A visionary, SNHU president Paul LeBlanc named chamber's citizen of the year
Feb. 25—P aul LeBlanc is used to posing for selfies with graduates of Southern New Hampshire University when he meets them in his travels.
These days, the SNHU president is more likely to connect with them on Twitter.
"There was a time when I spent most of my time on campus and knew all the students," LeBlanc said. "I am on the road a lot. We have 185,000 students, and I can't be everywhere."
But SNHU can be everywhere, thanks to its global reach online.
When LeBlanc became president of SNHU in 2003, the school had an enrollment of 2,800 — just a couple of hundred fewer than the number of students who attend in-person classes now at the Manchester-Hooksett campus.
The other 182,000 likely will never set foot there.
One of LeBlanc's first goals when he took over SNHU was to grow the school's fledgling online program — now the largest nonprofit provider of online education in the country.
Under LeBlanc's leadership, SNHU has been named one of the 50 most innovative companies in the world by Fast Company magazine.
"He seems to have that ability to see into the future," said Heather McGrail, president and CEO of the Greater Manchester Chamber.
The chamber has named LeBlanc its Citizen of the Year and will honor him at a gala dinner April 11 at the DoubleTree hotel in Manchester.
LeBlanc, 65, has helped put the city on the world map, McGrail said.
"Two decades ago, no one could imagine SNHU would be where it is today, and the vision and growth that Paul has contributed drove that," McGrail said. "It really helps to show how much he has made education accessible and affordable to everyone."
Embracing new Americans
SNHU employs more than 5,000 and has total assets of $1.4 billion, according to tax documents. LeBlanc made nearly $1.2 million in 2020.
The school's growth has been driven by LeBlanc's desire to expand the reach of higher education.
For this article, he chose to be interviewed at the Center for New Americans in Manchester, a program launched in 2017 as a partnership between SNHU and the YWCA to support both children and adults who are new to the United States.
The program reflects the kinds of programs the university has invested in here.
Early in the pandemic, the university helped deliver more than 215,000 meals through the Manchester School District, Granite United Way and Granite YMCA. LeBlanc previously served as president of the United Way board.
In 2021, the university announced it would drop tuition from $31,000, with options for $15,000 and $10,000 programs. The move was in response to the amount of debt students were taking on.
"We wanted to make sure we weren't slipping in terms of our commitment to working-class and first-generation students," he said.
More recently, the university donated $50,000 and volunteer hours to construct beds to help open a shelter for homeless women on Pearl Street.
LeBlanc appreciates that SNHU draws a lot of students who come from a background similar to his. In many ways, he's not the traditional college leader, with degrees from some of the nation's most esteemed universities.
Considering college
LeBlanc's family immigrated to Waltham, Mass., from Canada, where they lived in a community of subsistence farms. The youngest of five, he became the first person in his extended family to attend college, and he received a bachelor's degree from Framingham State University, a master's degree from Boston College and a doctorate from the University of Massachusetts.
LeBlanc wasn't even sure he would go to college and was thinking about joining the military. That's when his high school social studies teacher, Elizabeth Collins, asked what colleges he was applying to.
Helen Heineman, an English professor at Framingham State, asked him a similar question: "Where are you going to grad school?"
Heineman became president of FSU. LeBlanc went on to the same position at Marlboro College in Vermont before coming to SNHU.
LeBlanc's penchant for using technology to improve education developed early in his career.
Houghton Mifflin Publishing hired him to start a unit of the company dedicated to higher education technology. It developed Common Space, which allowed more than one person to edit a document at a time.
"I like to think, when I am feeling a little immodest, that we kind of engineered the early prototype for something like Google Docs," LeBlanc said.
Before coming to SNHU, LeBlanc served as president at Marlboro College from 1996 to 2003. The college never embraced a fully online program, which LeBlanc called a missed opportunity. The college closed after the 2019-2020 school year for a number of reasons.
LeBlanc said that when he came aboard at SNHU, he saw a hunger to take SNHU to the next level. He credits his predecessor, Richard Gustafson, for stabilizing the school's finances and launching early online programs.
"I came to a place that had a foundation on which we could build and was fiscally stable when a lot of places were struggling," LeBlanc said.
The biggest increases in enrollment came between 2012 and 2015, when the university jumped from No. 50 to No. 4 among non-profit education providers. The school was bringing on 30 to 40 new full-time employees every Monday.
"We had to get more and more space in (the Millyard). We started with 10,000 square feet," LeBlanc said. "I remembered when we moved down there I said, 'Oh my God, what was I thinking, are we ever going to have enough people to use the space?'"
He called those three years a "rocket ride" with new computers installed on an almost-daily basis and employees working on carts scattered around the mill because desks couldn't be ordered fast enough.
"We broke everything," he said. "We broke IT, I think we broke HR, but then we learned."
Another spike came early in the pandemic, when 40,000 students enrolled. The university had to hire 1,400 new full-time employees while companies across the nation were cutting back.
Making connections
SNHU has partnered with businesses for its College for America, a competency-based program, which helps with education, professional development and career advancement.
"Paul's vision and willingness to disrupt the status quo has redefined higher education for hundreds of thousands of adult students," said Lisa Guertin, president of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield in New Hampshire, in a letter in support of LeBlanc's nomination for the chamber award.
Guertin said that through the College for America program, nearly 700 students have earned associate and/or bachelor's degrees. Companywide, more than 575 have enrolled in a degree program. The vast majority of graduates are women in front-line positions, she said.
LeBlanc says he genuinely loves connecting with people, a character trait he inherited from his parents, especially his mother, who worked in a factory making vinyl car tops until her mid-70s.
He recalled a 2004 visit to his home in Manchester with A.A. Moody Awori, who was then Kenya's vice president, where the two talked about being grandparents.
"At the end of the night before he left, (Awori) said, 'Spending time with your mother was the highlight of this whole trip,'" LeBlanc said.
LeBlanc is proud of the success SNHU has had helping students from nontraditional backgrounds.
LeBlanc talked about Josie Douyon, who graduated from a program in partnership with Duet, another competency-based education program. She is a single mother from the Boston area who worked at a hotel for nearly 10 years.
"She went to work for a tech company in Cambridge," LeBlanc said. "She has been there 12 months and just got her third promotion. She is making good money. She is better able to take care of herself and her son. She is glowing."
Expanding overseas
LeBlanc said SNHU remains committed to keeping its brick-and-mortar campus, which it has been able to improve by reinvesting online profits.
The university recently showed further commitment to Manchester by buying a Millyard parking garage and adjoining mill building for $55 million. LeBlanc admits plenty of parking spaces are available nowadays as the university continues to allow employees to work from home.
LeBlanc said there is room for more growth, noting that nearly 40 million people have some college credits but not a degree. The college is expanding in Latin America and countries overseas, including India.
LeBlanc and his wife, Patricia Findlen, live in Manchester, where he plans to remain after he eventually retires. He knows that people's lives are shaped by other people, so he's always giving back. The couple personally give to Families in Transition, New Hampshire Food bank and the YWCA.
McGrail heard LeBlanc tell the story of Douyon with much pride.
"You can tell he gets up in the morning to impact lives," McGrail said. "You can tell by the way he talks about the students' stories because he lights up and it's clearly what motivates him."
