Leadership, Innovation, and the Future of Education with Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc is the Board Chair for Human Systems, a new AI and Education company he co-founded with noted researcher George Siemens. 

Until June 2024, he served as President of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU). He remains at SNHU as a researcher, writer, and advisor. Under the 20 years of Paul’s direction, SNHU has more grown from 2800 students to over 250,000 and is the largest non-profit provider of online higher education in the country, and the first to have a full competency-based degree program untethered to the credit hour or classes approved by a regional accreditor and the US Department of Education.

Paul is considered one of America’s most innovative educators. In 2012, the university was #12 on Fast Company magazine’s “World’s Fifty Most Innovative Companies” list and was the only university included. Forbes Magazine has listed him as one of its 15 “Classroom

Revolutionaries” and Washington Monthly named him one of America’s ten most innovative university presidents. He was named 2022 Citizen of the Year in his home city of Manchester, NH.

In 2018, Paul won the prestigious IAA Institute Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence in Higher Education, joining some of the most respected university and college presidents in American higher education. He is a frequently requested speaker internationally and often quoted in the media. He is the author of Students First: Equity, Access, and Opportunity in Higher Education (2021), winner of the 2022 Phillip E. Frandson Award for Literature, and Broken: How are Social Systems Are Failing Us and How We Can Fix Them (2022).

He served as Senior Policy Advisor to Under Secretary Ted Mitchell at the US Department of Education, working on competency-based education, new accreditation pathways, and innovation. He also served on the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Board on Higher Education and Workforce, the AGB President’s Council, the NEASC (now NECHE) Commission, and the Board of the American Council on Education, which he chaired, as well as various corporate boards and advisory committees.

Paul will step down from his current role on June 30th to lead Human Systems, a new AI and Education start up co-founded with George Siemens and funded by SNHU.

Paul’s family immigrated for an impoverished rural farming community in Canada, settled in the Boston area; the youngest of five, he was the first in his extended family to graduate from college. His wife Pat is an attorney, now retired, and they have two daughters. Emma is a Rhodes Scholar with a D.Phil from Oxford and will soon graduate from Yale Law School. Hannah has a PhD from Stanford and is a History teacher at the Francis Parker School in San Diego. Paul is a passionate traveler, having visited over 65 countries and all 7 continents, rides motorcycles (too fast), reads a lot (too slow), and is most excited about becoming a first-time grandfather in June.

This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.

Transcript

Alexander Sarlin: 1:29

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc is the board chair for Human Systems, a new AI and education company he co founded with noted researcher George Siemens until June 2024 he served as president of Southern New Hampshire University, also known as SNHU. He remains as SNHU, as a researcher, writer and advisor. Under the 20 years of Paul's direction, SNHU has grown from 2800 students to over 250,000 students, and is the largest nonprofit provider of online higher education in the country, and the first to have a full competency based degree program untethered to the credit hour or classes approved by a regional accreditor and the US Department of Education, Paul is considered one of America's most innovative educators in 2012 the university was number 12 on fast Companies list of world's 50 Most Innovative Companies list, and was the only university included. Forbes magazine has listed him as one of its 15 quote classroom revolutionaries. And Washington Monthly named him one of his 10 most innovative university presidents. He was named 2022 Citizen of the Year in his home city of Manchester, New Hampshire in 2018 Paul won the prestigious IAA Institute Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence in higher education, joining some of the most respected university and college presidents in higher ed. He's a frequently requested speaker internationally and often quoted in the media. He's the author of two books students, first, equity, access and opportunity in higher education in 2021 which was the winner of the 2022 Philip e Franson award for literature and broken how social systems are failing us and how we can fix them in 2022 look those up. He's an amazing writer, as well as a great university president. He served as Senior Policy Advisor to Undersecretary Ted Mitchell at the US Department of Education, working on competency based education, new accreditation pathways and innovation. He served on the National Advisory Committee of institutional quality and integrity, National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and medicine's board on higher education in the workforce, the Ag President's Council, the NEASC now the NEC he Commission and the board of the American Council of Education, which he chaired, as well as various corporate boards and advisory committees. Paul is stepping down from his current role he already did on june 30, from SNHU to lead human systems, a new AI and education startup with George Siemens and funded by SNHU, Paul's family, immigrated from an impoverished rural farming community in Canada, settled in the Boston area. He was the youngest of five, the first in his extended family to graduate from college. His wife, Pat is an attorney now retired. They have two daughters, Emma, a Rhodes scholar with a philosophy degree from Oxford, who will soon graduate from Yale Law School, and Hannah, who's a PhD from Stanford and is a history teacher at the Francis Parker School in San Diego. Paul is a passionate traveler. He's visited over 65 countries and all seven continents. He rides motorcycles, reads a lot, and is most excited about becoming a first time grandfather this summer. Paul LeBlanc, Welcome to EdTech insiders.

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc: 4:55

It's great to be with you. Alex, thanks for having me.

Alexander Sarlin: 4:58

I am really, really excited about this conversation. You are literally a legend in education technology. And you know, I first saw you speak when I was at Coursera many years ago, and you came to speak to the Coursera team. And even then, you are already doing unbelievable things with Southern New Hampshire University, and now it's just scaled more and. More and more even since then. So I'm so happy to have you.

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc: 5:22

Drudge, Alex, I mean when you say legends, I just euphemism for old, because that is also true. I've been around for a while.

Alexander Sarlin: 5:29

No, I don't mean it by that. I mean what you've done for online higher education cannot be overstated this concept of, you know, mega universities, giant reach, being able to support students for what they actually need is so powerful. So let's start with this. Tell us a little bit about Southern New Hampshire University and its growth under your leadership. Sure.

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc: 5:56

So I arrived 21 years ago. It was 2003 and there were about 2500 students at the time, and they mostly were on our campus and modest campus in Manchester, New Hampshire, where we were based. And we had changed our name before my arrival just a couple of years before. So we had been New Hampshire College. Now we're at Southern New Hampshire University. And the first thing I did was a kind of brand study where we asked people, it's a brand state in which you don't, sort of lead the witness. So the question was named the universities, you know, in New Hampshire, and our brand recognition was so low, like, even in New Hampshire, it was low. In our defense, we had just changed our name, right? So then the questioner later asked, you know, New Hampshire College. Oh, yeah, I know that place. So they didn't even know us. And then even in like Boston, just an hour away, which is a much larger catchment area in terms of population size, people didn't know us. So we were starting from a pretty low place in terms of trying to build a brand. But, you know, I teach a program at Harvard, sometimes in a program at Harvard for new presidents, and I will say, when you arrive as a new president, it's like being dealt into a high stakes poker game. You had dealt a cost set of cards like you don't get to choose your cards. You chose the play, so they chose you. Now you're in the game, and smart poker players don't play dumb cards. They don't chase inside straights, for example, they don't take another car on 18, you know, like all those basic rules. And I looked at our cards and I thought, I'm never going to make New Hampshire Southern New Hampshire University, a research university. It's not going to be an r1 that's not what we're about. It's not our mission. We were always rooted in non traditional students. We didn't start with a campus. We started with evening students, you know, above a storefront in downtown Manchester in the 30s. But we did a small online program. It was 18 people. It was very small. It was a couple 100 students. 300 students. I thought, this is a car I can play like I had my backgrounds in technology. I could see what was happening with the for profits. Now, remember Alex at that point when we could do fully virtual, online degrees, the nonprofit sector largely looked down its collective nose at that notion that that's poor quality. And the for profits rushed in. Nature pours a vacuum, and at their height, they educated 12% of all American college students. Even though we're big at 250,000 students, Phoenix was twice as big when at their height. So I thought, this is a card I can play. I think we can serve adult learners. The for profits were starting to engage in some pretty bad behaviors. We often forget that their early for profit did some good things, like early Phoenix taught us a lot. We tend to sort of dismiss that, but I thought we could play in that space. So that's what we set out to build. And there are phases, and I'll do them quickly. The first phase was, bring order to the house like get under the hood, fix things, make sure that our business processes and our business rules were aligned to the students who wanted to serve. We didn't have the language of jobs to be done at the time, but that's what we were doing. Really understanding what did adult learners need from us? They needed four things, convenience, cost, completion time and a credential that unlocked an opportunity. Second phase was start to build capacity. Like, do we get to have the right team? Do we have the right people, the right right products start to get a little space from our traditional governance, because, and no place has been able to scale online when they've been enmeshed in traditional faculty governance. So how do we do that? And that's out of knock it's like it works for where it works, but it doesn't work in this space. And then we started doing it. We expanded it. We had a kind of hold home court strategy, like, let's see if we can start to build enrollments in New Hampshire and then New England. So we had New Hampshire, then we had the any six, the six states of New HAMP and then we did that for a little bit. Thought maybe we can start to spread our wings and go so the next phase was, was sort of real growth. It was like getting ready to grow, and then growth, and then when the recession hit, we just went on a rocket map. So 2010 we were the we were the 50th. We were on the list of 50 largest nonprofit providers of online education, we were number 53. Years later, we were number four. It was crazy. We had no idea how to scale. Alex, we broke everything. We broke we broke HR. We broke everything. But we learned the hard way have scar tissue. And then, you know, by 2015 we were quite large. And then we went into just a period of. Steady growth over the next years. And then, of course, when the pandemic hit, we grew by 46,000 students in one year, and we had to hire 1600 full time people. We did all of that fully remote. And the scaling lessons we learned from 10 years before actually served us well, like we were strained, but the systems held our capacity, what we had built, and now it's just, we're kind of a mature organization. It's 250,000 students. It's a big machine. It runs well. And I think what distinguishes it is a myopically passion to focus on individual students. And I know that sounds like, Isn't everyone there? And I would argue, no, my book students first argue that it's actually not what higher ed is mostly about. That's the story. It's a I've handed it off to a wonderful successor who was my university Provost for the last two years. She was recruited with the notion that she might be, I can't pick my successor, but the board said, Yeah, amazing choice, and she's doing a great job. And you know, her challenge will be. And that's what I tell everyone. It was funny. I ran into someone at the UPS conference recently, and she said, You know, I know we're a long way away from that, but we're trying to build like we want to emulate SNHU. And I was like, don't emulate SNHU as it is today, like that. SNHU already knows that it has to reinvent itself over these next years. So I said on my way out to everyone. Don't look for reassurance that nothing's going to change. Look for reassurance that everything will like SNHU has to look quite different in five years than it does today. And that's that's my successors. You know, mission and role.

Alexander Sarlin: 11:54

There's so much to unpack in that story. I mean, you make it sound like looking back in hindsight, it seems very linear, right? Oh, then there was the report, and then there was the pandemic. And, you know, we had the online card to play, but I want to unpack a few pieces of it. The first one is this myopic obsession on what students really need. You mentioned the sort of Clayton Christensen jobs to be done framework, and I think this is one of the most important pillars in Southern New Hampshire, growth and success is just this idea of what do people really looking for when they come to your university, what are they really looking for? And I think this has really changed the entire industry. I think people have really re evaluated their concept of what higher education means, based on what you have done and a small handful of other innovators have done, tell us a little bit more about that jobs to be done framework and how you made sure to meet every student where they are. So

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc: 12:51

for your listeners, I mean jobs to be done. That framework came was really created by Bob molesta, not play Christian scene when Bob was at Harvard Business School. Here we still work with Bob. And the idea is, just for those who don't aren't familiar with that, is that when someone writes a check for a product or a service, whatever we are, whatever we're selling, they're actually buying a job, a solution to a job that needs doing. So simply, I don't buy a drill. I buy a hole. What I'm buying is a job that I need to drill a hole. That's the job to be done. So give me a drill. And if I'm a homeowner who's hanging a picture, I don't need a heavy duty, you know, high voltage, big metal drill. I need a little Mikado drill that's made out of plastic and is affordable, but just drills me a simple hole. It does the job. If I'm a contractor who's truly going to concrete, etc. I need a different so if you know your audience and the job to be done, you build very specifically for them, and you don't waste a lot of money on other things that they don't care about. So the job to be done on most traditional campuses are two things. There's always two jobs to be done. One is table stakes, and the other is the real job to be done. So on campuses, the job to be done, the table stakes job is get me a degree which will give me a good career. You ask students why they go to college. It's the number one thing. It's in every survey. It's in every poll. So their buying decision is actually on the second job, which is for residential students. It's a coming of age experience, right? I'm 17. I want out from under my parents roof. I want to live in an intentional community that will feel like home to me, where maybe I get to reinvent myself. I want to fall in love. I want to drink too much on Saturday. I want to study abroad. I want to join a club. I want to play on a sport, on a team, right? Like all of that stuff I would put under a general bucket of coming of age and American Residential campuses just kill it. They do a great job. I mean, you look at how we do this today, it's pretty amazing. I switch over now to online, and I think about my 30 year old in a dead end job, working full time, two kids did two deployments, has a bunch of credits from the army, some credits from community college. They're stuck. They're not making enough money. They have the same first job to be done, give me a credential that will unlock a degree, but they have a second job to be done, which is make this thing fit into my incredibly busy life where I have no bandwidth. So when you ask students in that world to go to a campus on Wednesday evenings, at 6pm guess what gets really hard go into a campus at 6pm On Wednesday evening, right? Because I might not even know my schedule next week, depending if I work in hospitality, if I work in large retail, huge swaths of the economy. That's one piece that person I described to they've had all the coming of age they can handle, right? They don't need coming rage, but they need convenience and they need like so we get really focused on, how do we take all the grit out of the gears for a person who has no time? So when you think about 65% of the students who come to SNHU come with credits from someplace else. Used to be even higher if you tell that person, hey, we want to give you the quickest path to completion. So we need to see how many of your credits we can accept. Remember what I said, four C's costs, credential completion time. So this is a completion time one. So we need to look at that. You need to get certified transcripts from the registrar at the schools you attended. Oh, my God. How do I find those people? What is a registrar again? I was 10 freaking years ago, and then they want me to send a check for the personal like, I don't understand this. And by the way, I got home at five. They've been closed for now, right? So we've learned this lesson from Phoenix. We said, Hey, if you click on this box on the website that we're looking at together, we're online. I'm talking to you as an admissions counselor, you just gave me permission to chase down your transcripts for you, and we pay the $10 fee. And when I say that last part to my colleagues who come visit us, like, you pay the $10 like, don't you spend a fortune? Yeah, we spend a lot, but that's what helps a student get through, like, it's part of the cost of doing business, helping these students. So there are just lots and lots of examples of Alex, of what we did. And I think, I think that is, that is the, really, the critical piece here. And we don't do any new program without asking that job, that question first, like, what is the job to be done? And right now, there are many jobs to be done out there that aren't being very well done by sort of incumbent System of Higher Ed. Here's one guidance, the number of adult learners I know don't who want a new career path, like I don't want to do this work anymore. It's not enough, or it's physical. I'm getting older, and I can't be on my feet all day, whatever it is. The next question. It's, what should I do instead? Where do they turn it's amazing how little good information now we think like, oh my god. How can you say that there's a million websites out there, and that's part of the problem, of course, yeah. And really, it's such an important principle,

Alexander Sarlin: 17:34

I still feel like there's almost no clear path of figuring out that pathway if you're an adult learner. I mean, other than some of these really innovative university models,

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc: 17:44

how do you find that model? Yeah, how do you know it's there? And when someone says, oh, that boot camp is supposed to be really, pretty good, really, like, you know, like, I talked to students, and they've made their choices on such scant evidence and information, and they don't, and that's not a critique of them, there's no reason they would know what are the right questions,

Alexander Sarlin: 18:01

please, and there's no one to walk them through, oh, you mentioned, you know, two deployments, credits from the army, credits from a associate's degree. Like everybody comes with a particular, you know, melange of experiences and credentials and credits and and needs. So the idea of personalizing it to them is really, really difficult. Southern New Hampshire is just one of the most inspiring stories. Really. It's affected my career in a number of different ways. So in meeting students where they are, one of the things that Southern New Hampshire has done, which is really innovative, and I think differentiates it from some of these coming of age colleges, is highly limit the potential majors that a student can actually, you know, major in or or focus on within the online, you know, world and the liberal arts colleges have gone the opposite way, not recently, but recently, they started to shave down, but more and more and more options, because that coming of age model is about trying lots of things and getting your feet wet and having experiences, but for that learner that's looking for, you know, credential and completion time and a career, they don't want to experiment with 20 different majors that don't add up to anything. Tell us about that decision, because to me, that was one of the early, I think, core decisions that really changed Southern New Hampshire's trajectory in my mind.

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc: 19:40

So here's what I would say. First of all, some of this is a question of privilege. So the students we serve, I often say, the 45% of Americans who say they would struggle to come up with $400 for an unexpected car repair, right? Like, that was that famous staff from, I think, Gallup, like, that's who we serve. That's who our students are. So they don't have many shots at the bullseye, like they don't have the privilege to say, Well, that was kind of cool, and I learned some things, but that didn't really yield anything. Didn't open up an opportunity to do this other thing, like, that's not what they get. In fact, they get preyed upon. And that's one of the things I think is so infuriating about our incumbent system, is that they get a lot, not only a lack of information, but sometimes deliberately preyed upon or misinformation. Definitely, you have to be really, really thoughtful about what are the job prospects for someone in a particular degree program? Now we can, you know, we look at like CAS data, we look at Job, workplace, Workforce data, and how does a particular major fit. And then what we learned, the hard way, frankly, is that there's lots of regional variations like we were doing this work. In Alabama where, like, oh, it's, you know, aerospace, advanced manufacturing, healthcare and finance. Well, it's actually not that the first two are true. If you're in Huntsville, where we have NASA, right? Like, that's our aerospace advanced manufacturing place. But if you live in Birmingham, they're not a lot of jobs in those spaces, right? That's fine. So, like, really getting fine tuned on where you are knowing you like, Alex, this is like, are you in this? Are you going to be living where you live for good? Like, oh, yeah, that's my family's here, my mom and dad, blah, blah, blah, I don't want to move. Like, this is my community. Okay, let's talk about how you're making choices, what kinds of jobs you're thinking about. And then there's a question of suitability. So, yeah, I heard that, you know, cybersecurity is, like, really great. Like, there's a future in cybersecurity. It's like, Well, tell me, like, do you like tech? Do you like numbers? Do you like Right? Like this, and so, you know, a lot of places, and I think for profits, actually, would almost sort of punish the admissions counselors for talking to too few people, we have to go the opposite, which is that if someone spends two hours on the phone with a prospective student and really helps them choose the right program, and we feel like that's a good match, that's a huge win. And honestly, if the person goes away and finds a better place, that's also a win. Like if we're not the right choice, that's also important. I hate it when we lose students, and we still lose too many, because we, as I said, our students get knocked out of the box pretty easily, but we never want to contribute to what is often the case, which is they have some credits, more debt, still don't have credential. That's a loser to go more specifically to questions. So we're tracking all of our programs, trying to track program outcomes. That's a little funny in our world, because you often look at employment data, but the reality is that 86% of our students are already employed when they come to us. So attracting like do they move within the organization, and it's hard, because, as you know, labor market labor, labor data and IRS data and higher ed data don't talk to each other in the federal system. So you have some states that are doing a pretty good job on this. I think Virginia, Texas, both do a pretty good job on this front at the state level. But it's a messy task to try to get those lined up right. But the bottom line is we have to, especially now with aI think very hard about what majors look like. What will students need to do to be successful? What are the tools they'll have to master now, in a world where those tools are changing fast, and I think more existentially, will that job be around in 10 years?

Alexander Sarlin: 23:17

The idea of really carefully working backwards from outcomes is already one incredibly important form of guidance that you provide to your students, and then that sort of individualized attention at the level of the admissions counseling and paying the $10 fee for the transcript you know, or staying with somebody as they navigate their educational journey. Because, as you say, students with this profile, it's very easy for them to fall off the educational wagon for so many very valid reasons. Yeah, and you put

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc: 23:44

your finger on the thing we haven't talked about yet, which is the secret sauce. The heart of our model is our advising model. And we call our folks academic advisors, but in reality, they are success coaches. They spend as much time knowing that like if we know the holy grail of higher ed has always been personalization, we actually have it, but we have it in the form of someone who actually knows you deeply and is with you on that journey. And I think one of the innovations that's been underappreciated for us by people on the outside is often we recognize that you go from course to course, faculty member to faculty member. So we do not make the relational center of our universe, the faculty, yes, because you're only going to have them for eight weeks. We have these eight week terms that are typical online, right? But if your advisors with you through the whole journey, Alex, the emotional reunions that I see at commencement when a student meets his or her advisor because they don't just know you as a student. They know like when you've been through a rough patch out home in your marriage, they know when you know you've been having a crisis with your kids, they know they're celebrating your victories and your wins with you when you were ready to drop out. They're the one that saved you. I get so many, oh God, so many emails from students phrasing wanting me to know about their advisor. That really is, and it's the thing that I wrote about in the book, broken every innovator I interviewed in that book, which looked at other systems of care, medical care, mental health treatment, addiction treatment, et cetera, K 12, everyone who's really innovating successfully in those spaces. I do that by building around a coaching model, a relational model, because what I learned from the psychologist and even sociologists that I interviewed in that course of that book, is that you actually can't transform a life if you're not in deep relationship with the person. And it doesn't need to be five people and 10 people. It actually only needs to be one. I do this all the time now I ask this question on stage. Talk about AI. I ask this question. It, if I think about and I'll ask you the question, Alex, if you think about all the scores of teachers you had from kindergarten through graduating from undergraduate college, how many of those were transformative, like you remember their name today, and transformative meant they really knew you. They gave you their time and interest. You felt like you really mattered to them as an individual, as a kid or as a student, as a young person, and they lifted your sights and demanded more of you, but also allowed you to dream bigger dreams. I can name my three. Marsh laffman In sixth grade, Elizabeth Collins in high school, and Dr Heineman in undergrad. How many did you have? And then I'll tell you what the average is. When I asked,

Alexander Sarlin: 26:21

I can think of three. I have a third grade teacher, a seventh grade English teacher, and then actually a grad school advisor, who, I think got me pretty well.

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc: 26:31

The average is three. You are, you are spot on with the average. And I think you know, if you think of all of your education, I'm sure you have any good teachers along. Yeah, of course. But only three transformative teachers, like only three who knew you. Like, the system is broken. I totally agree. I just titled My book, and what do we want from our doctors? We want our doctors to know us. The research is crystal clear, like, if they spend only 10 minutes more with you, only 10 minutes, the chance that you would sue them in a malpractice like plummets because, oh, it's Dr so and so, everyone makes a mistake. I know it wasn't intentional. They know me. They care for me. I matter to them. This was you know, and you just go down. Donna Beagle, who writes about extreme poverty, all of a sudden, no one who escaped extreme poverty, excuse me, hard thing to say. Ever cites a government program, never cites a system, a process, an entitlement, and what they cite, a person immunity, just one person who lifted them out, who made them believe and gave them hope, right? So this is, you know, part of what I think has been, I think the way we think about technology and about scale and about public good has actually pushed human relationship to the side. I actually would argue social media has pushed human relationship. Although we're more connected than ever, we're lonelier than ever, and what we're I think you know, what our my hope is, is that an age of AI, we can let humans, we can invite humans to get back to what humans do best in need most, which is to connect with each other. That

Alexander Sarlin: 28:02

is very inspiring. And I think it's a good segue to our talk about AI, because you are now working in AI. I mean, it's funny. Just quick comment before we go there. You know, I think of Southern New Hampshire University, 250,000 students going out of its way. And like you said, the secret sauce is these academic advisors and success coaches. Every student is known. Every student has somebody guiding their journey. And then you look at, you know, a 5000 person liberal arts school where somebody has an academic advisor who's also a, you know, I remember I had an astronomy professor as an advisor in my first year of college. I was not in astronomy. It was totally random. They didn't know me at all. I've met with him twice. I'm like, the idea that you know, like you're saying, centering the faculty doesn't work even at a small scale, let alone this massive scale that you work at, and the fact that you figured it out at a massive scale, I think, is unbelievable. Let's talk.

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc: 28:55

Yeah, the only the places that get to it are the really small, very elite liberal arts colleges like a Bowdoin or a Williams, where you're much more likely to be known it's, you know, a couple of 1000 students and have a for it, right? Like these are amazing places where there's no graduate programs, so the faculty are not distracted by their our one research agenda and grant money, et cetera, et cetera. But to do that in that way is so expensive that those schools are prohibitively out of the reach of working people. They don't work for working adults, of course. So yeah, I think, you know, people say, How could you offer personalization at scales, like by centering around relationship? That's how we've done, yes, and by

Alexander Sarlin: 29:35

separating the role of the faculty and the coaching. I think that's a really core innovation as well. Oh yeah.

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc: 29:39

Dan Greenstein, when he was at the Gates Foundation. I remember interviewing him at a conference. We were on stage together. I said, Dan, you're leaving gates. He was moving on to his next thing. I said, you know, you've funded so many programs, and Gates is like, you know, light 1000 candles and see which ones still burn. But if you could choose one thing that all of our institutions should do that would make a real difference, what would it be? What have you learned? You said, professionalize your advising. Yes, get professional advisors who actually know what they're doing, who are like, they're just looking at their people, persons, like, I look at our academic advisors, former teachers, former counselors, right? They've always been driven towards care of others, and that's what makes a great advisor. You can teach everything else, yeah,

Alexander Sarlin: 30:20

but it's relationship building. So, okay, let's talk about AI in this context. Because AI throws a, you know, both a potential solution and a potential wrench in this extremely, you know, exciting and complex advisor relationship idea, right? I mean, suddenly some things we could never do at scale are possible because of AI. That's incredible. Also, there's a risk of solving problems with tech that should be solved with humans. Tell us about your approach to AI and what you've been doing with your new AI and education startup, humans. Yeah. So

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc: 30:54

the startup alluded to is called human systems. I co founded it with George Siemens. Many people know George, probably the leading AI learning science, data science, guys in the world, wonderful human being. And what we talked about was the sense that, you know, AI is a tidal wave about to wash over our industry and society more generally. So we're in the radical camp, admittedly right, like we think everything changed with the release of chatgpt, all of society, big existential question. I agree. So that camp, and if you believe that, and you think that we're going to see massive disruptions in work. So I'm in the camp that also believes that AI will do to white collar jobs what automation did to blue collar Yes, the World Economic Forum predicts 85 million jobs displaced in 2025 alone. McKinsey has something like 65% of all jobs will have to be radically restructured. I'm a big fan of David auteur, the labor economist at MIT, has a very good piece on AI the reinvigoration of the middle class, but they're winners and losers, right? So the loser in his theory, are high expertise jobs like doctors, because so much of what a physician is trained to do is about prediction, right? And I'm using the notion here from Chris Dede at Harvard, who writes about prediction versus judgment or wisdom. And if you think about a doctor 10 years of training, millions of dollars invested, and what they do is they predict you come in presenting symptoms, and they're making a prediction about what you have. And then they order all the tests in order to confirm it. And then they give you a prognosis, which is a prediction of how this is going to play out, or the ways it could play out. And then they give you a treatment plan, which is a prediction of what will work best, and AI is going to get better at all of that than any human being. Now, if you imagine that all of that time is spent on just nailing down what you have and how to treat it. That's not a job. That's a big deal. But the thing that you then want, what we desperately want from our physician, is the next thing, which is, Hey, Alex, this is pretty devastating. I get it. Tell me about the conversation you're going to have at the dinner table tonight with your family. Yeah. Tell me about how you think about quality of life. What is your support system? Are you in a faith community? How do you think about how do you want to make these decisions that play ahead of you? How do you want me to be in conversation with you? Those are wisdom and judgment. So I think that's the difference we're going to see. Is that AI will take sort of knowledge and prediction work away and leave us to do the more and more important work. And here's the thing, if I think of our advisors, for example, will they go away? Absolutely not. Do they take spend way too much of their time doing course planning for their individual students in their caseload? Absolutely we'll have ai do that like that. We spend too much time figuring out transfer credit evaluation of which pathway will be fastest, and I will do like that. We don't need to spend valuable human time doing that. But the conversation like, Hey, I ran your course pathways, Alex, let's talk about this. I really want to understand. Like, when you get charged up in the day, Alex, what charges you up? Like, what's the work environment you love best? And I thought like, oh, you know, like, even though the system says you could do this, I don't think it fits what you're done like that's a judgment wisdom conversation. So we here's my optimistic view of what happens. I think that the knowledge economy is way overrated. We pay most for people who work in it, accountants and lawyers and right it, those jobs need to get displaced. I love Stuart Russell, who's a computer scientist at Berkeley, who, one of his lectures on the baby said, said, Imagine if he had said to our ancestors, there's a future, a bright future, where every day you travel to a big box, you go into a big it's called an office building, but it's a box, and you go to a little glass box. They'll call it a cubicle, but it's a glass box. So you'll sit in that glass box and all day stare at a brightly little box called computers. They would have run the other direction, saying that sounds like hell, right? And a lot of our world are people getting paid reasonably well to do just that. And what we don't pay are the jobs that are most important. We don't pay k 12 teachers. We don't pay early childhood workers. We've decimated our mental health care system. We use the prison system instead. We look down on infrastructure work like plumbers and electricians and people who do jobs where they can stand back at the end of the day and admire what they've managed to accomplish, as opposed to you looking down at a spreadsheet on a computer on a laptop, and go, Well, I got the spreadsheet Right? Like these jobs are meaningful jobs, and my hope is that what AI will do is shift us back to these jobs, which we desperately need now, you would properly say, but we don't like to pay for those. These are the changes that Carlotta Perez predicts happens when you have a paradigm shifting technology like AI, like. All the old assumptions about what's valuable and what's not, those get flipped. Who wins, who loses? Those get flipped. And it's a messy time, like we're in that transition time, and it will be messy for a while. My hope is that on the other side of it, we have fixed what feels so broken in our world right now, which is a lack of human connection, a lack of empathy, a lack of community, a lack of people doing work that actually makes them feel like they're having an impact. I was a big fan of David Graber before he passed away. You've made now David Graber, his last book was called bullshit jobs. You know, 65% of people believe that if they stopped doing their job this minute, no one would notice, like nothing would matter. Like, is that is not like that's too big a part of our life to want to move to the world that way. So my hope is that we can use AI to amplify and strengthen human connection, to make people feel more connected in their world. And I think the challenge for universities will be to think really hard about what does it mean to be a knowledge factory, creating knowledge workers for a knowledge economy that is about to be amazingly upended, like you're going to start thinking about, what are the majors? What are the majors like in the short term? Here's the form I think it will take. It will be, what do my students in x need to know about, AI to be able to compete to get a job? And seven, you saw this, I think last week, it was someone purported, 75% of all college graduates from May are unhappy that they weren't trained in AI, wow, right? And employers are saying things like 80% of employers are saying, I wouldn't hire someone now who doesn't know how to use AI, wow. So, like, we got to get with it. Universities have to get with it. And then they're going to have to take a look at and every single discipline. Faculty in the department chair should be asking, what are the tools that I need to equip my students with? How are we changing our discipline? How the major is changing? What does work? How's that look? And then the university will have to grapple with the question of, what are the majors that will still make sense, like, you know, PwC just invested $3 billion into AI. Do you think it's because they're going to hire more accountants? I don't, what if you have a big accounting major, but if you're a business school, what are you going to do about accounting? And I you know, will we have no accountants? Probably not, because that, you know, still needs some for the edge cases, to audit the AI, to train the AI. So there'll be, there'll be a jobs for they'll look very different, and I suspect there'll be far fewer of them. So these are the big existential questions I think universities have to grapple with. Yeah, but do I we can use AI in ways that are amplifying of human relationship, to build connections? That's our bad that's what we're trying to build. That's

Alexander Sarlin: 38:24

a really fascinating, very comprehensive view of what, how the future may add role. And it makes a lot of sense, but

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc: 38:30

it's very precipitant. No, no,

Alexander Sarlin: 38:33

no, not at all. I think one of the core ideas that I'm pulling out of it is we have taken this concept of the sort of information economy, the knowledge economy. You know what constitutes a white collar or a high paying job for granted for decades, and it's guided behavior for college graduates. It's guided behavior for companies, guided behavior for everyone. But when you actually start to break apart what the tasks are within any of these jobs, right? If you're a lawyer and you're spending a huge amount of your time looking through law cases to get precedent, that is definitely going to be a like no question. But if you're a lawyer who is going to be, you know, coaching witnesses, or a lawyer who's going to be trying trials in front of juries, that's a human connection. Suddenly, those two skills, which were considered potentially part of the same job, are now part of almost either different jobs or they're just completely different categories of skill. And it feels like that kind of thinking needs to happen in virtually every aspect of the knowledge economy, from accounting to medicine to law to finance. It makes a lot of sense. So with that in mind, which I think is very prescient, tell us a little bit about how you are intend to sort of support the education system in crossing this chasm, right? If this is coming that fast, where already students are demanding AI training, people are already trying to figure out what jobs are going to be displaced, how could the education system even begin to adapt that quickly? You are an expert at fast adaptation in the higher education system, which is often very calcified. What do you hope to do? And George Siemens also is very innovative within a very calcified system, as you say, legendary AI and education expert, tell us about how you think to get ahead of it. Thank you. It's like a big problem. Chuckling, because,

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc: 40:19

like, our fast innovation just took 20 years, or the fastest overnight success story. But no, you're right. And look at in the higher ed context, 20 years of that, you're probably pretty good. There is so much now, so many AI solutions coming into higher ed. I don't know any major player in the. Ed Tech landscape that isn't figuring this out, working on it, layering in AI, new AI solutions. And so many of them are quite, quite good. You know, I just joined the board of Ellucian. And Ellucian, you know, is, you know, has banners, the biggest sis out there. And if you think about it, we've long thought about the SS like a utility, like, I just want it to work like it's just going to do the things I needed to do. It's, you know, tied to how we build students, registered students, regulatory frameworks, etc. But if you think about an si s, it's rooted in your data. It's like the richest source of data you have, and now all of a sudden, data becomes super important. So the team there, and reason I was, you know, you're to join their board when they when they reached out is they're asking those questions, and I'm really interested, and I fear about one of the things to go to your question, higher ed isn't going to get this right if higher ed can't get its data right, and its data sucks. But at the institutional level, it's fragmented. It's siloed. We have tons of it, tons of data, but it isn't, in a way, a manner, in a place where we can actually ask better questions and do better work with students. I think, you know, we didn't touch on this, but one of the breakthroughs for SNHU was the way we use data and we measure everything. We have optics into everything. And this can be better every day. We're working to make it better, but we have 75 data analysts right who just measuring everything, so we've got to get our data together. And one of the things that we proposed, and the American Council on Ed is trying to host this, trying to stand this up, is a global data Consortium, or higher ed, starts to pool its data in ways that ensure security and privacy, but gives us massive insight, and we can start to ask questions we can never ask before. So that's one piece. I think we'll help. So you got a lot of solutions are coming, and you have work around data that's happening. And I do find even now, there's a really robust conversation about the guardrails, about ethics, about algorithmic bias, about hegemonic bias. That's really encouraging, because we didn't have those conversations about social media. And AI is going to make social media look like a day at the beach. So I'm glad that we're having the guardrail conversations. All of those pieces are moving, but if you think about AI as something that fundamentally changes all the rules of the game, I fear for our industry. So the work that we're doing to go more specifically to human systems, because you asked, is we're actually not trying to think about, how do we build things that could help the incumbent system? It's a clean sheet of paper. How would we reinvent the system if we were unencumbered by the ways it's always done what it's done? So we're not making any assumptions about accreditation, about Title four, about the roles of anyone, and it doesn't mean that we won't have all those things. It just means we're not it's not our starting point. We're not trying to make this thing wedge it in. So this is very much a Clay Christensen. You know, he's a dear friend of mine for 40 years. It's a clay disruptive innovation play where you say we're not trying to be better and use AI to play by the rules of the game as we've always known them. We're trying to rewrite the rules of the game. And what could that look like? And my hope is that our number one goal is to make it very much student centered, right? We started on that question and to give students supports for connectedness and community. So if they're in what we the system we're trying to build, you actually connect more to the world, not less with the world. What would that look like? How do you do that? And we think a lot about well being, wellness, human skills. Those are secondary concerns for much of higher ed like, yeah, if you come to school with us, along the way, you'll get you'll be a better human being. Like, really, how? Like, where's the intentionality? How does that happen? Where's the science behind it? How do you measure that? How do we know it's zero success? Like, so we're digging deep into all of those things as well. It's a big, big swing for the fences, right? This is really hard and complex, so the likelihood that we'll fail is very, very high, but, but it won't be for lack of trying. And we've developed a really great team, just brilliant people. That's a global effort. So right now it's about eight full time people and about 35 contractors, and the back end work and engineering and data science is all being done in Australia, and the front end work and learning design is all happening in North America. And it's really it's kind of fun to be back in startup mode. I loved SNHU. I mean, I never loved institutions, but I fell in love with this one, and where we became our people and what they do, but it is fun to be back in those early, scrappy making mistakes startup mode, and learning a whole lot

Alexander Sarlin: 45:10

well, the scale of the changes that are coming down the pipe right now, I think you and I agree, are so massive. I actually don't think you know failure is even a possibility in this moment, because what we're all doing is trying to figure out, is trying to dig into this incredibly complex change that has just hit us all as a human civilization, and try to figure out where to go. And already in this conversation, you know, it's been very clear that you are thinking about the systems in a way that's going to inform so many other people, whether it's a. See and their SIS data system and how to use data to personalize or what that means, whether it's, you know, universities having to rethink their majors, whether it's people having to rethink what the careers of the future look like. You know, just getting these ideas out there is already success, because it's going to change the way we all react. The guardrails you mentioned, of course, incredibly important. The guardrails are so key. And you know, I've been really bullish on AI, but I'm seeing more and more that we really we have to be smart about regulation, because it could go way off the rails very quickly, and there's going to be some interesting stuff. And learning from social media, as you said, is going to be key. So I don't think failure is an option here. And bringing together so many brilliant people, and people with the kind of experience that you have, meeting people where they are thinking about things at a 50,000 100,000 foot view. I mean, not many people can claim to have, you know, like change the landscape of education, but I think you are definitely one of them. Well,

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc: 46:35

you're very kind, Alex, thank you so much. It's been really a pleasure to speak with you, and we'll keep you posted. Well, you know, we hope to be piloting our first iterations of what we're building sometime early in 25 and maybe our first commercial release by late in the fiscal year. So June, July, next year,

Alexander Sarlin: 46:53

come back here and tell our tech insiders audience about it and how it's rolling out. We would love that, and we will put links to all of the resources you named in the show notes for the episode. Thank you so much for being here with us. Paul LeBlanc, former president of Southern New Hampshire University and one of the world's most innovative educators, thank you for being here with us on edtech insiders.

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc: 47:15

Thanks, Alex,

Alexander Sarlin: 47:15

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