The 10 Largest For-Profit Education Companies In The World

Encompassing private tutors, publishing companies, and for-profit universities, the United States for-profit education industry is massive, exceeding $270 billion in revenue in 2020.

The for-profit education industry is also changing extremely quickly as a result of technological and broad consumer trends. For example, the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in a massive increase in the popularity of online teaching services and digital textbook providers.

In this article, we’ll cover the 10 largest for-profit education companies in the world. We’ll discuss their offered services and business models, as well as comment on their growth and how they align with where the industry seems to be headed.

The 10 Largest For-profit Education Companies

1. TAL Education

   Headquarters: Beijing, China
   Revenue: $4.5 billion

   TAL Education provides after-school education to students in primary and secondary school.

   The company currently serves over 30 million students in China. They operate 676 learning centers across 56 cities, as well as offer online teaching services.

   TAL Education’s most popular products are their math tutoring and SAT/ACT preparation programs. They also offer tutoring for all the other common school subjects, such as history and science.

   Another one of TAL’s notable offerings is their “AI Teacher Solution.”

   Previously, China’s population of under-privileged and mostly rural-dwelling children was too vast for any education company to hire enough tutors to serve. TAL Education has been able to offer this population high-quality education using AI teachers that are individualized to each student.

   Although the company boasted tremendous revenue growth of 60% YOY from 2016-2019, they’ve been experiencing great public controversy due to the revelation that one employee that accounted for 3% of all company revenue was falsely inflating their sales.

   One interesting thing to note is that despite being the largest player in its industry, TAL’s revenue only accounts for a tiny percentage of its country’s for-profit education industry.

   The industry seems to be one that allows for numerous companies, rather than being one that’s dominated by just a few. This could perhaps be due to the difficulty concerning scalability.

   It’s easy for tech companies to scale their infrastructure for mass users, but not so much for education companies that need to recruit more and more educators as their user base grows.

2. New Oriental Education and Technology

   Headquarters: Beijing, China
   Revenue: $3.11 billion

   New Oriental Education and Technology, often called New Oriental, is the largest provider of private educational services in China in terms of student enrollment, geographic presence, and the variety of programs offered.

   The company owns and operates 1,159 learning buildings, 95 language schools, and 20 book stores across 56 cities. As of early 2021, they currently serve over 45 million students.

   New Oriental’s main program offerings are their pre-school education, online courses, and overseas study consulting.

   They also operate North America and United Kingdom departments that mainly focus on each country’s respective college exams, such as the SAT, ACT, and TOEFL.

   New Oriental’s revenues have grown by over 20% YOY for the past four years.

3. Bright Horizons

   Headquarters: Cincinnati, Ohio
   Revenue: $2.0 billion

   Bright Horizons Family Solutions is the largest provider of empower-sponsored child care in the United States. Their other primary educational products include education advising and back-up child care.

   The company was first established in 1986 and opened its first two locations the following year in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

   It has since expanded into more than 1,000 child care centers across the globe and 30,000 employees.

   700 of these locations are located in Canada and the United States, and an additional 300 are in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. There are also currently two centers in India, with plans to open additional locations.

   Bright Horizons has recently been acquiring new businesses to expand its operations into new areas of the education industry.

   For example, the company acquired GP Strategies in 2019 to begin offering tuition program management services. They also acquired Sittercity, an online marketplace platform for family solutions, in 2020.

   Another notable element to Bright Horizons Family Solutions is their Bright Horizons Foundation for Children program, which it has operated since 1999. The program offers playrooms and safe spaces for children facing family crises.

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4. Stride

   Headquarters: Herndon, Virginia
   Revenue: $1.6 billion

   Stride (formerly known as K12) provides fully online K-12 curriculums to over 115,000 students across all 50 states.

   The company offers its online programs at three levels:

   • Supplemental. These classes expand on what’s taught in classrooms and provide individualized tutoring services.

   • Homeschooling alternative for parents. Full-day schooling curriculums that contain all the same information that students would receive through typical homeschooling.

   • Homeschooling alternative for states and districts. The same curriculums as the homeschooling alternative for parents, just marketed towards states and school districts.

     The specific details of a particular type of curriculum that K12 offers may vary depending on the state or school district’s rules and laws.

     In the Commonwealth of Virginia, for example, the company adjusts the teacher-student ratio of their classes to match the state’s schooling standards.

   Stride ’s programs cover the same subject areas provided through traditional K-12 schooling (hence the company’s name), such as math, science, and history.

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5. Adtalem Global Education

   Headquarters: Chiba, Japan

   Revenue: $1.5 billion

   Adtalem Global Education, formerly known as DeVry Education Group, is an educational services conglomerate that owns and manages postsecondary education institutions.

   Some major examples of these institutions include:

   • American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine (AUC). AUC is an international, for-profit medical school based in the Netherlands.

     Although the school is located outside of the United States, it teaches a fully American-based medical curriculum. All of its medical programs are recognized by the Medical Board of California.

   • Ross University School of Medicine (RUSM). RUSM is a private medical school based in Barbados, with separate administrative offices located in New Jersey and Florida.

     The school’s main program offerings include clinical training, clerkships, and an eight-week clinical semester called Internal Medicine Foundations (IMF).

   • EduPristine. EduPristine is a global mostly-online school that mainly offers courses focused on finance, accounting, and analytics.

     The company has conducted corporate training for notable companies such as Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, and NUS Singapore.

   • Chamberlain University. Chamberlain is a healthcare and nursing school that offers classes online and in locations across the United States.

     The university has two colleges, the College of Nursing and the College of Health, that offer a variety of doctoral, graduate, and undergraduate programs.

     Chamberlain faced a major controversy in 2017 when students protested the sudden addition of a comprehensive exam that was required for graduation.

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6. Strategic Education

   Headquarters: Herndon, Virginia
   Revenue: $1.07 billion

   Strategic Education is a holding company that owns several notable educational services businesses:

   • Capella University Capella is a fully-online, for-profit university based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

     The school enrolls 38,392 students over its 52 bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral diploma programs.

     47% of all students are enrolled in master’s programs and have an average age of 40.

   • Strayer University. Strayer is a for-profit university that enrolls over 50,000 students worldwide.

     Strayer University is similar to Capella in that most of their students are working adults and mainly over the age of 30.

     Strayer offers most of their classes online, although they do also operate 76 campuses across 15 U.S. states for students wishing to take physical ones.

   • DevMountain. DevMountain is a coding boot camp that offers both fully-online and in-person classes.

     The majority of their classes range between 6 to 26 weeks in length and teach topics such as UI design, mobile app development, and web development.

     There are currently three physical campuses located in Utah, Texas, and Arizona.

     The company was founded in 2013 and has since taught and graduated over 2,000 students.

     Strategic Education acquired DevMountain in 2016 for $20 million.

   • Hackbright Academy. Hackbright Academy is a women-only coding boot camp that offers 10-week programming classes in San Francisco, California.

     Facebook currently sponsors a “Moms in Tech” scholarship, which allows mothers who have previously worked in IT to retrain into the industry at Hackbright at no cost.

   Strategic Education also used to own another code academy called The New York Code + Design Academy. The program officially ceased operations in 2019.

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7. Gaotu Techedu

   Headquarters: Beijing, China
   Revenue: $976 million

   Gaotu Techedu (formerly GSX Techedu) is the third-largest after-school education company in China. Their main product offerings are their online tutoring programs for K-12 students and their foreign language courses for adult users.

   The company also owns and operates the online educational platform Genshuixue.

   The website allows tutors to upload teaching materials and users to search for topics of their interest, such as piano or ACT prep. The website also comes with an accompanying mobile app for iOS and Android.

   Gaotu Techedu has been facing controversy since mid-2020 when short-selling organizations such as Muddy Waters Research accused the company of falsely exaggerating their revenue numbers.

   The company currently employs 6435 employees.

8. Grand Canyon Education

   Headquarters: Essen, Germany (Aldi Nord) Mulheim, Germany (Aldi Sud)
   Revenue: $900 million

   Grand Canyon Education is the company that owns Grand Canyon University, a private for-profit Christian university that serves over 115,000 students. 90,000 of these students are online, while the other 25,000 attend in-person classes.

   The company also offers a variety of educational support services that are completely separate from Grand Canyon University, such as vocational training programs.

   Currently, Grand Canyon Education is attempting to change the for-profit status of its university to non-profit.

   Although the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) accepted the company’s application towards this change in 2018, the United States Department of Education ultimately rejected it and still classifies its status as being for-profit.

   Grand Canyon University offers over 200 doctoral, master’s, and bachelor’s degrees through its nine colleges.

   A few notable examples of these schools are:

   • Colangelo College of Business

   • GCU Honors College

   • GCU College of Science, Engineering, and Technology

   Grand Canyon University is currently the first and only for-profit member of NCAA Division I. Most of their sports teams also have a membership and participate in the Western Athletic Conference.

9. Chegg

   Headquarters: Santa Clara, California
   Revenue: $767 million

   Chegg is an educational technology company whose main service offerings are online tutoring and digital textbook rentals.

   Some of their other products include online test guides and forums.

   Another notable feature is Chegg’s text analysis tool, which uses AI to parse text and suggest improvements.

   Their active user base as of late 2020 exceeded 5 million college and high school students.

   The company’s revenue and user growth exploded in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Most students were forced to take classes online and at home, making the fully digital services offered by Chegg extremely useful.

   During the same year, Chegg faced many controversies due to students using their platform to obtain answers and cheat on tests.

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10. Perdoceo Education

    Headquarters: Schaumburg, Illinois
    Revenue: $695 million

    Perdoceo Education, formerly called Career Education Company, is a holding company that owns and manages three for-profit education service companies.

    These are:

    • American InterContinental University (AIU). AIU is an open admissions for-profit university based in Schaumburg, Illinois, the same city as Perdoceo Education.

      The school enrolls over 15,000 students across eight international branches.

      80% of students attend their classes online and can obtain graduate and undergraduate degrees in majors such as IT, business, and healthcare management.

    • Colorado Technical University (CTU). CTU offers undergraduate, undergraduate, and doctoral degrees mainly in the subjects of business, technology, and management.

      There are 23,094 undergraduate and 2,703 graduate students enrolled in the school as of early 2021. 92% of these students attend courses fully-online.

      Despite its name, Colorado Technical University holds no official or public affiliation with the State of Colorado.

    • Trident University International (TUI). Trident is a for-profit online university based out of Cypress, California.

      The school enrolls nearly 15,000 students and has alumni numbering over 30,000. Approximately 75% of students are military veterans.

      Trident is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission and a member of the American InterContinental University System.

    The company also used to manage eight other educational institutions that have since ceased operations.

Author

Chris Kolmar

Chris Kolmar is a co-founder of Zippia and the editor-in-chief of the Zippia career advice blog. He has hired over 50 people in his career, been hired five times, and wants to help you land your next job. His research has been featured on the New York Times, Thrillist, VOX, The Atlantic, and a host of local news. More recently, he's been quoted on USA Today, BusinessInsider, and CNBC.