OPMs: The Next Frontier of Predatory Practices in Higher Education

This week, the Department of Education held a two-day virtual listening session to discuss predatory practices related to online management programs (OPMs) in higher ed. At the session, PPSL's President and Director, Eileen Connor, spoke about the emergence of predatory behavior and systematic deception targeted toward students in the OPM model. Two former students from an OPM-run program also joined to share their own experiences.   

Watch and read their statements below. 

Eileen Connor, President and Director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending 

 At PPSL, we use litigation to expose predatory behaviors in higher education. We have great concerns about the use of OPMs. Each month, PPSL hears from hundreds of student loan borrowers. There has been an uptick in complaints from those who have gone to OPM-operated programs like bootcamps and online master’s programs. OPMs represent the next frontier of predatory practices in higher education.  

 The reality is that OPMs depend on deception.   

 Students enrolling in these programs believe that they are enrolling in a prestigious, brand-name institution, in an online-version of an established brick-and-mortar program. In reality, this is completely false. Students enrolled in OPMs are getting an OPM education. OPM courses. OPM instructors. And OPM resources and supports. All at the same cost of the residential version. It’s not until much later that students realize that the degree they paid for is not what they were sold.    

 It is not right for an institution of higher education to betray the trust of its own students, but that is what is happening when, for example, the school passes off OPM employees as its own, by giving them school-branded email addresses  

 OPMs adopt their university partner’s branding to make it appear as though the school is running it. As one OPM president said, “The more invisible we are, the better.”   

 The lack of transparency impedes the ability of the Department to regulate and enforce its own standards—for example, there is currently no way for the Department to track outcomes of OPM-run programs. Their numbers are hidden behind traditional residential programs. If accountability metrics like retention, graduation rates, loan repayment are important, OPMs undermine those initiatives  

 But more to the point, the structure of the relationship between institutions of higher education and OPMs is a recipe for deception and abuse in recruitment. OPMs in many cases receive a percentage of tuition revenue, and are guaranteed a certain floor of enrollment.   

 Congress has been clear that this kind of incentive compensation poses a risk to students and should have no part in the federal student aid program. And unfortunately, the Department has given a safe harbor to OPMs, with terrible results.  

 OPMs use aggressive marketing and sales techniques. They target people on the basis of race, and use sales tactics that most reputable institutions of higher education would be embarrassed to acknowledge.  

 OPMs are contributing to the cost of certain credentials, while delivering a low-quality product. The amount of money that is siphoned from the program to pay for marketing and sales means there is less money to spend on the program itself. Many students in OPM-run programs are taught by contingent faculty using outdated or irrelevant course material.   

 OPMs are incentivized to admit as many students as possible, and in many cases are functionally making admissions decisions. We have spoken with former students of OPM-run programs who plainly did not meet the state admissions criteria that a school set, but were nonetheless admitted to an online program. In these cases, the OPM is guaranteed a certain volume of enrollment by the institution of higher education, or else it would be entitled to offer a competing program  

The numbers speak for themselves. At the time USC started their MSW program in 2010, there were about 900 students in the program and about 300 MSW grads per year.  

By 2016, the student body had quadrupled to 3,500. The “largest social work school in the country” it boasted, educating 1 in 20 social workers in the country.  

These are students who think they are attending USC, when really they are attending 2U.  

While the increased acceptance around remote education has lent a false sense of legitimacy to these programs, don’t be fooled. These OPM students are not “Zooming into” the most prestigious classrooms across the nation; however, they are certainly paying for it.  

In summary, this is just another page in the for-profit college playbook —which is a model we know well.  Why would we let this happen again? We cannot look away and let OPMs become the next ITT and Corinthian.   

Thank you to the Department of Education for listening to advocates and students today who are sounding the alarm. I hope you will listen and heed them.  

Evan Ganick 

Hello, my name is Evan Ganick. I graduated with a Masters in Social Work from the University of Southern California's online program. Despite the prestigious perception of this school, a USC education was not what I received. Instead, my education was deceptively run by USC’s online program management company, 2U, and I was lied to every step of the way. 

When I decided to apply to USC, I was set up with an admissions counselor to help me get through my application process. When I confided that I was nervous about paying for the program, she was quick to reassure me that I would get scholarships to cover the expenses. She went so far as pushing me to accept the USC offer immediately, and to reject my other school offers, warning that I would miss out on available scholarships.   

I put a lot of faith into what she was telling me. I believed her. I thought I was talking to a USC employee who had my best interests in mind. What I didn’t know was that all of that was a lie. I never got those scholarships. I never got the financial aid I was promised. I definitely didn’t get the quality education and job placements that she hyped. She wasn’t a USC counselor at all, but a 2U employee hiding behind a USC email, trying to fill her quota.    

Under the guise of USC, 2U has been able to recruit and manipulate thousands of under-privileged people with big hearts and big dreams. I am a southern gay man who wrote in my application about my dream to open a free LGBT tele-health non-profit in the south. The 2U admissions person absolutely used this — used my vulnerability, my passion, my dream — against me, to manipulate and pressure me into signing on to the program before my financial aid was even in place.   

I wasn’t alone. My classmates – a majority of whom were women, people of color, or single parents – were also manipulated into taking out thousands of dollars of loans, never receiving what they were promised. The program that we were told was highly selective was actually accepting anyone who came through the door, and then putting us in classes with unqualified professors that consisted of watching TEDTalks. Our career advisors were a joke. And there was zero preparation or support for taking the licensing exam.   

We were scammed, there’s no other way to say it.  

Nothing about my online USC MSW was worth the $142,000 of debt I’m in because of it. OPMs shouldn’t be allowed to dictate the price of a university's online program while hiding behind a nonprofit brand. My education should not be secondary to their profit.  

That’s why I’m here today, to advocate for myself, my peers, and for the countless others who would seek to make the world a better place through social work, and instead are being manipulated into these high cost OPM schemes.   

These OPM programs cannot continue to go unregulated. They need to be held accountable for the harm and deception they’re inflicting.   

Erica Gallagher 

Hello, my name Erica Gallagher and I am a graduate of the University of Southern California’s online Masters of Social Work program. Or to put it more accurately, I am a graduate of 2U’s online Masters of Social Work diploma mill.    

2U is the Online Program Management or OPM company that runs USC’s online MSW program.   

When I decided to attend USC, I had no idea that the online MSW program was actually run by 2U. I didn’t know that my classes were going to be taught by instructors who were hired specifically for the OPM classes, rather than USC professors, or that they would be using outdated materials to teach me. I didn’t know that OPM employees were the ones assigning us field placements, many of which had nothing to do with our experiences or our goals. I didn’t know that the admissions representatives and the counselors I was emailing on a day-to-day basis were actually OPM employees, and not actual USC staff. That’s because they went to great efforts to make students believe this was fully a USC program, even arming 2U employees with USC email addresses.  

If I had known, I would have never enrolled. From the moment I looked into the program until the moment I graduated, I was lied to. I was promised a USC education that would open doors for me, and that’s not what I got.   

Instead, I got a shady, but equally as expensive, version of USC’s on-campus MSW program.   

It’s so important for people to realize how much this OPM model hurts students and society as a whole. It rewards greed and profit at the expense of a quality education. It incentivizes schools to sign up as many people as they can, charging top dollar for subpar programs, while hiding their deception and profiteering behind the nonprofit brands of well-regarded schools. The fact that they did this with a social work program with a macro track — to people who were trying to build a career motivated by helping others — adds even more insult to injury.  

Having this degree was supposed to change my life, but all it has done is complicate it. All I’ve gotten with this diploma is a mountain of debt and anxiety.   

Thank you for listening.