By Ella Azoulay | October 28, 2025
This week, New Jersey State Senator Angela McKnight introduced the nation’s most comprehensive piece of legislation addressing the role of Online Program Managers (OPMs) in higher education. OPMs are private companies that contract with colleges and universities to provide services ranging from marketing, recruitment, and advertising to instruction and curriculum development. OPMs and schools also enter into mutually beneficial tuition-sharing agreements, a payment model that incentivizes OPM employees to use predatory recruitment tactics akin to those used by for-profit colleges. Often, students are unaware of the existence of the OPM and the role it plays in their education. Students take on debt to access what they believe to be a quality education from a name-brand institution with a good reputation, when they’re actually attending a low-quality online program run by a private company. If passed, New Jersey would become the second state in the country to enact a comprehensive law protecting students from risks that appear when colleges outsource the management of academic programs.
“Even before this administration, very little was known about schools’ partnerships with OPMs due to negligible federal oversight and regulation of the industry.”
With an administration that’s gutting the U.S. Department of Education (the Department), the agency responsible for overseeing these relationships, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency responsible for regulating the industry, state lawmakers must step up and protect students and borrowers. A coalition of advocates recently published a state legislative toolkit for protecting students from OPMs in higher ed that contains model bill language, talking points, resources, and more. Since taking office, the Trump Administration has illegally attempted to fire the vast majority of CFPB employees, and even let lawbreaking companies off the hook while leaving harmed consumers high and dry. These actions give a green light to corporations looking to defraud or mislead borrowers in order to pad their bottom line. Moreover, President Trump and Education Secretary McMahon have stoked mass chaos in their efforts to dismantle the Department and push an agenda that throws students and borrowers under the bus and pushes them further into debt.
Even before this administration, very little was known about schools’ partnerships with OPMs due to negligible federal oversight and regulation of the industry. In fact, the Department has never known which schools even have contracts with OPMs, let alone the extent of OPMs’ reach or how many students are affected. Luckily, states are beginning to take action: Minnesota made history last year by signing into law the first bill ever passed that bans tuition-sharing and regulates OPMs that contract with institutions of higher education.
“The potential impact of this legislation, if it is passed and signed into law, would be profound.”
New Jersey’s State Senator McKnight’s SB 4818 builds on Minnesota’s success; it protects students by limiting OPMs’ role in their education and requiring greater transparency about the companies’ relationships with their schools. The bill, which applies to all public, private non-profit, and for-profit colleges and universities in New Jersey, protects students from predatory and misleading recruitment, prevents colleges from granting OPMs inappropriate control over college and program decisions, and requires institutions to share information about their OPM contracts with the state.
The potential impact of this legislation, if it is passed and signed into law, would be profound. Not only would it promote transparency in an industry that largely operates in the shadows, but it would protect thousands of current and future students attending online programs through New Jersey’s colleges and universities. Students often attend online programs in order to advance their career, or to obtain opportunities that will allow them to achieve financial stability. Instead, many find themselves saddled with student loan debt that they can’t afford because they were misled about an online program. New Jersey’s bill would protect students and families from falling victim to OPMs masquerading as New Jersey institutions of higher education.
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Ella Azoulay is the Research & Policy Analyst at Protect Borrowers (formerly known as the Student Borrower Protection Center). They joined Protect Borrowers from the Center for American Progress where they worked on higher education policy and advocacy.