Contracting with an OPM? Your Students Want to Know.

College partnerships with Online Program Managers (OPMs)—for-profit companies to which schools may outsource components of running an online program like marketing, recruiting, and instructional design—have been under fire in the past few years. From Congressional probes, to a lukewarm Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, to now-paused agency guidance from the Department of Education, policymakers are looking under the hood at college’s OPM arrangements with an increasingly bright flashlight.

The GAO found that at least 550 colleges had contracted with an OPM as of 2021, a large figure that still likely undercounts the total number of OPM arrangements, since institutions are not required to report or disclose such information. Student recruiting and marketing—areas where higher education is no stranger to scandals resulting from predatory behavior and misrepresentation—are the most common services OPMs provide to client institutions, and they often rake in upward of 50% of tuition revenue in return. The OPM industry itself has seen several defining shakeups this year alone, including major players selling off their OPM services or ousting high-profile chief executives. So, it makes sense that investigative journalists and policymakers alike are raising eyebrows. But how do students feel about their colleges potentially contracting with OPMs to manage their higher education programs?

To find out, Third Way partnered with Global Strategy Group to survey 1,000 current or former graduate students about their experiences, including their perceptions of OPMs. OPM-contracted programs range from boot camps to doctorates, but leading companies commonly work with institutions to support graduate degree programs, and notably master’s degrees, which are shorter and easier to scale online. Our survey responses show that graduate students are not instinctively against their school contracting with an OPM, but they have significant concerns about quality and feel strongly that their college should be transparent with them about an OPM’s involvement in their education.

Graduate Students Know Little About OPMs (But the More They Learn, the Less They Like)

One bright side for OPMs may be that students don’t know much about them: 56% of survey respondents reported knowing very little or nothing at all about OPMs, with only 10% claiming to know “a lot.” The name “Online Program Manager” is neutral-to-positive on its face, and when given a basic definition of the services an OPM provides, respondents’ initial feelings were overall favorable, with students who attended graduate school online or in a hybrid format feeling more positively about OPMs than those whose programs were in-person.

When provided with more information about OPM arrangements with colleges—that OPMs are for-profit companies, are not affiliated with a college, and are not accredited—favorability dropped 13 percentage points overall, from 64% to 51%. The percentage of online and hybrid graduate students viewing OPMs as somewhat or very unfavorable jumped from 2% and 4%, respectively, up to 16% and 19%.

Graduate Students Have Concerns About OPMs’ Profit Motives and Quality

To probe students’ viewpoints on their own institution potentially contracting with an OPM, we asked them to fill in the blank in this sentence: “If I knew that a for-profit, outside company was partially managing my graduate education, I would feel ____.” Neutral words like “indifferent” and “fine” came up, but so did more complicated feelings and expressions of doubt: “cheated,” “betrayed,” “upset,” “angry,” “unsure,” “skeptical,” “uncomfortable,” and “worried.”

When asked if they believed that students would receive an education of higher quality, lower quality, or about the same quality if their graduate school were to outsource instruction and curriculum development to an OPM, respondents predicted lower-quality instruction over higher-quality instruction at a rate of more than two-to-one. Given an open-ended prompt to reflect on what, if any, consequences could result from part of their education being managed by an OPM, respondents zeroed in on cost and quality concerns.

Graduate Students Want Transparency About OPM Involvement in Their Education

We also presented students with a list of services frequently provided by OPMs to gauge their comfort level with each activity being handled by an external company. Students were most comfortable with their institution outsourcing technology and IT support (71%) or student services like counseling or career advising (61%) to a for-profit company not affiliated with their school. But the majority of students said they would be uncomfortable if they found out their institution was outsourcing core instructional functions like faculty hiring (53%) or curriculum development (55%) to an OPM.

Students expressed the greatest discomfort with actions that involved OPM employees presenting themselves as school staff members—a practice that has garnered media scrutiny and raised alarm bells for consumer advocates. OPM employees often use a university email account with an “.edu” suffix, have access to software that allows them to make recruiting calls from the school’s area code regardless of their location, and do not readily disclose that they work for an OPM rather than the college or university in conversations with students. Respondents were broadly uncomfortable with this setup: 63% said they would be uncomfortable with an OPM employee contacting students using an “.edu” email address without disclosing who they worked for.

Across the board, graduate students expressed healthy skepticism about OPM involvement in their education and placed a clear premium on their chosen college or university maintaining control over educational quality and central academic decision-making. Above all, they valued transparency from their institution about an OPM’s role in their program delivery and found the concept of OPM staff masquerading as school employees distinctly off-putting. In summing up their views, 61% of respondents said they would be okay with their institution contracting with an OPM “as long as my school was transparent and I knew about it.” Another 30% expressed they were not comfortable with an OPM arrangement at all, regardless of disclosures from their school—and fewer than 1 in 10 students had no concerns about an OPM managing part of their education.

Conclusion

Recent mergers and acquisitions, a slew of bad press, and the uncertainty of the Department of Education’s third-party servicer guidance have further disrupted the shaky footing of the OPM industry. As policymakers and university leaders consider next steps, these survey results drive home graduate students’ clear desire for transparency about OPM involvement in their academic program and the need for institutions to prioritize quality and value when outsourcing aspects of students’ educational experience.

Methodology

Between August 15 and August 29, 2023, Global Strategy Group conducted an online survey of 1,000 registered voters nationwide who are either current or recent graduate students. The precision of online surveys is measured using a credibility interval; in this case, the interval at the 95% confidence level is +/- 3.1%. To view the topline results, click here.