This week Navitas announced a 10-year agreement with Florida Atlantic University (FAU) to establish a pathway programme marking its first significant partnership in the US in four years and reflecting the company’s confidence in its university programmes despite seeing profits drop 31% in the year to June 30.
The new programme will open in January 2015 at FAU’s main Boca Raton campus, offering undergraduate pathway and pre-Masters programmes across a range of disciplines including accounting, arts, humanities, engineering, marketing and international business.
“This is the first new pathway college in the US we have announced since 2010 so it’s very significant”
“This is the first new pathway college in the US we have announced since 2010 so it’s very significant,” Bev Hudson, Executive General Manager of University Programmes, North America told The PIE News.
“FAU has a wide range of programmes and has excellent facilities for students and is a fantastically dynamic university, with a strong commitment to scholarship and internationalisation,” she said.
The company’s 2014 full year report shows annual profits fell 31% to AUS$51.6 m on 2013’s AUS$74.6 m. The results were impacted by AUS$30.5m in goodwill write-downs mostly due to the loss of a key contract with Macquarie University in Sydney to operate its SIBT pathway programme.
The company’s University Programme Division bore most of the brunt of the write-down even though revenue increased 20% to AUS $499.2m after major business development investment in the US and solid enrolments across all key regions.
Other operational highlights for the division include the opening of two new University Program Colleges in New Zealand and the UK.
“FY14 was a critical year for Navitas as we recorded significant revenue growth but were also focused on investing in the business so that the company is better positioned to maximise identified growth strategies,” Navitas Group CEO, Rod Jones said in a statement.
Jones added that he is expecting to see solid growth for FY 2015 with EBITDA reaching between AUS $162m to AUS $172m (up from 2014’s AUS$144.9m).
The company is eyeing future partnerships as part of its growth strategy. “We are in active discussions with a number of potential new university partners, mostly in the US but also in the UK and Australia,” the company said.
“We are in active discussions with a number of potential new university partners, mostly in the US but also in the UK and Australia”
In addition to the FAU deal, Navitas has similar partnerships with UMass at its Boston, Dartmouth and Lowell campuses as well as the University of New Hampshire and Western Kentucky University.
Hudson commented that given the short time frame to advertise the programme at FAU, she is only expecting a relatively small intake for January, but added “we would hope to grow to strong numbers by fall 2015.”
With around 600 international students currently, FAU said it hopes the partnership will boost the university’s geographic diversity and build on its status as “the most diverse public university in the state of Florida.”
