Whither OPMs?

[studyingfortests]

The Office of Personnel Management was the only OPM I knew. thanks to this thread and the Google machine, I just learned an OPM business has to do with using Other People's Money.

Or, in this case, it refers to Online Program Managers. These are for-profit companies who essentially rent the name of the universities they represent and then write a curriculum, develop a marketing plan, pay for advertising and a very aggressive team of salespeople to sign students up. They also hire the adjunct teachers to teach the curriculum they have written, handle admissions, and basicaly everything else except issue the degree.

And the quality of the education, as one might expect, is generally substantally inferior to what one would get from the real bricks-and-mortar school.

The OPM takes 50-65% of the student tuition money paid, the school gets the rest. This tends to make the tuition *much* higher than other non-OPM schools, and the OPMs also spend a fortune in advertising to snag students and get them to sign up.

USC was the largest of the university "buyers" of this program, and after getting a large class action against them (a whole bunch of truly egregious stuff happened) it unceremoniously dumped 2U, the OPM it hired... but only after paying a $30M kill fee.

I am glad the OPMs are dying out. It was just the latest in a series of embarrassing scams for online education.