“Perhaps some people were hoping there would be a blockbuster GAO report, finding fault with the OPM industry, but the GAO answers the specific questions that Congress asks it to answer,” said Kevin Carey, vice president for education policy and knowledge management at New America, a left-leaning think tank, and one of the most prominent critics of the college-OPM complex. “It’s a neutral, analytic and investigatory body that acts within the mandate that it’s given, and I think that’s what it did in this case.” Still, the report will likely kick off heightened monitoring of the sector and suggests regulatory changes are coming that could affect how OPMs work with colleges. And it remains to be seen how much any such changes would affect companies’ ability to use tuition-share agreements, the bedrock of some of their business models.
