The 138-Year-Old Publisher That Learned to Think in Software

The odd thing about McGraw Hill is that almost everyone recognizes the name, yet the name now hides the business. It conjures a heavy chemistry book, a backpack with bad posture, perhaps an access code scratched silver at a campus bookstore. The modern company is still a publisher, but that noun is doing too much work. In fiscal 2026, McGraw Hill generated $1.43 billion in digital revenue - about 68 percent of its $2.10 billion total. More than 73 percent of revenue was re-occurring. The red cube increasingly lives in logins, assignments, diagnostic questions and dashboards.

This is a transformation with unusually deep roots. James H. McGraw entered publishing in 1888 by buying the American Journal of Railway Appliances. His company merged with John A. Hill's in 1917. The resulting business spent decades assembling authoritative knowledge and the channels to put it in front of students. That history matters because McGraw Hill's software is not sold as a blank canvas. It arrives carrying curriculum, assessments, author relationships and institutional trust.

The textbook became a feedback loop

A printed book delivers the same page to every reader. Adaptive software can watch a learner attempt a concept, estimate what they understand and select the next useful task. That loop is the center of McGraw Hill's digital portfolio. Connect helps college instructors build courses, assign work and see performance. SmartBook adapts reading and practice. ALEKS maps knowledge in mathematics and chemistry. SIMnet teaches and assesses workplace software skills. Sharpen packages videos, quizzes, flashcards and guided explanations into a phone-sized study session.

The problems are prosaic and stubborn. Teachers lack time. Students arrive with uneven foundations. Institutions want better completion and retention. Course materials go stale, fail to connect with a learning management system or offer instructors a swamp of data without a next step. McGraw Hill's pitch is to close the space between content and action: show the lesson, observe the response, identify the gap and recommend what comes next.

“The books built the trust. The software builds the relationship.”

The scale of that relationship is easy to miss. McGraw Hill reported 26.7 million paid digital users and more than 25.6 billion learning interactions in fiscal 2026. That works out to roughly 960 interactions per paid user, though averages flatten enormous differences between a child using an occasional intervention and a college student completing a semester of assignments. The point is not the division. It is the density of the signal.

Four businesses under one red cube

McGraw Hill operates across four reported segments. K-12 sells core, supplemental and intervention curricula to U.S. school districts. Higher Education serves faculty, students and institutions with courseware and materials. Global Professional covers medical, engineering and business reference products. International distributes school, university and professional offerings outside the United States. The portfolio reaches more than 80 languages, and the company had about 4,400 permanent employees in 35 countries at the end of March 2026.

The buyers differ. A district may commit to a multi-year curriculum after a formal adoption. A professor may choose Connect for a course. A university may negotiate campuswide inclusive access. A medical institution may license clinical tools. Individual students can buy books or upgrade study products. That mixture makes the business less tidy than pure SaaS. School procurement is cyclical, print still matters and revenue can be seasonal. It also gives McGraw Hill several ways to expand an institutional relationship.

For users, the practical value depends on the setting. An instructor can reuse a course shell, automate routine grading and spot a concept that is confusing half the room. A student can move from an assigned chapter to targeted questions or download reading for a commute. A district can combine core lessons, intervention and assessment instead of asking teachers to stitch together disconnected tools. A medical learner can rehearse a diagnostic conversation before the stakes include a real patient. None of those activities is novel in isolation. The appeal is having content, practice and evidence in the same path, with support from a vendor already embedded in the institution.

The new edition is no edition

In 2024, McGraw Hill began moving higher-education products toward an “Evergreen” delivery model. Instead of waiting years for a new numbered edition, digital content can be updated continuously while an instructor keeps the architecture of a course. By fiscal 2026, Evergreen represented 68 percent of Higher Education revenue. It is a product decision with business consequences: fresher material for students, less rebuilding for instructors and a steadier reason to stay subscribed.

This is also where the company differs from both traditional publishers and fast-moving education startups. Its old advantage is authority: vetted authors, instructional design, standards alignment and long customer relationships. Its newer advantage is context. A general chatbot can explain quadratic equations; ALEKS knows which underlying skills a learner has demonstrated. A generic writing assistant can rewrite a paragraph; McGraw Hill's tool can sit inside a particular curriculum and rubric.

In education AI, constraint can be a feature. A classroom does not need the most imaginative answer. It needs the useful one.

McGraw Hill has begun threading generative AI through that context. Teacher Assistant helps educators find curriculum resources, adjust pacing and plan lessons. Writing Assistant guides revision without simply doing the assignment. AI Reader turns selected passages into explanations and practice. Clinical Reasoning lets medical students interview simulated patients, order tests and compare a diagnosis with an expert-vetted approach. Sharpen's AI is deliberately positioned as study help, not an answer dispenser.

There is no magic in the label. McGraw Hill itself warns that AI can make mistakes, and school systems care about accuracy, privacy, accessibility and academic integrity. The interesting product choice is therefore not merely adding a conversational box. It is bounding that box with curriculum and showing educators where it fits in a workflow.

Competitors, collaborators, occasionally both

The company sits in a crowded middle. Pearson, Cengage, Macmillan Learning and open educational resources compete for college courses. HMH, Savvas, Amplify and Curriculum Associates contest district budgets. Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer and AMBOSS overlap in medical and professional learning. Cheap study apps and general AI tools attack from below. A student can now summon a plausible explanation without opening any publisher's platform.

McGraw Hill's response includes partnerships that would once have looked unusual. It is integrating Pearson's PRoPL interim assessment into K-12 curricula. A separate connection with Renaissance will pair Star Assessment data with its math and literacy programs. T-Mobile is packaging connectivity with learning solutions for districts facing the digital divide. The strategy is practical: own the curriculum experience, but let useful data and infrastructure cross the boundary.

A public-company report card

Private ownership shaped the recent chapter. Apollo-managed funds bought the education business in 2013. Platinum Equity acquired it for about $4.5 billion in 2021. McGraw Hill returned to the New York Stock Exchange in July 2025, pricing shares at $17 and using roughly $386 million of net proceeds to repay debt. It is now a public company, though Platinum-affiliated funds remained the controlling shareholder after the offering.

Fiscal 2026 offered a clean snapshot of the transition. Total revenue was nearly flat at $2.10 billion, as a smaller K-12 adoption market offset strength in Higher Education. Digital revenue grew 5.5 percent. Re-occurring revenue grew 5.8 percent. Higher Education revenue rose 12.3 percent to $879 million, and the company reported positive full-year net income. This is not a startup growth curve. It is a mature business changing its mix while navigating enrollment, district budgets, procurement calendars and debt.

That sobriety is what makes McGraw Hill worth watching. It has no permission to break the classroom in pursuit of novelty. Its customers buy outcomes, reliability and support. The company's expertise sits at the seam between subject matter and learning science - how to sequence an idea, assess understanding, make content accessible and tell an educator something actionable. Software lets that expertise arrive more often than a new edition.

The red cube is still printed on books. But the more revealing image is invisible: a student answers, a system updates its estimate and the next question changes. McGraw Hill's long reinvention is contained in that small adjustment. Publishing once meant deciding what belonged on the page. Now it also means deciding what should happen next.

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