Fewer Colleges Sharing Profits With OPMs

Inside Higher Ed

Kathryn Palmer

February 19, 2025

Colleges and universities are relying less and less on outside companies to manage their online programs, according to a quarterly market report from Validated Insights released today.

The new report shows that, for all of 2024, higher education institutions launched just 81 new partnerships with online program managers—the lowest number since 2016.

It also shows that the dominant method for paying online program managers is changing, too. Institutions are increasingly looking for flexibility and customization through a fee-for-service model, which allows them to pay an OPM a set fee for a particular service instead of buying big service bundles and splitting the profits with OPMs.

Industry experts say the rise of fee-for-service arrangements has been a long time coming in a market once dominated by a more controversial revenue-sharing model, which critics have lambasted as predatory arrangements that incentivize servicers to use aggressive, dishonest recruiting tactics to drive up enrollments and maximize tuition revenue.

“For the past 10 years, there’s been a lot of momentum building for the fee-for-service model,” said Brady Colby, Validated Insights’ head of market research. “There was a lot of conversation about how it had a lot of potential for growth, but it was just recently that we saw that come to fruition.”

According to the report, fee-for-service has now surpassed revenue sharing as the dominant business model for OPMs.

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