The tall, silver-bearded president of Southern New Hampshire University is beaming as he takes a brisk walk through the halls of the Mill, the private not-for-profit school’s vast nerve center. There are no students here. Instead, the converted textile factory on the banks of the Merrimack River in Manchester, New Hampshire, is packed with row after row of gray cubicles staffed by 1,700 employees servicing the exploding online enrollment—some 135,000 and counting—at SNHU, as the school is known. “We have set out to be the Nordstrom’s of higher education,” says Paul LeBlanc, 61. “We want to have the best-in-class customer support.”
A former English professor from a working-class immigrant family, LeBlanc has taken his passion for technology and, cherry-picking what many of the much-maligned for-profit colleges did right, revitalized a dying institution. Like the for-profit schools, SNHU attracts students with a nationwide advertising campaign that eats up as much as 20% of its operating budget. And as the for-profits have done, SNHU targets a nontraditional demographic, the 37% of American college students over age 24, many of whom have jobs and families. They can’t afford and don’t want a residential campus experience. His teaching staff: an army of 6,000 adjuncts who earn as little as $2,200 per course.