Franklin & Marshall College’s incoming president believes liberal arts colleges will weather the many challenges facing higher education and continue their mission of developing well-rounded students.

“We’re in a moment in which the future of higher education has never been more important,” said Andrew Rich, whose appointment as the school’s new president was announced earlier this year.

“The liberal arts are right at the center of this and how we help prepare young people to be critical thinkers, good communicators, have the ability, resilience, the leadership skills to navigate our world,” he said. “It’s never seemed more important, and I feel like F&M does it well.”

Rich will take the helm officially as F&M’s 17th president on July 7, following the retirement of Barbara Altmann, who has led the college for seven years.

In June, Rich stepped down from his prior role as the Richard J. Henry and Susan L. Davis Dean of the Colin Powell School at the City College of New York. During his six-year tenure there, the student population grew by 40% to 4,000 students.

His ability to grow enrollment at his last job will be tested at F&M, where enrollment dropped from 2,426 in fall 2017 to 1,867 in fall 2024.

FROM APRIL: Franklin & Marshall College lays off 16 staff members

Enrollment at many colleges and universities across the country is expected to decline even further beginning in fall 2025, as a yearslong decline in birth rates begins to affect the size of the college-aged population.

One way to boost enrollment embraced by many schools has been to recruit larger numbers of international students. Today, roughly 17% of F&M’s student population is international and contributed $19.5 million to Lancaster County’s economy, according to data available through the association of international educators.

But the Trump administration’s hard stance on immigration and recent moves to restrict or screen education visa applicants has created uncertainty surrounding this large pool of potential students.

In a conversation with LNP | LancasterOnline, Rich spoke about these challenges and his hopes for F&M’s future under his leadership.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity:

Why did you throw your hat in the ring to become president of F&M?

If you go all the way back, I grew up in Newark, Delaware, which is only a little more than an hour from here. So, when I was a kid, we used to come to Lancaster, and I’ve been to Dutch Wonderland and I had a real fondness for Lancaster as a kid.

And, when I was looking at colleges, we looked at F&M … my parents actually thought a liberal arts college was a good fit for me, so F&M was the first place we looked at. I’ve always known of F&M, always admired it and really always thought it was an exceptional place.

I ended up going to the University of Richmond, which had all of the elements of a liberal arts experience.

I got intensive mentorship from faculty there. One of my professors – I was a political science major – took me under his wing, and we wrote a paper together that we published, and he let us take it to one of the major political science conferences. I also got to work on campaigns in Delaware, getting in politics and I got academic credit for it. So I felt like I got all this amazing experience thanks to going to a liberal arts college.

My first teaching job after I finished at Yale was at Wake Forest University, which is also a liberal arts college and in many respects over the last 22 years, on and off, what I’ve done at City College was try to bring the very best of the liberal arts to a different kind of institution.

How do you expect public service to influence or be part of your role here as president to F&M?

[Andrew Rich was awarded the Daily Point of Light Award in 2024. Recipients of the award are recognized for making a significant impact in their communities through volunteer service.]

Higher education is public service. Part of what you’re doing in education, and particularly in higher education, is shaping the next generation of folks who are going to make a difference in our world.

And one of the things that is striking to me about F&M that I really love is the history, (founded by) Benjamin Franklin and John Marshall, where it’s always had public service and civic engagements as an essential part of the project.

To me, what we do in the liberal arts, and particularly what I hope and believe we do here, is train folks for the careers of the future and train them for citizenship and how to be engaged in whatever it is they know needs to happen in the communities where they live. So that mission is the mission I feel like I’ve been serving in different ways all the way through my career.

READ: Lancaster County colleges, universities brace for looming dropoff in prospective students

What are your thoughts on the climate facing higher education today?

Some important questions are getting asked on all different sides of the political spectrum about what we do at colleges and universities, and I think it’s creating a moment in which all of us who are involved in this project are thinking hard about why what we do matters.

For me, it’s felt like it’s never more important to be involved in this work and to do it as a leader. … If you want to understand why this country has been so successful over the last two centuries, one place you have to look at is our higher education institutions. Colleges and universities have been the engine of innovation, they’ve been the engine of economic progress. They’ve been the engine of new knowledge.

And they are the ways that young people from all different backgrounds can equip themselves to do well for themselves, for their families, for their communities and for our society. (We’re in a) complicated political moment, but one that’s very exciting, it seems to me, for what higher education has to offer. …

I’m attracted to F&M because from what I can see it’s an institution that is thriving on many, many fronts and has all the kind of DNA of what we want higher education institutions to be doing in this country.

What is your view on the role of diversity, equity inclusion practices in higher education?

My general point of view is that higher education should be for all people. … You want everybody to have the opportunity to take advantage of what it is colleges and universities have to offer in our society. And you also want colleges and universities to be a place where all lived experiences can be represented and where all points of view can be represented.

One of the things that I think is exciting about colleges and important about colleges is that you can bring people from different lived experiences, different backgrounds, different belief systems together and they don’t have to persuade each other. They probably won’t. But they can have civil discussion and constructive dialogue about the things they disagree on in ways that can make it possible for our democracy to succeed. That’s kind of exciting. It works best when everybody gets to be a part of it.

How do you plan to support F&M’s international students or what is your message to these students in the current political climate?

My message is we love them. I mean, honestly, they are welcome here. They are embraced. They are an integral part of the fabric of Franklin & Marshall and of this community, and Lancaster itself is a community that is global in its reach, a place where refugees are welcome, where people from all different backgrounds, nationalities can come.

F&M is a stronger institution because it’s a global institution, and I know the college is doing everything in its power to serve and support our international students and we’re going to do everything we can to make sure they have every system of support that they need to be successful.

What does that look like?

Certainly it is making sure we’re in direct touch with every single one of them in one-on-one conversations to see what their status is in terms of getting their visas approved. If you have a visa, you’re set. If you don’t, you may still be able to find a path to getting one. We’re working with them.

We’re certainly monitoring what comes out of Washington closely and making some contingency plans that if there are students who can’t get to campus, that we’ll make sure that they continue their education at F&M in some kind of remote fashion until we can get them here.

What are your goals and strategies in terms of growing enrollment at F&M?

We would love to have more students, and I think there’s a pathway to doing it. The value proposition of F&M is extremely compelling, and once I get here, it’ll be one of my top priorities to figure out who and how: Who’s going to be part of the project and how we’re going to work together to make it happen quickly.

Why should students choose a liberal arts college today?

Liberal arts colleges are essential. They have been for a long time. They’re even more essential right now because when you think about what’s at the heart of what we have to offer, the ways we have prepare students to be critical thinkers, capable communicators, folks who are able to kind of navigate across disciplines and across ways of thinking – that’s what we need in our society right now.

(Members of) this generation need to have resilience, they need to have leadership skills, they need to have the kind of ways of thinking to be able to navigate that and that’s exactly what a liberal arts education does.

And, in a moment in which there’s also questions about how we can serve and support our democracy, a liberal arts college has so much to offer about how you can look at history, philosophy, how you can look cross-nationally and how you can really prepare yourself intellectually and … succeed as a citizen. That’s an important part of what liberal arts has to offer.

Once you get started, what are the first things you want to do here?

The thing I want to do most is get to know everybody. It’s a tremendous community. I already feel very fortunate how kind folks have been to begin to help me understand the different areas of work.

Right out of the gate, I’m excited to get to know our faculty, our staff. I’m very excited to get to know the leaders and the people in Lancaster and how we are working as a community partner in ways that we can be even more helpful to that project.

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