Paul LeBlanc, who as president of Southern New Hampshire University oversaw the two-decade transformation of a struggling 2,500-student college into one of the country’s largest online education providers, is leaving next summer.

Lisa Marsh Ryerson, the university’s provost and former president of Wells College and of the AARP Foundation, will succeed LeBlanc as SNHU’s president, the university said. She will begin a two-year term on July 1.

“I will sleep well at night, knowing that SNHU is in good hands,” LeBlanc said in a video statement. “I know this community will stay true to its mission.”

LeBlanc was hired as president of SNHU in northern Manchester in 2003, coming from Marlboro College in Vermont. The school had begun as a business school in 1932 and gone through several iterations, getting the authority to award degrees in the 1960s. Renamed New Hampshire College it expanded physically, buying the former Mount Saint Mary College campus in Hooksett before selling it and consolidating on its current campus, which straddles the Hooksett/Manchester line. It became Southern New Hampshire University in 2001.

When LeBlanc arrived SNHU, like many small private colleges, was facing an uncertain financial future. The school had already started offering online courses but LeBlanc oversaw a huge expansion in the system, creating a new breed of private universities with enormous online-only enrollments. SNHU now has an online enrollment of more than 200,000, more than the on-campus enrollment of every New Hampshire college and university combined.

LeBlanc was also a leader in the school’s development of what is known as competency-based learning, an alternative to traditional semester programs, focusing on measurable skills or outcomes and uses variable class structures and lengths of terms.

Inside Higher Education reported that Leblanc said in an email to colleagues that after leaving he would work on developing “new AI-supported learning models” and “a new global data consortium, which we think is critical if higher education is going to shape its AI future as opposed to being merely reactive.”