By Kathryn Palmer
02/19/2025 – Inside Higher Ed
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.