Private Trade School Operation
The industry — Technical and trade schools
Base industry report for 611510 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 872
- Under 10 employeesA
- 64%
Of 872 Canadian establishments with employees, 64% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
One thing must be trueEntry turns on a single condition that can be named and tested before much is spent. Clear it and this becomes an execution question; fail it and no amount of operating skill helps.
Raise or borrow the entry ticket, or buy an operator who has already paid it. The barrier is money rather than permission, so it yields to a balance sheet — and an acquisition is usually cheaper than a start.
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.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 4
The binding constraint — entry cost + regulatory drag
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.
Approval is granted by a provincial career-training regulator and does not travel, so the market ends at the provincial line — and international enrolment, which most private colleges were built on, is set by federal visa policy that can change without notice.
UTI's $835.6M of fiscal-2025 revenue divided by its 32 campuses, and by its 24,618 average full-time active students. Derived from two reported figures in one release. A single approved Canadian campus without UTI's programme breadth or federal student-aid volume should expect a small fraction of the per-campus number; the per-student figure is the one that transfers.
Sectors joined: EdTech · Gaming/EdTech · Training/AI · EdTech AI · Arts Education · VR/AR Training
[UNVERIFIED] Sector-to-NAICS mapping is analyst judgment — see data/angel-sector-map.json. Counts are a per-record cross-reference and are not additive across records.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 2 of 5 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
No vendor has both a disclosed revenue and a published share.
Only a revenue floor is known — the true market is larger by whatever the undisclosed vendors earn.
Competitor set · 5 named · 2 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Universal Technical InstituteNYSE: UTIA | $836M | — | Fiscal year ended 30 September 2025 |
| Lincoln Educational ServicesNasdaq: LINCA | $518M | — | FY2025, per the 10-K |
| CDI College, Herzing, triOS / Eastern, Academy of LearningC | not disclosed | — | Canada's established career-college brands; all privately held, none publishes revenue, and their ownership and campus counts were not researched for this record |
| The publicly funded colleges (6112)B | not disclosed | — | Not a competitor for acquisition but for the student: their subsidised tuition is the price an approved private campus has to justify a premium against |
| The independent single-campus majorityA | not disclosed | — | 358 of 872 Canadian establishments employ one to four people — the modal competitor is one approved programme in one building |
Evidence
Evidence. Universal Technical Institute's fiscal-2025 figures were read from exhibit 99.1 to its Q4 FY2025 8-K on SEC EDGAR [A]; Lincoln Educational Services' FY2025 revenue ($518,241,000, from $440,064,000) was read from its 10-K XBRL on EDGAR [A]. Those are the anchor, and they are American: they establish what a regulated private trade school earns per campus and per student where a company can open campuses at will, which is the benchmark a Canadian operator is measured against, not a measurement of the Canadian industry. The establishment count and size bands are Statistics Canada, December 2023 [A]; no US County Business Patterns figures joined for this code. UNVERIFIED on the Canadian side: no domestic tuition, enrolment, completion or operator-revenue series was opened, no Canadian career college discloses, and the provincial approval and tuition-protection requirements are stated from the general structure of provincial career-training regulation rather than from each province's regulation read in turn. The named Canadian brands are general market knowledge and were not researched. The cut factor is analyst judgment.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
National body for regulated career colleges, established 1896; provincial associations feed into it. No member count stated on site.
NACC's annual conference; 2026 edition October 25-27 in Ottawa.
Ontario advocacy body; site says it advocates for 280+ career college campuses (that is the sector, not a stated member count).
BC private career college association founded 1977; membership includes NACC membership. No member count stated.
Member campuses: site says 'CECU's membership includes 900 campuses across the United States'. The US body for private trade schools; UTI and Lincoln Tech sit here.
CECU's trade magazine for career-college operators; careereducationreview.net now redirects to this page.
No independent forum or active subreddit for private career-college operators was found; discussion runs through the provincial and national associations.
Software serving this industry
Vertical software markets filed along the same branch of NAICS — who sells to these businesses, and who an entrant would have to displace.