The chess game behind senators’ inquiry into OPMs
February 7, 2022
Natalie Schwartz
Sen. Elizabeth Warren and two other senators asked eight OPMs for information about their businesses, citing concerns about tuition-share deals.
Last year, a decade-old $115,000 online master’s degree in social work made waves.
The two-year program, at the University of Southern California, left many of its graduates with low salaries and high debt, The Wall Street Journal reported. Its recent graduates who’d taken out federal loans owed a median $112,000. Half earned just $52,000 per year or less two years after graduating.
But USC didn’t develop the online program alone — it contracted with 2U, an education company that does business with nonprofit universities such as Georgetown and Rice to launch and run online degree programs in exchange for a cut of their tuition revenue. 2U performs an array of services for its university clients, including marketing and recruiting, student support and content creation.
