Educational services
This sector comprises establishments primarily engaged in providing instruction and training in a wide variety of subjects. This instruction and training is provided by specialized establishments, such as schools, colleges, universities and training centres. These establishments may be privately owned and operated, either for profit or not, or they may be publicly owned and operated. They may also offer food and accommodation services to their students. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 15,484
- Under 10 employeesA
- 60%
- Establishments · USA
- 114,806
- Employment · USA
- 3,743,840
- Payroll · USA
- $180.4B
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 15,484 Canadian establishments with employees, 60% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
Colleges are a large and, until recently, fast-growing system: Statistics Canada reports total college revenues of $18.5 billion in 2023/2024, up 11.5% — the largest increase in more than two decades [A]. But a community college or CEGEP is created by provincial statute, governed by a provincially appointed board and funded by grant: public funding was $8.5 billion, 46.0% of revenue [A]. There is no application to become one. This is a buyer, not a market to enter, and the size bands say so — 89 of the 506 establishments employ 500 or more. The instructive part is what happened to the revenue an outsider might have reached. Fees rose from 32.9% of college revenue in 2020/2021 to 42.1% in 2023/2024, and to 64.5% in Ontario, on a record intake of nearly 100,000 new students, with most of that fee growth coming from international students in Ontario, who pay up to four times the domestic fee [A]. Private operators shared in that by teaching public-college credentials under partnership contracts — and both the volume and the partnerships depended on federal study-permit policy, which was tightened from 2024. The growth was a permit regime, not a market, and the public college held the credential throughout. The private side of this field — a career college under provincial approval — is screened as Private Trade School Operation at 611510, and corporate training at 6114. What is sold to colleges (student systems, contracted services) is screened separately at 611310.
The buyer is reached through somebody else's platform, and the two biggest sellers just merged because growth stalled. Coursera completed its combination with Udemy on combined 2025 revenue of more than $1.5B [B] — Coursera at $757.5M and Udemy at $789.8M [B/C]. That is not a merger of strength: Coursera's net revenue retention was 93% in Q4 2025 [C], meaning existing customers spent less than the year before, and Skillsoft turned $531M in fiscal 2025 [B] while shrinking. Meanwhile enterprise learning is bought inside the HR suite — SuccessFactors Learning and Workday Learning ship with the system of record, as the LMS record at 541514 sets out — and the consumer side is a search and marketplace game. A new entrant has excellent content and no route to the buyer.
Provincial career-training regulators set the approval, the tuition-protection bonding and the outcome reporting, and student visa policy has repeatedly reset international enrolment — the revenue line most private colleges were built on — with little notice. Approval precedes enrolment by a year or more. The course-delivery software above this code is screened separately at 6115.
Genuine demand, genuine repeat business, and a ceiling set by hours: revenue is instructor-hours × rate, and neither scales without hiring instructors who can leave with their students. Driving schools add a provincial licensing overlay and vehicle costs. This is a reliable small business and structurally not more than that.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
District procurement is RFP-gated, board-approved, and runs on a 12–24 month cycle aligned to the school year. Student data privacy obligations add a heavy compliance floor before first revenue. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.
Alumni software sits between two records that are already on the atlas. The higher-ed SIS/LMS record (611310) covers the system that knows who graduated; the nonprofit-fundraising record (8132) covers the donor CRM that books the gift. Advancement is where they meet: the university's development office runs a nonprofit-style donor CRM, but its prospects are its own alumni, fed from the SIS. So the market splits into two layers. The system of record is the advancement CRM, and it is held by Blackbaud and Ellucian. Blackbaud sells Raiser's Edge NXT and Blackbaud CRM to universities and private schools out of the same $1.14B-revenue business recorded on 8132 [A, via that record]; Ellucian sells CRM Advance (Microsoft Dynamics/Power BI based) and its Banner and Colleague advancement modules alongside the SIS it already runs [C, vendor]. Salesforce Education Cloud is the third option. Gift history, pledges, endowment and scholarship accounting and decades of constituent records live here, and a switch is an SIS-scale project. The engagement layer — alumni community, directory, mentoring, events, giving days, video, donor signals — is where the startups went, and it has already been rolled up. Gravyty (K1 Investment Management) is Graduway's alumni community merged in December 2021 with Gravyty's AI fundraising tools, after K1 put about $60M into Graduway in 2019 and $21M into Gravyty in 2020 [B]; it now claims 2,750+ institutions [C]. EverTrue was combined with ThankView under a Rubicon Technology Partners majority investment in October 2021 and has since added Pledgemine, Fundriver and DonorSearch [B/C]. Anthology's alumni products (Encompass, the old iModules; Advance; Raise) went to Encoura in February 2026 after Anthology broke itself up [B/C]. Hivebrite, the best-funded independent (€18.5M Series A 2019, €35M Series B 2023 led by Quadrille Capital with Insight Partners [B]), is not an alumni company any more: only about 20% of its revenue comes from education [B, Maddyness]. Hivebrite was not acquired by EverTrue — it remains independent and itself bought Orbiit in 2024. Almabase is the counter-example: bootstrapped after about $500K of early angel and 500 Startups money, it sells an alumni engagement and giving layer that syncs to Raiser's Edge, Blackbaud CRM, Salesforce and Ellucian [C]. PeopleGrove ($1.8M seed and $4.7M Series A, both led by Reach Capital [B]) went toward student career mentoring and has merged with CORE's clinical-placement software. The wedge is narrow and occupied. Every engagement vendor already sells 'works on top of your Raiser's Edge', the buyer is a committee-led, academic-year procurement office (the distribution problem on the SIS record), and general-purpose donation tools like Givebutter ($50M from BVP Forge, 2024 [B]) set the floor for giving pages. Incumbent vulnerability decides it: the CRM layer is not vulnerable, and the layer above it is owned by three PE-backed roll-ups and a profitable bootstrapper.
Procurement is committee-driven, RFP-gated and aligned to the academic year, with 12–24 month cycles and multi-year contracts. An SIS migration is treated with the same caution as a core banking replacement and happens about as often. Free, credible open source (Moodle) also caps the LMS price floor. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.
Seat growth is real and revenue retention is not — the buyer is a solo creator whose business fails at a high rate, so gross adds are consumed by churn of the customer's business rather than of the product. Moodle sets a zero price floor for institutions and Kajabi and Thinkific have already taken the prosumer tier. Sourced update: the only public comparable in this category, Thinkific, turns over $73.2M with ARR of $61M growing 5%. That is the size of the prize for a listed leader — the ceiling is now a sourced figure rather than an assertion.
Scheduling, billing and parent communication for tutoring centres is a genuine unserved pain with an achievable product, and a total addressable spend too small to matter — a few thousand multi-tutor centres in North America at three-figure monthly ACVs. Sole traders use a calendar and a payment link. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.
And what every business buys · 25 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Companies in this industry · 45
Every company this research names that is filed here or beneath — the operators, and the vendors that sell to them — largest disclosed revenue first. The rank is within the company’s own six-digit industry.
| Company | Filed under | Revenue | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| BlackbaudNASDAQ:BLKB | Universities611310 | $1.1B | 1/12 |
| Universal Technical InstituteNYSE:UTI | Technical and trade schools611510 | $836M | 1/4 |
| CourseraNYSE:COUR | Business schools and computer and management training6114 | $758M | 1/3 |
| Thinkific LabsPrivate | Technical and trade schools6115 | $73M | 1/7 |
| EllucianPrivate | Universities611310 | — | 2/12 |
| GivebutterPrivate | Universities611310 | — | 3/12 |
| InstructureDelisted | Universities611310 | — | 4/12 |
| MoodlePrivate | Universities611310 | — | 5/12 |
| AeriesPrivate | Elementary and secondary schools611110 | — | 1/6 |
| All Star Driving SchoolPrivate | Other schools and instruction6116 | — | 1/5 |
| AlmabasePrivate | Universities611310 | — | 6/12 |
| AnthologyPrivate | Universities611310 | — | 7/12 |
| August SchoolsPrivate | Elementary and secondary schools611110 | — | 2/6 |
| Canadian independent trainersPrivate | Business schools and computer and management training6114 | — | 2/3 |
| CDI College, Herzing, triOSPrivate | Technical and trade schools611510 | — | 2/4 |
And 30 more on the companies page.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Educational services, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Tagged to this industry
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.
Inside this industry
1 row sits directly beneath 61, and 32 in all once every level is counted. Each has a base report of its own.
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 611 | Educational services | 15,484 | K-12 Student Information SystemsPublic College OperationAlumni Relations & Advancement Software+6 more |