This would put them behind chief rival Pearson in terms of overall size, but more importantly, ahead of them in terms of higher education market share. As the second and third largest companies that dominate the college course material market, the merger would create a combined firm of more than $3 billion in pro-forma revenue. The deal has been dubbed a “merger of equals,” and the post-merger company intends to operate under the McGraw-Hill brand with the leadership of Cengage CEO Michael Hansen. On May 1, 2019, the education publishers Cengage and McGraw-Hill Education announced plans to merge. Q&A: Cengage/McGraw-Hill Merger What is the Cengage and McGraw-Hill merger?

The filing can be found here, and our press release is here. Update: On AugSPARC submitted a detailed filing opposing the merger to the Department of Justice. As SPARC continues to work on our own more detailed filing, we wanted to share some of what we’ve learned by answering some common questions we’ve heard from the community. SPARC stands with these groups, and we hope that their calls to action will open a conversation with regulators about the merger’s negative consequences for students and higher education. While we acknowledge that the current regulatory environment makes opposing any merger an uphill battle, we think that this is an important opportunity to educate antitrust enforcers about the unique challenges presented by the textbook market, and especially the implications of the growing control of academic publishers over key higher education infrastructure.Įarlier today, student governments and consumer organizations filed letters opposing the merger with DOJ. Over the past two months, we’ve been working with industry and antitrust experts to build arguments against the merger, which we intend to file with the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. Shortly after the merger was announced, SPARC began to explore avenues for taking action. higher education course material market as a duopoly-with potentially dire consequences in terms of price, access, and control of student data. If approved by federal regulators, the merger would reshape the U.S. The urgency of the issues outlined in our Landscape Analysis was put into sharp relief in May, when Cengage and McGraw-Hill-the second and third largest college textbook publishers-announced plans to merge. Over the past year, one of SPARC’s top priorities has been tracking the evolution of the academic publishing industry and its implications for the future of research and education.

Mcgraw hill textbook website