Podcast: Blurring the Lines of the University

Future U Podcast hosts Jeff Selingo and Michael B. Horn talk to Paul LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU). When LeBlanc started, SNHU was a small college with just 2,800 students. It now has more than 135,000 learners worldwide.

LeBlanc talks describes the perilous state of higher education, its importance for the nation and world, what Covid-19 and the recession will and won’t accelerate, and how the distinction between learning online and on campus may fade in the years to come.

“In the past when the nation has gone through a catastrophe such as this, it has tended to reinvent higher-ed…,” LeBlanc said. “I think what you’ll see now is a much much greater comfort with the idea of giving students a range of options for how they acquire their learning.”

Listen to the podcast

This podcast is created and produced by higher education experts Jeff Selingo and Michael Horn.  Selingo, a FutureEd senior fellow and former editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, is special advisor and professor of practice at Arizona State University, and a visiting scholar at Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities. Horn is chief strategy officer for the Entangled Group, an education investment firm,  and a senior partner at Entangled Solutions, an education consulting company.  Selingo and Horn can be contacted here. Future U is supported by the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership, a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University, and by Entangled Solutions.