Paul LeBlanc on building a university where every student matters

What this conversation is about

Paul LeBlanc was president of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) when he joined Glenn Llopis on Personalization Outbreak. He is also the author of Students First and Broken, a book about why our social systems fail people and how to fix them.

LeBlanc came to the United States from a very poor, French-speaking part of eastern Canada. He learned English in the libraries of homes his mother cleaned, and became the first in his family to go to college. That experience shapes this whole conversation: why higher education must work for people's real lives, why every person needs to matter, and how AI will change what we value.

The edit

Traditional higher education, LeBlanc says, was built around a 17-year-old who can move onto a residential campus. Working adults, military learners and people without much money have to bend their lives around schedules and paperwork that weren't designed for them, and they get knocked off track easily:

"Time itself is a source of inequity. Poor people have less time, they have less control of time." — Paul LeBlanc · 00:05:21

Glenn sees the same pattern across higher education:

"We've stifled more than unleashed the individual student. And you unleash when you respond, not react." — Glenn Llopis · 00:11:37

Inside organizations, the edit shows up as bureaucracy. When LeBlanc asked SNHU's academic advisors how much of their week went to students and how much to internal processes, he didn't love the answer, even at a university that works hard on this.

How people reclaim opportunity

For LeBlanc, SNHU's reinvention is really a return to what higher education is for:

"The reinvention we're doing is actually about rediscovering what I think is higher Ed's central mission in our world, which is to create social mobility and by extension, social justice and opportunity for people who are otherwise gonna get left behind." — Paul LeBlanc · 00:01:44

That meant taking friction out of the system, like handling transcript requests for returning students, and building the online model around one human relationship: each student and an advisor who stays with them through the whole journey. He points to research on people who escape extreme poverty:

"No one who escapes extreme poverty ever cites a program, a platform, a government policy, a system or an agency. You know what they cite a person." — Paul LeBlanc · 00:05:21

He calls this mattering: being known as a whole person, having someone invest time and resources in you, and seeing that your presence shapes the organization. His own mentors did that for him, including a professor whose phone call got him into graduate school.

What leaders and organizations can take from it

LeBlanc applies mattering to employees too. When people say something isn't working, SNHU acts on it, and they can see their input change things:

"They also see their ability to have influence to have agency. Cuz we don't want to be part of a machine. We want to be part of an organization that feels like we matter to them and they matter to us." — Paul LeBlanc · 00:12:42

Command-and-control hierarchies don't fit a volatile, uncertain world, he argues. His leadership team pushed operational decisions down to councils that work as a network of networks, borrowing the military idea of commander's intent:

"You could stay very crystal clear on your mission and on your end goal, like where you want to end, but you give your people a lot more power... and agency about how they get there." — Paul LeBlanc · 00:20:20

He also sees AI shifting value away from knowledge work and toward the work only people can do:

"It is the path to a human-centered future in which we let AI do the low level and mid-level knowledge work and where we have much more focus on the things that actually matter, which is the care of each other in a society that works for everyone." — Paul LeBlanc · 00:27:46

• Scale around relationships. Decide which human relationship matters most, then scale everything else around it.
• Clear out the busywork. Use technology to remove internal processes so people spend their time on the people they serve.
• Invest in human-centered work. Teaching, counseling, mental health and elder care need people, and AI can help free the resources to value them.

How this conversation connects to Glenn's methodology

Glenn's body of work comes down to one idea: without agency and without knowing the rooms where you belong, you can't have the conviction to reinvent yourself on purpose, or the strong identity that guides how you live and lead. LeBlanc built an institution around both halves of it.

• Agency (the Individual). The one person who believes in you, and the agency people gain when their input changes the organization.
• The rooms (the Environment). A university designed around working adults' lives, instead of asking them to fit a campus built for someone else.
• Conviction and reinvention on purpose. Rediscovering higher education's mission of social mobility, and preparing for the way AI will reshape work.
• Identity that guides how he lives and leads. Leading with care: knowing people, investing in them and helping them dream bigger dreams.

See the body of work behind the method →