The Century Foundation has just released a report about Online Program Managers that contains both a critique of the industry and advice for colleges that are planing to seek the services of an OPM.
The report is a wake up call about the extent of the industry’s control over the online sector and the degree to which these business have the succeeded in using not-for-profit schools as fronts for the extraction of large sums of tuition money from students and universities.
We learned that these partnerships are as bad as many had suspected, if not worse: in return for some superficial convenience, public universities in every corner of the United States had been putting their for-profit contractors in the driver’s seat in nearly every respect, including financial considerations. More often than not, more than half of the programs’ tuition revenue goes straight to the contractors.
One of the things I have often wondered is why more colleges don’t dump their OPMs and try to run their own online programs. Now I know: it’s long term contracts that are set up to make it hard to switch providers or strike off on your own.
Boise State University, for example, must give Academic Partnerships (AP), its contracted OPM, two years’ notice to keep its contract from auto-renewing for another three years. What’s more, if the agreement reaches its full five-year term and Boise State manages to end the contract, the school must continue paying Academic Partnerships for each student it secured that is still taking online courses at the school. And perhaps worst of all, if Boise State terminates the agreement early, it can’t work with any other similar provider for the same programs until after what would have been the fifth anniversary of the contract. This arrangement leaves Boise State with no recovery options other than completely abandoning a program and its students if it wants to alter who or how the program is managed.
If more than half of the tuition in these programs is going to the OPM but the universities are “teaching” the courses, then, unless the universities are subsidizing these programs, the amount they spend on instruction must be much lower in these programs than in face-to-face or university-run online programs.
How this does not affect program quality is beyond me. Is it really possible to have programs that spend so little on instruction that they can give up half the tuition money and still make a profit (which is why universities have these programs after all) with out reducing the quality of the program?
Surely the assessments of these courses and the accreditors that vet them would catch these problems.
If it’s really possible to run a quality online program for a fraction of the cost of a traditional program, then surely we need to bring those efficiencies into traditional classes and cut tuitions in them by the fraction that we pay to the OPMS in online programs.
Or if it’s really possible to run a lousy online program that still produces assessment data that satisfies accreditors, then something is seriously wrong with the assessment and accreditation process.
My gut says it’s the latter.