The COVID-19 pandemic has had substantial impacts on all types of higher education institutions. The common thought is that the shift to online would be a benefit to existing online education providers. This paper examines the market as a whole, as well as the performance of publicly-traded online higher education providers against the market index of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, with the goal of identifying whether or not online providers were able to take advantage of the market conditions to exceed the performance of the market as a whole. Coupled with this investigation is the phenomenon of public institutions acquiring for-profit online providers and the implications of that emerging trend to the higher education market as a whole.