Outgoing president of N.H. college turns to studying AI

Paul J. LeBlanc knows a thing or two about weathering periods of rapid transformation in higher education and coming out ahead.

The president and CEO of Southern New Hampshire University, who will step down at the end of June, led SNHU through major growth in his two decades at the helm. The nonprofit school, which had about 2,500 students when LeBlanc arrived in 2003, now says it serves more than 225,000 learners, the vast majority of them online.

LeBlanc said the first massive growth spurt of his SNHU tenure came on the heels of the Great Recession. He asked the board in late 2010 to make a big investment in marketing SNHU programs, then he called for the school to double down on that strategy in early 2011.

The next few years “were an absolute rocket ride,” with the school adding students and staff so rapidly that its IT and HR systems buckled under the pressure, LeBlanc said.

“We broke everything. We had no idea how to scale. We were kind of out over our skis,” he said. “Students didn’t suffer, but boy did we.”

The trial-by-fire lessons SNHU learned in the mid 2010s came in handy at the dawn of the 2020s, when the COVID-19 crisis unleashed a surge in demand for remote learning. Within

the first year of the pandemic, LeBlanc said SNHU added 1,600 full-time staffers and 46,000 students, all remote. This time, the systems held strong, he said.

Now as he prepares to pass his office keys along to his successor, LeBlanc is eagerly anticipating the next disruptive wave: artificial intelligence.

“I am in the camp that says AI changes everything, like fundamentally changes society, the nature of the workforce, the information economy, all of it,” he said. “And if that is true, if I am right about that, then universities have to change dramatically as well.”

In his next chapter, LeBlanc will work with a team of researchers to study emerging AI trends, impacts on education, and opportunities to innovate. (The initiative harkens back to his early scholarship. During grad school decades ago, LeBlanc studied the ways computers could affect how societies think.)

LeBlanc said the AI-induced changes on the horizon will require educational institutions to reimagine how they assess student learning and grapple with implications for privacy and data security. There are also bigger questions about what jobs will go away and what jobs will be created, which influences the fields of study schools will offer, he said.

In the not-so-distant future, professionals will be judged less by what they know and more by what they can do with what they know, LeBlanc said.

“I think AI will do to knowledge work — or white collar jobs, if you prefer — what automation did to blue collar jobs,” he said. “It’s going to be deeply disruptive and displace a lot of people, and we’re going to have to adapt around that.”

There is good reason to be concerned, LeBlanc said.

“I think there are lots of ways we could get it wrong,” he said. “I think the potential for AI to do great harm is enormous.”

So now is the time, he said, for innovators and educators to make sense of what’s happening and help shape what comes next, to serve students and lay the groundwork for evidencebased safeguards.

“The best policy always follows practice,” he said, “and some of the worst policy tries to anticipate something that isn’t yet well understood.”

PAUL J. LEBLANC

Plans to study AI’s impact on education and opportunities to innovate