You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: We all appreciate what a difficult year this has been.
Even in the face of this incredible adversity, Stride has been able to thrive.
We've only been able to do so because of the commitment of our thousands of team members.
These folks have been dedicated to our customers and the families that need an alternative approach to education, now more than ever before.
This is also a year in which the country and the world took notice of online and distance learning in a mainstream way, but the experience is not always positive.
Across the country, many schools struggled with uncertainty and inconsistency for students and families, as they vacillated between online and in-person instruction.
Our teachers, platforms, content and curriculum are all developed to meet this need.
[Technical Issues] many have not embraced it.
Others realize its potential if done the right way.
We stand-alone, having served millions of students in our online bundle.
And while many schools struggled with learning loss and deteriorating test scores, our result outpaced them in the phase of on-boarding a record number of families for our programs.
I will get to how we are turning to this formula.
First, I am going to review some of our fiscal 2021 accomplishment.
By almost any measure, we had a record year, by a long-shot.
We helped over a quarter of a million full-time learners and millions of other users became interested in our programs.
Learning loss became the norm, except in the schools we managed.
No wonder the national data showed an overall enrollment decline of [Technical Issues].
We published our first ever ESG report backed by a number of key initiatives.
A new partnership with National Association of Black Male Educators designed to increase the diversity of teachers across the country.
A program with Teach for America to share practical online experience to student and teachers.
Our We Stand Together College Scholarship, a $10 million multi-year commitment to support underrepresented students.
But we are not relying on the tailwinds of the pandemic to set our long-term path forward.
We rebranded our company from K12 to Stride to ensure that our name better reflects the commitment to providing educational opportunities for learners of all levels.
We acquired two high growth, higher margin companies to expand our adult Career Learning offers.
We held an Investor Day to outline our strategy and growth trajectory through fiscal year 2025, a trajectory that I believe we are well on track to hit and we raised almost $360 million through a convertible note offering to facilitate further investment in both organic and inorganic growth.
In our General Education business, we saw student enrollment increase by almost 50%.
With all the uncertainty this past year, we saw dramatic improvements in retention, in both our General Education as well as our Career Education business.
And we did not see the mass withdrawal of students in the second half of the school year, as many states began to reopen their brick and mortar schools.
This is a testament to the stickiness and value propositions of our programs.
As we've mentioned previously, students who enrolled in our Career Learning programs tend to retain at a higher level than our General Education students and we believe this trend will continue.
We also had a record number of reregistration families, indicating that they will be returning for the fall.
Our Career Learning business finished the year with over $250 million in revenue.
This is an increase from less than $10 million just four years ago, a 150% compounded annual growth.
This year, we saw a growth of over 125% to almost 30,000 students.
These programs offer a career path without the need for expensive college degree.
And we're increasing the programs from our MedCerts acquisition that we will offer the high school students the certificates in the healthcare industry.
Both our MedCerts and Tech Elevator acquisitions continue to grow and contribute to the bottom line and are exceeding our expectations from when we purchased.
They are high growth, high margin market opportunity platforms for us that we will continue to leverage into other areas of our business, particularly our high school programs.
We will continue our focus on IT and healthcare training because these industries are projected to add more than 2.5 million new positions in the US by 2029.
On the other hand, our Galvanize acquisition has not performed according to our plan.
We've restructured this business and believe we now have a glide path to both renewed growth and profitability heading into next year.
We will also look for ways to invest behind and expand our adult learning offerings with a lens for making Career Learning a $1 billion plus business.
In June, we released our inaugural ESG initiatives report.
As an Education and Career Learning company, we have a significant opportunity to help achieve global education, workforce and diversity and inclusion goals.
All of our ESG initiatives are based on the four cornerstones; extending lifelong learning for today's competitive workforce; supporting racial and socio-economic equity and inclusion; fostering transparent leadership, governance and professional development; and contributing to a more sustainable world.
For me, our focus on learning outcomes is the most important aspect of all our ESG efforts.
Stride is in a unique position to influence the lives of millions of students of all ages.
Not many of our companies have that kind of impact or carry that responsibility.
We don't take that responsibility lightly.
By now, everyone is aware of the significant shortages impacting the workforce.
Stride is well-positioned to help alleviate that shortage.
To that end, we have set 10-year goals that are driven by learner outcomes.
So by 2030, our goals are to graduate over 100,000 students from our Stride career high school program, to graduate hundreds of thousands of students from our adult programs, and to achieve leading graduation of learning growth rates for over a million students.
Our report contains a lot more specific information on our ESG efforts.
I encourage everyone to read it.
Now I want to turn to fiscal year '22.
The long-term trends, prospects for our General Education and Career Learning businesses, both remain tremendous.
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised consumer awareness around the need for and the benefits of online education in grades K through 12 and in adult learning.
While it doesn't work for everyone, many students and families have realized that online learning and the flexibility it provides is a preferred alternative.
Increased awareness and openness to different options to meet educational needs fundamentally provides for a long-term tailwind for all aspects of our business.
As we do every year, we will try to provide formal fiscal '22 guidance during our first quarter earnings call in October.
So while we're not providing guidance right now, I do want to provide some insights into how the current enrollment season is trending.
Even now in August, we're still less than halfway through the volume of our typical enrollment season.
And this means that these trends could shift in the coming weeks.
Additionally, the pandemic has increased uncertainty around all these metrics, so please do not extrapolate what I am about to say.
We have not seen the massive return to brick and mortar school [Technical Issues].
We are currently exceeding the number of reregistrations that we saw during fiscal '21 and in previous years.
Right now, we're well ahead of where we would be normally in enrollments versus pre-pandemic levels.
Awareness for our offerings is at an all-time high, the pandemic helped to drive awareness [Technical Issues] and now they just need to choose.
Conversion rates from our new leads are an all-time high.
So when families seek us out, they're more likely to enroll.
We believe that health and safety continue to be top priority for families and we're seeing that and we're seeing even stronger demand in states where the Delta variant has surged.
Our goal is clear, is to grow every year and importantly, we remain on track to achieving the long-term revenue and profitability targets that we outlined during the Investor Day last fall.
We still anticipate achieving revenue of $1.9 billion to $2.2 billion, adjusted operating income of $250 million to $350 million by the year 2025.
Now I'll hand the call over to Tim to discuss our full year 2021 results.
First, let me recap our reported results.
Revenue for the full fiscal year 2021 was $1.54 billion, an increase of 48% over the prior fiscal year.
Adjusted operating income was $161.4 million, up 160% compared to the prior year.
Capital expenditures were $52.3 million, an increase of $7.3 million over last year.
In each case, these results met or beat the expectations we provided in our guidance last quarter.
The outperformance was primarily driven by favorable revenue for enrollment and retention.
Looking ahead to fiscal 2022, it is still too early to confidently forecast our current date enrollments for the reasons James just outlined.
Given where we are in the process, there remains variability around two key factors; firstly, ongoing reregistration and new enrollments and secondly, the retention of these enrollments once school starts and through the month of September.
Now here's what I can say today about fiscal year 2022.
We expect to grow adjusted operating income and adjusted EBITDA year-over-year compared to our strong fiscal year 2021 results.
Furthermore, we believe that the increased awareness and acceptance of online and hybrid education accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic has sustainably reset the baseline for the General Education business.
Therefore, we are confident that General Education revenue in fiscal year 2022 will be significantly larger than it was in fiscal year 2020.
As we have done in the past, we will refrain from providing guidance until we report our first quarter fiscal 2022 results in October.
By that time, we will have much greater visibility into enrollments for the new school year.
Returning to our results for fiscal year 2021.
Revenue from our General Education business increased $346 million or 37% to $1.28 billion.
This is due primarily to higher enrollments, partially offset by lower revenue per enrollment.
General ed enrollments rose 45% year-over-year to more than 156,000, while revenue per enrollment declined 5%.
The decline in revenue per enrollment was due primarily to state budgetary pressures, resulting from COVID-19 and a higher mix of lower funded states.
As we stated last quarter, we expect revenue per enrollment to improve next year, given what we know today about state budgets and policy.
Career Learning revenue rose to $256.6 million in FY '21, an increase of 140%.
This growth was driven by significantly higher volumes in our Stride Career Prep Programs, as well as organic growth and new acquisitions in our adult learning businesses.
We expect to continue growing our Stride Career Prep Programs in FY '22 with plans to open four new programs and expand eight existing programs in FY '22.
Gross margins were 34.8%, up 140 basis points compared to fiscal 2020, driven by an increased contribution from the higher margin adult learning businesses and lower costs from efficiencies and automation initiatives.
We expect margin improvement to continue into fiscal 2022.
We are confident that we will achieve our 36% to 39% gross margin targets much sooner than fiscal 2025, which was our original target communicated during our November 2020 Investor Day.
Selling, general and administrative expenses were $424.4 million, up 35% from fiscal 2020.
The increase in SG&A was driven primarily by higher costs associated with our enrollment growth and increase in stock-based compensation expense and the annualization of expenses for our adult learning businesses.
Adjusted EBITDA of $239.9 million reflects an increase of 87% over FY '20.
Adjusted EBITDA margin improved 400 basis points from 12% of revenue in FY '20 to 16% in FY '21.
The margin improvement and growth in adjusted EBITDA are driven by higher revenue and improved operating leverage.
Stock-based compensation expense came in at $39.3 million, up 67% year-over-year, driven by the timing of certain stock-based grants tied to our Career Learning business.
We currently expect stock-based compensation expense to decline to a range of $30 million to $34 million in FY '22.
Interest expense totaled $18 million for fiscal 2021, in line with the expectations we provided last quarter.
This consisted of approximately $5 million in cash interest and $13 million in non-cash amortization of the discount in fees on our convertible senior notes.
In the first quarter of fiscal 2022, we early adopted new accounting guidance related to our convertible notes.
This will result in the elimination of the non-cash debt discount expense among other impacts.
As such, we expect our interest expense in FY '22 to be materially lower and more in line with the cash interest we recognized in FY '21.
Our full year tax rate for FY '21 was 26%, below the guidance range we provided last quarter.
We had some positive tax benefits related to stock-based compensation and had the effect of lowering our tax rate for the year.
In FY '22, we anticipate an increase in non-deductible compensation that will cause our tax rate to be closer to the 28% to 30% range.
Capital expenditures for the year totaled $52.3 million, up 16% from the prior year, due mainly to higher capitalized software development costs associated with adult learning, automation and improvements to our platforms.
Capex, as a percent of revenue was 3.4% and that is lower than our historical average of approximately 4% to 5% over the past few years.
Free cash flow defined as cash from operations less capex totaled $81.9 million for FY 2021.
This was approximately $45 million below the expectations provided at Investor Day last November due entirely to the timing of receipts, which drove lower than expected cash from operations.
Some of the timing issues were associated with our growth in states that regularly pay in the following year and some were related to delayed payments due to COVID.
In fiscal 2022, we expect to have significantly higher free cash flow, reflecting these timing issues from fiscal 2021.
Finally, we ended the year with cash and cash equivalents of $386.1 million, an increase of $173.8 million compared to the same period a year ago.
We believe that our strong free cash flow generation and liquidity will continue to provide the financial flexibility to fund our existing operations and pursue strategic acquisitions.
To summarize, fiscal 2021 was a landmark year for Stride.
We saw record enrollments in both our General Ed and Career Learning businesses, which drove double-digit growth in revenue, adjusted operating income, and adjusted EBITDA.
Our Career Learning assets, which accounted for less than $7 million of revenue four years ago, generated over a quarter billion dollars in revenue during the year, a sign of the tremendous demand for Career Education offerings, and Stride's innovation and leading position within this market.
In addition, we continue to improve our margin profile and bolster our cash and liquidity position while maintaining a low level of indebtedness.
As James mentioned, we could not be more excited about the prospects for our business and we'll continue to execute on our high growth, career learning strategy and margin expansion initiatives.

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compname posts career learning revenue of over $250 million.

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