It started as a declaration of ideals and ended as a sale. In 2012, two of the most prestigious universities on earth — MIT and Harvard — put $30 million each into a radical experiment: give away world-class courses to everyone on the planet, for free, and run it as a nonprofit so no shareholders could ever get in the way. Nine years later, they sold the whole thing to a for-profit company for $800 million. The rise and sale of edX is the most dramatic plot twist in the history of online learning — and it says a lot about what happens when ideals meet economics.
2011: The course that broke the internet
Before edX existed, there was MITx — MIT’s own experiment in free online courses. The first offering, 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics, launched in 2011 under the leadership of Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor and director of the university’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Tens of thousands of students enrolled. Like Coursera’s experiments at Stanford, it proved the demand was enormous.
Agarwal became convinced that online learning needed something different from what the for-profit startups were building. He pitched a vision to MIT and Harvard leadership: a joint, nonprofit platform, built on open-source software, that would put the universities — not venture capitalists — in charge of the future of digital education.
May 2012: The $60 million handshake
On May 2, 2012, MIT and Harvard announced edX. Each university committed $30 million, and Anant Agarwal became its first CEO. The mission was explicit: expand access to quality education worldwide, enhance teaching on campus and online, and advance research into how people learn. The nonprofit structure was a deliberate choice — and a deliberate contrast. As Harvard Magazine later put it, the universities chose the nonprofit model “in part to stave off the for-profit enterprises launched by Stanford computer scientists: Udacity and Coursera.”
The press conference had a manifesto-like quality. This wasn’t a startup chasing a valuation; it was a public trust for education. Harvard’s CS50 — the university’s flagship computer science course taught by David Malan — became one of edX’s first and most beloved offerings. More than 5.4 million people would eventually learn to code through CS50x.
2012–2015: The open-source years
edX’s early moves set it apart. The platform’s software, Open edX, was released as open source — anyone could run their own instance. Dozens of universities and organizations signed on as partners, and edX grew into a genuine global consortium rather than a single company’s product. Verified certificates brought in revenue without making the learning itself exclusive, and the platform’s research arm published real studies on how online students learn.
By the mid-2010s, edX had become one of the “big three” MOOC platforms alongside Coursera and Udacity, but with a distinctly academic flavor. Its course catalog leaned hard on rigorous university subjects — computer science, physics, data science — and its nonprofit status gave it credibility with faculty who were suspicious of commercial platforms.
2016–2020: Scale, but not profit
The problem was that ideals don’t pay server bills. Running a massive free platform is expensive, and edX’s nonprofit model made it hard to raise the kind of capital its for-profit competitors were swimming in. The platform kept growing — partnerships expanded, course enrollments climbed into the tens of millions — but the underlying economics were getting shakier, not stronger.
The pandemic changed the math for everyone. In calendar year 2020, edX reported that cumulative course enrollments had risen by 29 million, reaching 110 million total. The platform was serving 39 million people through more than 2,800 courses from 194 partner institutions. On paper, edX had never been more successful. In reality, Harvard and MIT were staring at the same question every nonprofit platform eventually faces: how do you sustain this forever?
June 2021: The $800 million sale
On June 29, 2021, the news broke: Harvard and MIT had agreed to sell essentially all of edX’s assets to 2U, a for-profit online education company, for $800 million in cash. The deal closed in November 2021.
The reaction was immediate and emotional. Critics called it a betrayal — the nonprofit built to resist commercialization had succumbed to the very market forces it was created to oppose. Harvard Magazine’s headline said it plainly: “Now, edX has succumbed to those very market forces.”
Defenders of the deal pointed to the structure. The proceeds were invested in a new nonprofit that would maintain the open-source edX software platform and continue pursuing the original mission of expanding access to education. 2U promised to keep edX’s courses free for five years. And from a purely financial perspective, Harvard and MIT had turned a $60 million joint investment into $800 million — a return any endowment manager would envy.
Still, the unease was real. As one Harvard Crimson columnist wrote, “Harvard held the future of education in its hands. Then we sold it.” The five-year promise to keep courses free had an expiration date, and nobody knew what a for-profit owner would do when it arrived.
2021–2024: What the money bought
The years after the sale were not kind to 2U. The company, which had been valued at $5 billion in 2018, saw its stock collapse — shares plummeted 86% in the wake of the acquisition, followed by multiple rounds of layoffs. By May 2024, 2U was worth less than $35 million, and in July 2024 it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, weighed down by nearly a billion dollars in debt.
2U insisted its platforms, including edX, would continue operating with no interruption for learners or university partners. And to be fair, edX itself kept running: courses stayed online, enrollments continued, and CS50 kept teaching millions of people to code. The platform outlived its owner’s balance sheet.
The legacy: a nonprofit that worked — until it didn’t
So what is edX’s legacy? For nearly a decade, it proved that a nonprofit, university-led platform could reach tens of millions of learners and produce genuinely important research on digital learning. Its open-source software still powers learning platforms around the world. And the $800 million sale funded a new nonprofit aimed at the same original mission.
But edX also became a cautionary tale about the economics of “free.” Running world-class education at global scale costs real money, and the nonprofit model never found a sustainable answer. The ideals were real — and so were the bills.
If edX’s story makes you want to try online learning yourself, you might appreciate our piece on why most people never finish online courses, plus practical help on staying motivated when learning alone and knowing when to quit a course — and when to push through.
