Huffpost has a long and interesting article on the threat posed to higher education by the proliferation of Online Program Managers. OPMs help colleges develop, manage and market online programs, usually master’s-level programs. In exchange for those services they typically pocket 50 to 60% of the tuition. The article is by Kevin Carey of New America and it includes a section on Bob Shireman’s efforts to regulate for-profits while he was in the Department of Ed.
The short version of the article is that the OPMs take the now discredited for-profit model and use their connections to legitimate non-profits to create a cloak of repeatability around their work. They started by working with prestigious schools but have shifted to partnerships with financially troubled smaller privates and state schools. In some these partnerships it’s getting harder and harder to tell whether the OPM or the college is the senior partner.
It’s a good article, although one of the OPMs has disputed some of it’s claims. Carey is right that the OPMs prefer master’s programs because they are more opaque in their admissions practices than undergraduate programs, so those programs can be more “accessible” than undergraduate programs without affecting a school’s published admissions standards. But more than that, my sense is that they prefer master’s programs that confer a credential the quality of which is irrelevant. This is especially the case with master’s in education. For a teacher to get the pay bump that comes from obtaining a master’s degree it does not matter whether the degree was earned in residence in a face-to-face to program that required lab time and real research or just knocked out online with the cheapest and least rigorous program available. You still get the same raise whether you earned your degree at Cal Tech or from De Vry.
I wrote about this (Automatic Pay Raises for Teachers Create Perversive Incentives in Graduate Education)a while back for the James G. Martin Center.