No other university president in central Ohio has served at one institution longer than Franklin University President David Decker.
There are plenty of people in higher education who say the job of university president is more challenging than ever, and headlines like “Wanted: New College Presidents. Mission: Impossible" and "Why Good Presidents Are Walking Away" aren't exactly encouraging.
But Decker, who joined Franklin in 2007 as the private university's fourth president, has stuck it out through the ups and downs of the last two decades.
"In 2007, when I began at Franklin University, there were about 21 million college students in the United States. Today, there are about 18 million," Decker said. "During that period of time, the number of colleges
and universities has not gone down. It has actually gone up. And there are major new contributors in the sector."
Large multi-state online universities like Southern New Hampshire University and Western Governors University have expanded their reach as more institutions are feeling growing competition for the same pool of students.
"Some institutions have reacted to that by sort of hunkering down, trying to cut their costs accepting the fact that they're going to get smaller and hoping that somehow it'll all blow over," Decker said. "But it's not going to blow over. Nothing ever blows over."
Decker said universities have two options: engage with it or stand by the road and watch the bus go by.
Franklin, he said, is choosing the former.
The Downtown university is now the largest private school in Greater Columbus, Decker said — an encouraging sign in higher education as many other institutions, especially private schools, have seen stagnant or declining enrollment during the COVID years.
Franklin enrolled 10,319 students in fall 2025, increasing its enrollment by 9% year-over-year. The vast majority of its student body are adults over the age of 25, with the average student in their early 30s. More than 60% of Franklin's students are women, and about half of all students take classes part-time.
Many Franklin students are often juggling classes with careers and families as they pursue additional certifications, while others are mid-career professionals who started college elsewhere and never finished. That's exactly the kind of student that more universities are scrambling to figure out how to serve. But Decker said Franklin already has the momentum.
"We're trying to look ahead," he said. "You can't predict what's going to happen in the future. But you can look ahead and say what are the capacities that you need in order to succeed in the future."
The Dispatch sat down with Decker for a question-and-answer interview, which is presented below with edits for length and clarity.
Question: How would you describe this moment in higher education?
Answer: I would say it is a moment in which higher education in general is suffering from a crisis of self-confidence.
Obviously, you always have pressures coming from many different directions. We have the demographic cliff, and we have political pressures of all kinds from all different directions. We have a general sort of questioning of the value of higher education and certainly the public mind. But all of those things are not that different really from things that happened to higher education at other points in recent history.
I think that that our sector is suffering from a lack of self-confidence and a lack of willingness to articulate its value in any way other than a defensive way.
What would you say is the opposite of playing defense? What does that look like?
I'll give you some examples. Our country has a dramatic shortage of teachers in almost every state. It has dramatic shortage of nurses in almost every state. It has shortages in many other fields.
Our university has targeted teacher education and nursing and allied health and related subjects and dramatic expansion into the national market outside of our base in Ohio. Three years ago, we were authorized to offer teacher education programs in two states, and now we're in 14 states. We offer nursing programs in over 30 states around the United States.
The opposite of being in a defensive crouch and explaining yourself to the world is to constructively try and address the obvious issues that exist in our workforce, so that our economy remains strong and so that there's a culture of opportunity.
I'm not talking in the abstract. I'm talking about individual people believing that they have the opportunity to make more money, and to live in a better town, and to take care of the family better, save money for the future, and do things things that everybody wants to do. And we have the ability to facilitate and expedite that progress on a personal level for our students.
What is the biggest challenge facing Franklin University right now?
I'd say one of the biggest challenges, perhaps the biggest, is the disconnect between the speed of change in industry and the needs of the workforce on the one hand and the slowness of the regulatory world on the other.
We have the ability of Franklin to very quickly produce programs and educational offerings that address specific things that are happening in the current world, whether it's AI or whether it's specializations in nursing or whether it's new pedagogy.
But in order to do those effectively, very often we need to get approval from accreditation authorities. And those are organizations that are accustomed to operating at a much slower pace than Franklin University is accustomed to operating at it.
If you could wave a magic wand and fix one thing in higher education, what would it be?
I don't know about solving a problem, but I would make a request, and the request would be to the opinion leaders of our society. The ones who write the columns for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post and the ones who speak on television and in the legislatures.
And my request would be that the the next time they are preparing to give a speech or an interview about how not everybody needs to go to college and about how college is too expensive and about how it's too unrelated to the needs of society that they would look at two charts from the United States Department of Labor.
One of them shows the correlation between income and education. You see a straight line going up from no high school to a high school degree to some college but no degree, the bachelor's degree, the master's degree, the doctoral degree. The income line goes up.
The other one is is the correlation between education level and unemployment rate. And there you have the opposite.
If I could just get all the people who are making those statements to look at those two graphs before the next time they open their mouth, I would be a happy man.
Lightning round with Franklin University President David Decker
Reading list?
"At the moment, I'm reading "Gettysburg: The Last Invasion" by Allen Guelzo, and I'm reading a biography of Thomas Cromwell. Generally speaking, I like history and poetry and historical novels."
Top artist on Spotify?
Decker has diverse music tastes. He's a fan of everything from rock and roll to Caribbean music to jazz and classical. He particularly like Dire Straits.
Favorite campus event?
"My favorite campus event is our doctoral hooding ceremony. We have five doctoral programs every term and three times a year we graduate 30 or 40 new doctors of education and business and so forth. We have a special ceremony for that. Our big graduations have thousands of students, but these are much smaller and more intimate. This is such a sort of mountain top experience for students. The doctoral degree puts you at the top of the hierarchy of education, and these are students, who are almost all of them employed, did this while they were working."
If you're visiting our campus, you can't miss...
"I would say the building that you're sitting in [which houses the President's Office on the corner of E. Rich Street and Grant Avenue.] This building was constructed in 1863. It's the oldest building on campus. It was built in the middle of the Civil War by the sisters of St. Joseph as a school initially and as a place for the sisters to live who taught in the school.
It has gone through many, many changes over the years. But if you look, for example, at that hardwood floor over there, that's the original hardwood floor from 1863. And when we redid this building last year, we sent out to get some matching wood for parts of the floor that had been damaged. And the the mill that we sent to told us that that wood was 800 years old when they milled it.
So, it's now almost a thousand years old. I consider that to be pretty good genes.
Higher education reporter Sheridan Hendrix can be reached at shendrix@dispatch.com and on Signal at @sheridan.120. You can follow her on Instagram at @sheridanwrites.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: After 20 years at Franklin University, President Decker is still making things possible
