There Are A Million Education Startups And No One To Acquire Them

One of the hottest startup sectors right now is education.
2Tor, for example, has raised $90 million in venture capital to make credible online degrees for universities.  Knewton has raised $54 million to make customized content for students. Even Coursekit, a startup founded by three UPenn students to disrupt Blackboard, has raised $6 million.
We're just scratching the surface here. There's also Skillshare, Khan Academy, Codecademy, Schoology, TutorSpree, ShowMe, Coursera, Chegg, Udemy, and plenty more.
But there's no Google or Facebook in the education space.
So who is going to acquire these startups for hundreds of millions of dollars?
"It's a great question heretofore unanswered," says Hashable founder and angel investor Mike Yavonditte. "[Education startups need to] go public or get profitable."
For a company like 2Tor, profitability is a real possibility.  Students are paying 2Tor and its partnering universities the same expensive tuition for an online degree as those paying for the physical campus experience.  More than 3,500 students from 30 countries participate in 2Tor's online and mobile degree programs.
But the cost of on-boarding a university isn't cheap -- 2Tor spends about $10 million on every college it works with, perfecting and customizing their programs until they're happy.
For others, the path to profitability is far from clear.
We've compiled a list of potential education acquirers, but most don't have enough cash to write many -- if any -- big checks for startups. Of course cash isn't the only factor -- last year Texas Instruments acquired National Semi for $6.5 billion and it only had $992 million in cash and cash equivalents.

Pearson is the largest education company in the world

It has a has a few billion in cash and cash equivalents, so it could write a sizable check for a startup.

McGraw-Hill has nearly $1 billion on hand and could spend some of it snatching up innovative startups

Educational software and content is a large portion of the McGraw Hill business. It has about $944 million in cash and cash equivalents.

Apollo Group owns University of Phoenix and could snatch up other online university startups

Apollo Group owns University of Phoenix and other for-profit education institutions.
It has about $2 billion in cash and cash equivalents, so it could afford to write a billion dollar checks