Southern New Hampshire University President Paul LeBlanc will spend three months at the U.S. Department of Education to help grow non-traditional higher ed programs.
In an effort to increase access and affordability for students, the U.S. Department of Education will begin selecting universities as so-called experimental sites.
LeBlanc says experimental sites will act as centers of research and development for new models of higher ed. And he says he won’t be part of the selection process.
“What I’m trying to do for the department is help it understand how to best construct those sites—in other words, what are the parameters the department wants to put around them, what are the expectations they would have for the institutions, what kind of things do they want to learn?”
Ultimately, the department hopes to take what it learns and craft regulations for competency-based learning.