The owners of Bridgepoint Education, a five-year-old higher-education company where nearly all the 31,000 students attend online, got a more tepid response to their initial public offering than they were hoping for this week.
The company, which in late December said it hoped to raise as much as $230-million by going public, instead drew just under $142-million, selling 13.5 million shares at $10.50 each. (As recently as last week, it said it hoped to fetch as much as $16 per share.)
Most of the proceeds of the sale will go to the main investors, Warburg Pincus.Bridgepoint, which previously acquired two nonprofit colleges — Ashford University, in Iowa, and the University of the Rockies, in Colorado — said its net income for 2008, on revenues of $218-million, was $26.4-million.
The company began trading today on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BPI. —Goldie Blumenstyk
