In a matter of 18 years, South New Hampshire University (SNHU) has multiplied its students by 64: from 2,800 to 180,000, to become the largest distance university in the United States. It has the same population on the Internet as the cities of Burgos and Albacete and its idea is to reach 300,000 university students – the size of Valladolid or Vigo – in three years. The architect of its explosion is Paul Leblanc, its rector (president), which has successfully turned the student’s relationship with the university upside down. That is why many institutions in the United States are now trying to copy the recipe.
When in 2003 Leblanc took over the institution in the city of Manchester, founded in 1932 to train the military, it only had 16 employees in the digital area and a few hundred distance students. Two decades later, this son of Canadian immigrants is a technology guru invited to speak even at the Davos Forum. The most innovative thing about the SHNU method, a private non-profit university, is that it creates training routes tailored to each student after a personal interview with one of its more than 300 advisers and with the answers to a questionnaire developed together with Google. The rector, who participated in the Global Education Forum, tells this newspaper in Madrid, where he met with the students of the degree in Education at the Camilo José Cela University, who received him with great expectation.
The SNHU groups the profiles of students according to their needs and knowledge. “Why attend a class on something you already know? Why not validate those skills? The university has to be built for each one ”, says Leblanc. The Google program, which they are already using, but will continue to develop for two years, improves the more data it stores and compares.
Professor Johann Neem is shown in his book Seeking Purpose in an Age of Reform (Looking for the goal in a time of reform) as one of the detractors of the system developed by Leblanc, since he believes that this training leaves aside questions of debate and reflection that a university must provide to the student.
“You don’t just learn in the classroom. If you have a 26-year-old military [el 18% de sus estudiantes ha pasado por el ejército] Who led a group in Afghanistan and comes back, probably knows a lot about leadership. How do we catch this learning? ”Continues the rector of SHNU. “For that we make a skills map: What do you know? And what can you do with what you know? Because that’s what employers are interested in. In a newsroom, it does not matter if you know the structure of an article if you are unable to write it ”. The SHNU allows a student who passes several micro-credentials – very specific specialization courses – with a preconceived route to achieve a bachelor’s degree if they also take certain basic subjects.
SHNU wants to end traditional exams; uses simulations. “Let them show what they know how to do. We work a lot with employers to find out what competencies and skills they require and we adapt the assessment ”. College is not on the top 650 list colleges (centers that teach, but do not investigate) from the United States of the magazine Forbes ―There are a total of 3,900―, but Leblanc takes the salaries of its graduates as a reference, above the average. “With the practical engineering course they earn $ 77,000 [66.000 euros] year. Sometimes double ”.
Leblanc’s distance learning formula is no longer only aimed at adults who work and take a few hours to study – the public that tends to be the majority in distance learning – but also at those who have just graduated from high school. This objective would raise broods in Spain; Minister Manuel Castells, ex-professor at the Open University of Catalonia (virtual) and professor for decades in Berkeley (California), hinted at the possibility of exploring this formula for the entire population and the rectors stirred. The one from Granada, Pilar Aranda, stated in an article in this newspaper: “We consider our teaching spaces as places of personal and work relationships in which close humane treatment contributes a lot to training and research. Without emotion, education is more difficult ”.
“This is the first generation of students who have grown up as digital natives. It is much more comfortable for them to learn on a screen. They do their homework on a mobile phone, not on their laptop ”, defends Rector Leblanc. “In addition, residence on a campus is very expensive in the United States and studying at a distance gives flexibility to work for young people without means, as it happens with adults.”. Their tuition fees are lower (2,100 euros per semester compared to the usual 8,600 in a digital grade) and with their elasticity they reach an audience – there are 30,000 African Americans, many Indians from the reserves and refugees – who seek to recycle.
During the pandemic, the SNHU has grown by 1,000 people in the workforce and by 40,000 students, the same as the universities of Valencia and the Basque Country after decades of operation. For Leblanc, the perfect model would be “that one day you go to class in the morning and the next you watch the lesson from your home at night”. Automotive engineering students, for example, “follow the classes online and they go to the laboratories to use the wind tunnel ”. But that option is only in the hands of the minority who reside on their campus or nearby, of course.
“For the students online, we have a hybrid system. For example, there is a mental health program, in which you follow the course remotely, although twice a year you spend time in a residence doing clinical internships, because you need to see patients ”, continues Leblanc. In Spain, where remote healthcare degrees are not conceived, more and more MBAs are offered online who concentrate their students from half the world two or three times in a point of the globe to live experiences in group.
Leblanc, doctor in Rhetoric, composition and technology from the University of Massachusetts, laments the bureaucratic obstacles to transform teaching: “Technology changes every day, music, journalism or commerce, but not health or education because there are two regulated industries with large public funding ”.
Previous college which he led, Malboro, Vermont, which refused to teach remotely, has closed. “The university model is different,” he regrets. Leblanc, who paid for his career working in construction during the summers, recalls that “the debt for studies of university graduates is 1.6 trillion dollars [1,38 billones de euros]”, As well as the Spanish public debt. According to an extended estimate made in 2017 by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, half of the 3,900 colleges and US universities [en España hay 90 universidades] they will go bankrupt in a decade. In 2018, the agency Moody estimated that at least 25% of private centers were in the red. Although the rector of SHNU does not want to generalize: “There are great universities that are richer than ever. Harvard has $ 54 billion [46.000 millones de euros]. It is, after the Vatican, the second richest non-profit organization in the world ”.
Although the SHNU estimates that it will reach 300,000 students in 20124 ―some are Spanish scholarships as athletes on the residential campus―, Leblanc assures that he does not care: “The important thing is that there is a great need to train, even if you do not change jobs” . He thinks that recycling is the only way not to fall into disenchantment and poverty. “People believe that society and the economy no longer work for them, that is why there is a rise in nationalism and populism.”
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