out for me so I have it straight?
Expert: Contract was signed spring of 2017. I became provost that July, no, sorry, July of '18. July 2018. So I walked in with it already a year old and the first two programs live. I didn't negotiate it. Not to duck it, but I've sat on panels where people assume the provost drives these deals, and it's almost never the provost. Ours was the CFO and the finance committee of the board. Academic affairs got shown a deck.
Analyst: Not the contract.
Expert: A deck.
Analyst: You hadn't seen the actual contract before you took the job?
Expert: I saw it that September, after I asked our general counsel for it and she had to go get it from the CFO's office. Sixty-one pages plus schedules. Read it over a weekend, read it again with a legal pad, and by Monday I had about two pages of questions nobody could answer.
Analyst: Give me the structure.
Expert: Ten year term, running from first enrolment rather than from signature, which mattered enormously later. Revenue share. Sixty-forty their way for the first five years, then it stepped to fifty-five forty-five, and it was supposed to reach even in year eight. And the split was struck on gross tuition and fees.
Analyst: Not net.
Expert: Not net.
Analyst: So institutional aid comes out of your forty.
Expert: Every discount, every scholarship, every employer rate we cut to land a cohort. We ate all of it and they still took their sixty off the sticker price. So the effective split on a discounted student was nothing like sixty-forty. There was a hospital partnership where we gave twenty-two percent off, twenty-two, went to twenty-three at some point, and on those students we were down around seventy-four twenty-six. We built that model eventually. It did not exist for my first three years in the job.
Analyst: Nobody had run it?
Expert: Nobody had run it. Everybody watched the top line, the top line was going up beautifully, and a top line going up beautifully is precisely what that contract was engineered to produce.
Analyst: What did the top line do?
Expert: Online graduate headcount was about a hundred and forty in fall '16. Two programs, run out of a closet. Peak was fall 2023. Nineteen hundred and change, I'd say nineteen forty-something. Four programs by then.
Analyst: Which four?
Expert: Nursing, the MBA, data analytics, an MEd for working teachers.
Analyst: And gross tuition on that?
Expert: Call it forty-one and a half in FY23.
Analyst: So you're keeping roughly sixteen six.
Expert: On paper.
Analyst: Meaning?
Expert: Meaning sixteen six is what showed up on the revenue-share line. It is not what the university kept. Nobody had loaded the cost side against it. Not once in six years.
Analyst: So what did it actually clear?