I do wish them the best but I don't think it's a counter example. They've been around for 20 years, so if they are huge (I have no idea how big they really are) then it because they stuck it out for the long term.
"The Great Courses was founded as The Teaching Company in 1990 by Thomas M. Rollins, former Chief Counsel of the United States Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources."
Thank you for mentioning the specific number for The Teaching Company, which allows me to relate it to my local public school district. I was just at a public meeting last week where I learned that my local school district, one of a few dozen school districts in the suburban Twin Cities (and by no means the largest), has an annual budget of $137 million. Other HN participants may want to check what the budget is of their own local school district. (As an update, a Web search I just did turned up my school district's budget documents online.)
On the basis of The Teaching Company bringing in less revenue than one school district in a single state, more than twenty years after it was founded, I would have to say that the submitted article's main point is correct, that there isn't a lot of big money for private enterprise in education in the United States.
Note on background knowledge: I have bought a few sets of videos from The Teaching Company, as has my local homeschooling support group. Our local public library system also buys them. But the local school district spends more money in a year than the full revenue of the company even at that.
I'm sorry, but I don't find that to be an instructive comparison. The money the school district spends isn't revenue from the open marketplace, it's tax dollars, which the law compels residents of the school district to give them. Your school district could be the absolute worst or the absolute best in the world, but the money they spend would be derived from the law, not from free choice of a similar caliber (it's much easier to stop doing business with the Teaching Company than to sell my house and leave the district).
On esimply can't compare legally-mandated, tax-derived expenditures to cash freely given to a private enterprise (which is their revenue). Not only that, the proper measure in both cases is outcomes per dollar spent, not total expenditures. For the business, this is return on equity. For a school district, it's educational outcomes vs. dollar inputs.
This is not to say that every company in the education sector is a great business; there are lots of so-so and outright horrible businesses in many sectors of the economy. But comparing a private enterprise to a tax-supported government entity doesn't make that point clearer.
"The Great Courses was founded as The Teaching Company in 1990 by Thomas M. Rollins, former Chief Counsel of the United States Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources."