How Private Equity Broke the Software That Runs Higher Education
Blackboard’s parent company, Anthology Inc., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with over $1B in liabilities, serving more than 2,100 colleges and universities and tens of millions of students. The reasons had less to do with bad software and much more to do with a debt load foisted onto it by its private equity owners.
In 2020, Veritas Capital rolled up several EdTech companies into a platform called Anthology, then acquired Blackboard in 2021. A “white board” strategy — but one that failed miserably in the real world. These platforms had separate codebases, clients, and buying centers. Integration nightmare. Decision making in higher ed is not centralized. The cross-selling opportunities never materialized. Meanwhile, more nimble competitors like Instructure and D2L were eating away at Blackboard’s core LMS market. What the rosy press releases didn’t lead with: the acquisition left Anthology carrying about $1.7B in debt.
With rising interest rates in 2023, that debt became much more expensive to service. By 2025, interest payments consumed 41 cents of every dollar earned. EBITDA collapsed from $33M to just $4M. In December 2024, Anthology missed an interest payment. By spring, Veritas was writing off its equity stake.
University IT departments watched the situation deteriorate for months. Competitors got aggressive, exploiting the uncertainty. And in the middle of it all were the students — who had no idea the platform was owned by a PE firm that had loaded it with $1.7B in debt, or that the whole thing was being sorted out in bankruptcy court in Houston.
Anthology did survive — emerging in 2026 as a restructured, debt-free Blackboard Inc., with the previous lenders Oaktree Capital and Nexus Capital as new owners, pledging $70M in new initiatives and reinstating Founder Matt Pittinsky as CEO. Encouraging signs. But these are distressed debt investors, not education specialists. Their focus will be on profitability and exit. The 2,100 universities that rely on Blackboard now depend on a platform owned by investors whose core competency is extracting value from troubled assets.
Veritas lost its equity stake but collected management fees throughout its ownership and has since moved on. Maybe this is a new chapter for Blackboard. But the universities and their students are still working through the consequences — which, in private equity, is how the story is supposed to go.