SNHU: The Amazon of Higher Ed

Slate, recently published an interesting article titled, "The Amazon of Higher Education: How tiny, struggling Southern New Hampshire University has become a behemoth."

It's a fascinating look at how a traditional B&M school embraced DL to make a profit. The inside look at the business of online education includes lines like, "Click on an ad for the MBA program and you get a phone call from a counselor in less than nine minutes."

The author quotes SNHU president, LeBlanc, and Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen frequently. They believe, among other things, that “[t]he business models implicit in higher-ed are broken." LeBlanc has created a highly standardized model of higher education where the professors "act more like coaches than professors." It appears that this is -- and probably has been for a while -- the new face of DL.

Overall, the article is complimentary of SNHU, ending with the suggestion that hundreds of other nonprofit B&M schools will soon expand their online programs to look a lot like SNHU.

 

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