The New Normal, Episode 6: President Lisa Marsh Ryerson

Five takeaways from the president of a university that enrolls 225,000 learners at a time on why higher education cannot tweak its way to an AI-native future, and what she wants from the companies pitching her.

Southern New Hampshire University held its early graduations on Hanover Street in 1932, with about 50 learners in the room. Today it enrolls 225,000 learners at a time, starts a new term every eight weeks, and posted the largest year-over-year percentage increase in students in the country in recent IPEDS data, above 19%. Lisa Marsh Ryerson leads SNHU as president, after running a women’s college and AARP’s foundation work on poverty among older adults.

Ryerson is the sixth guest on The New Normal, OutRival’s interview series with leaders deploying AI in production. The conversation, recorded on SNHU’s campus, covers what the university decided before it bought anything, why higher education cannot tweak its way to AI-native systems, and what she wants from the companies pitching her.

Here are the five biggest takeaways from her conversation with OutRival co-founder Ruben Harris.

1. The obligation comes before the technology

Long before AI, SNHU built its enrollment operation around one commitment: reach a learner in the moment that matters to them.

If someone sees a commercial at 10pm and starts thinking about going back to school, the university owes that person a conversation right then. “Our obligation back to them, that brand promise of opening up access, is to get to them in the moment that matters most for them,” Ryerson says.

That commitment gets harder to keep at 225,000 learners.

“We can’t have a human at every stage as we continue to grow,” Ryerson says. So SNHU puts agents alongside its advisors, answering questions and routing learners to a human once they are ready to talk. “If you answer only inbound, you are totally reactive. Our work requires us to be daily intentionally proactive.”

2. You cannot tweak your way to an AI-native future

“What got us to where we are today will not get us into the future,” Ryerson says, and she applies that to SNHU before anyone else.

She credits the companies building tools for higher ed for reinventing their product sets, but reinventing an existing system is still tweaking it, not rebuilding it. “We cannot tweak our way to the future,” she says.

What interests her more is building from scratch with an AI-native lens, which is what SNHU is doing with its own new AI platform. Starting there means asking what a learning experience actually needs to produce a return for the learner, without assuming any of SNHU’s existing tools or processes have to be part of the answer.

If colleges and universities do not build these systems themselves, someone else will end up defining what learning looks like. “Why would we ever cede our authority on what learning is and what learning must be for people and for communities?”

3. Invest in the people before the licenses

Ryerson calls SNHU a build culture. But that doesn’t mean the university builds everything itself. It means that before SNHU adopts a tool, it trains its people to actually understand the work that tool is supposed to do.

She had chief AI officer George Siemens design a six-week AI boot camp for her leadership team. People kept doing their normal jobs while it ran, with daily assignments and lunch-and-learns worked in alongside everything else, and the material was tailored by role, so a provost and a CFO learned different things.

“We learned where it belongs, and more importantly, where it doesn’t,” she says. That same program is now rolling out to the next level of leaders.

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4. Build with us, not for us

Ryerson gets pitched new AI tools and partnerships constantly, and says SNHU is more curious than ever about what is happening outside its walls. SNHU recently created a specific point of contact for this: a new executive vice president for enterprise ventures, Jim Chilton, who leads incubation work.

“When someone assumes that we need something, without really knowing us, I know that it isn’t authentic,” she says.

The partnerships she values are the ones where a company’s team works alongside hers, runs pilots, and tells her honestly what is not working. When a company cares about SNHU’s learners as much as SNHU does, she stops thinking of it as a vendor and starts thinking of it as part of her own team. Her instruction to anyone who wants to work with SNHU: “Build with us, not for us.”

5. Personalization is not a one-time purchase

SNHU’s advisors work from a model Ryerson calls purpose matchmaking: instead of assuming what a learner wants, an advisor asks. The answer might be a degree, or it might be a promotion and help identifying a skills gap. The advisor’s job is “building a pathway with a learner, not for a learner, assuming their purpose.”

The catch is that what a learner wants isn’t a constant.

Harris notes that goals and purpose change over time, so a single conversation cannot cover it. Ryerson agrees, and names the mistake leaders make: they buy a system and “think it’s a one and done.” The alternative is staying curious enough to keep asking questions, whether the one asking is a person or an agent. “It’s about knowing,” she says. “And caring to know.”

That is why she wants every channel held to the same standard. A learner who applied years ago and never enrolled should be recognized as that same person if they come back. “Access without completion is not positive,” Ryerson says.

Listen to the episode

Check out the full episode to hear:

• Why she cut her executive team to seven while growing the leadership layers underneath it
• The data lake test she applies to measurement: are you swimming across, or drowning?
• What walking in the work means to her, and why she describes it as a matter of respect
• Her most used AI prompt, which asks a model to check her blind spots and cognitive bias