Friends or Foes: Decoding OPM Partnerships in Higher Education through Text Mining

This study examines how Online Program Management (OPM) firms articulate their strategic identities through mission statements, assessing the extent to which these communicated values align with those of higher education institutions (HEIs). Drawing on a corpus of 106 OPM mission statements from 15 countries, we apply Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to identify dominant themes and recurrent patterns. The analysis reveals five thematic clusters: educational transformation, learner empowerment, online learning platforms, specialized professional education, and accessible global education. While these themes frequently reference values associated with HEIs they omit critical operational details related to costs, governance, and quality assurance. Such omissions suggest a performative alignment, in which OPMs adopt the rhetoric of academic values without fully committing to them in practice. The findings highlight potential tensions between aspirational narratives and contractual realities, offering guidance for HEI leaders to conduct rigorous due diligence, ensure contractual safeguards, and align partnerships with institutional missions.