Broken: How Our Social Systems are Failing Us and How We Can Fix Them

Many of the systems built to serve people instead do more harm than good.

In Broken, Dr. Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, draws on his experience working in one such system—education—to reconnect us to the human facets of serving people. In doing so, he charts a course for rebuilding and reinhabiting better systems across education, healthcare, criminal justice, government, and more.

The United States spends enormous sums on helping people—$3.8 trillion on healthcare, $182 billion on prisons, and $604 billion on higher education—and yet these systems routinely fail us.

When we seek to improve how they function, our efforts focus on policy debates, technical solutions, funding, and data. But if these systems are to truly improve, we have to start with the human values that fuel decision making.

Broken explores the deeply human dimensions we must consider—aspiring, discovering, mattering—if we want to rebuild the policies, technologies, processes, and, most importantly, the heart we use to serve people.

Over the course of 25 years as a college and university president and higher education innovator, Paul LeBlanc, PhD, has encountered innumerable wonderful people who want to do the right thing for students but whose efforts cannot overcome the shortcomings of the system. Now, he shares what he’s learned, and continues to learn, about the opportunities and necessity to put humanity and care at the center of all our systems.

With Broken, LeBlanc outlines the distinctly human questions that education—and all systems that serve—must start asking to reframe what is broken in order to make lasting repairs and to better care for those they serve.