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I appreciated the time that David Sutphen took to speak with Josh Kim and Edward Maloney regarding 2U’s stance on OPM research. As someone who has engaged in some of the first academic work on the subject, I am passionate about helping higher education get a true picture of this multibillion-dollar part of the higher education industry. To date, I think the picture is cloudy in large part because OPMs continue to find reasons to ignore the calls for research.
As someone who actively reached out to many of the major OPMs in the United States during my data collection, I still have to question the veracity of an OPM saying that they want to be a part of any real project. Speaking from personal experience, there is a significant amount of lip service to participating in research projects from the OPMs, and little actual follow-through with actually engaging with the research or researchers.
As I discussed in Inside Higher Ed a few months ago (“3 Questions for Michael Graham on his Dissertation on OPMs”), I continue to think (echoing the strong push from Josh Kim and Edward Maloney over the years) that this is a massive mistake by the industry. Here’s why:
- The federal government isn’t going away. The GAO report on OPMs is just the start, and the opinion seems to be that the Department of Education is going to issue stronger guidelines.
- In the vacuum created by OPMs’ silence, organizations such as the Century Foundation have filled the void with studies that do not look at the entire picture of what OPMs are. The OPM industry has ceded control in influencing regulation to people who do not agree with a for-profit company engaging with higher education in this way.
As I also said in the first Inside Higher Ed article, the simple fact of the matter is that the research that I did does not paint a bad picture of the revenue-share OPM industry. The level of satisfaction between revenue share and fee-for-service OPMs is comparable. The OPM industry should embrace balanced research and researchers who are trying to highlight a complete picture of what these companies do.
Furthermore, the normalized-data argument rings a bit hollow in my opinion. If the OPMs truly want to be able to get the data, they should help fund a true research project and make it the job of the researchers to begin to solve the normalized data problem that Mr. Sutphen highlights as a barrier to conducting any research. Waiting on an industrywide fix is, in my opinion, just another stalling tactic. Let’s start the research and force the research leaders to help solve the data issue. Furthermore, as every OPM revenue share company makes money on tuition revenue, the institutions that have engaged with them have had to pay for every enrollment. This means that in some way OPM students have been tagged in order to pay the OPM. In short, there is a solution to be found if there is a willingness to actually engage. Again, I think the data argument rings hollow.
I am a part of a group of researchers from institutions across the United States who are working on establishing a set of initiatives where we will begin to look at different aspects of the OPM industry. To a researcher, we all believe that there is no assumption that can be made about OPMs without data. In other words, we go into this work without presupposing that revenue shares are inherently evil and fee for service is somehow good. With this letter, I call upon 2U and other OPMs to meet with us, talk about our research initiatives, and facilitate our work. Let us paint the picture that highlights the reality of this industry. You will never be able to produce data that anyone will trust; it’s really that simple. Let us in, and let us work.
As someone who believes that the economic realities of the future of higher education are challenging, institutions need every tool possible to help sustain themselves and their communities. A lot of us are in higher education because we believe in education’s power to change lives. But if institutions continue to fold, higher education’s impact will diminish and the landscape of higher education will be left to the megauniversities. OPMs are a tool; while we should never trust them, we should be able to keep this tool in order to help fulfill our mission to serve our students and our communities.
