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<\/p>\nGov. Ron DeSantis\u2019 experiment with New College of Florida was intended to excise DEI (and DEI-adjacent gender studies) from a state institution and install some kind of \u201cclassical education\u201d curriculum. The experiment, which began in January 2023, took an unexpected turn because the real test wasn\u2019t whether DeSantis could strongarm reform into the small, once-private college, but rather whether these conservatives could un-woke the college while maintaining the fiscal sobriety that has long been the soul of conservatism.<\/p>\n
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New College began as a local idea with a bizarre risk-forward academic curriculum that was designed to jolt higher education from its 1950s slumber. There would be no grades or credit hours; rejecting the managerial-accounting approach to education that had seized higher education, New College would put the responsibility of learning directly on each student.<\/p>\n
The idea that Sarasota in 1961 (population: 35,000) could launch an elite liberal arts college would appear to be rather delusional. But by 1974, New College was arguably the highest-rated liberal arts college in America, with an entering class boasting SAT scores higher than Amherst\u2019s or Williams\u2019 entering classes. Somehow, Sarasota achieved educational alchemy. But the college was funded disproportionately by its very high tuition and the 1973 oil crisis toppled a financial structure almost entirely dependent on this sole source of revenue. The 1970s witnessed more colleges closing than any decade before or since. The state salvaged New College because in 1975 it was the only nationally top-ranked college in Florida.<\/p>\n
The water-torture descent into bureaucratic homogenization was at first gradual, but the state kept dripping requirements, and by 2015 the college began to look like a small, substantially underperforming version of every other state college. Today, the bulk of the required curriculum at New College is determined by the state and is uniform across the state university system. And so the alchemical miracle of 1974 has become the contorted liberal arts ornament of Florida\u2019s education leviathan.<\/p>\n
First Time in College students are the pulse by which a college\u2019s health is measured. Under the current administration, New College has consistently posted all-time low SAT scores, yet even those are artificially inflated because the administration exploits the loophole of not reporting transfer test scores while its student body swells to over 30% transfers, more than double its historical average. New College\u2019s First Time in College growth rate is nearly zero and is still below its own numbers from a decade ago.<\/p>\n
Including transfers, the college\u2019s current total undergraduate growth rate is under 2%. At this rate, New College won\u2019t hit its stated undergraduate target of 1,200 students until 2044, and the total cost to Florida taxpayers is projected to be about $2.2 billion over that period. All this for a college of fewer than 900 undergraduates that is ranked #135 by U.S. News (the college has fallen 59 places in that ranking since the new administration took over in 2023).<\/p>\n
If it weren\u2019t bad enough to relegate Florida\u2019s designated \u201chonors college\u201d to having the lowest SAT scores of any of the state\u2019s eleven honors colleges, the costs to achieve this failure have been enormous. According to the state\u2019s university governing body, the Board of Governors, New College is projected to spend over $500,000 per degree, or about 10 times the Florida state university system average. To put that in perspective, the state could enroll New College students an hour north at the University of South Florida in Tampa, pay for their education, and buy them a house (or a Rolls-Royce Cullinan Black Badge, or any number of other luxuries that cost the $450,000+ difference between a degree from New College and from the higher rated University of South Florida.)<\/p>\n
This year, the college has budgeted over $130,000 per student. These costs make New College one of the most expensive colleges in the world to operate and put it in the same territory as America\u2019s other most expensive college: the Air Force Academy. New College is not only vastly outspending the public colleges in Florida, but it\u2019s spending more per student than any private college in Florida.<\/p>\n
The current administration is academically running a Motel 6 on a Ritz Carlton budget. Should it really be that expensive to close a gender studies department?<\/p>\n
When the New College became a ward of the state in 1975, the pressures to conform were, at first, mostly benign. But eventually, the leviathan has its demands, and everything from data reporting to course programming began to transform the once innovative school into a small, failed version of its larger state university system brethren. The contagion of mindless yet expensive bureaucracy became unavoidable.<\/p>\n
As far as the \u201cclassical\u201d curriculum reformation, there has been a performative nod to Homer, but all other indications are that the college is being led by a woke CEO transforming what was a distinguished market position into a generic and sterile rebranded Cracker Barrel. And such milquetoast homogenization isn\u2019t just destroying the innovative verve that once made the college so admired; it\u2019s extinguishing the college\u2019s once-potent market advantage. New College increasingly looks like every other small college (it now has grades and remedial programs \u2014 this is the legislatively designated \u201cHonors College\u201d). Those who wanted a robust \u201cclassical curriculum\u201d should be disappointed, but if it were only a branding stunt, the market isn\u2019t responding either. Even if it were a cynical fundraising ploy, the \u201cclassical curriculum\u201d billionaires (whoever they are) haven\u2019t stepped up; the college\u2019s endowment still sits below its 2001 number.<\/p>\n
It should seem obvious to all \u2014 and particularly to fiscal conservatives \u2014 that spending so much of the taxpayers\u2019 money on a college that represents less than one-quarter of one percent of the state university system is a wildly inefficient way to prove whatever the point may have been. New College has, it seems, simply exchanged one managerial class for another, spending freely to expand political fiefdoms while letting the raison d\u2019\u00eatre of the college wither. And once the taxpayers of Florida become aware of what may be one of the most expensive political stunts in recent history, the probable solution would be to close the college that\u2019s statistically irrelevant in the state university system.<\/p>\n
The solution to this mess is fundamental to the conservative soul: privatize it. Let New College compete in the market instead of insulating itself from reality by gorging at the trough of taxpayer funds. When the state took possession of the college in 1975, the college was one of the highest rated in the nation and cost about $18,000 per student to operate (in 2025 dollars). Now, according to the Board of Governors\u2019 own performance metrics, it\u2019s the lowest-rated college in the system (average score since inception of the metrics) and is budgeted to cost over $130,000 per student this year. If a global energy crisis pushing the college to become a ward of state was a failure, then what shall we make of an administration that cannot operate the college financially or academically? At least in 1974 one could readily determine the value that was being created.<\/p>\n
Concomitant with the free market is local control. If the local community, which includes wealthy Sarasota, were to agree to support such a college, then isn\u2019t the obvious solution to return the college to the private market from which it came? Privatizing a state college may seem insane but so was launching a liberal arts college in 1961 with the objective of being the best. Sarasota did it once, and Sarasota can do it again.<\/p>\n
So, end the bailout. Offer to support a transition to the private sector, and let local control and the market, not the government, issue its verdict on whether New College is worth saving. The political malincentives and distorted economics of government subsidies must end.<\/p>\n
What will it profit a governor who eliminates a gender studies department, yet forfeits his soul? For the sake of Florida taxpayers, let\u2019s hope that DeSantis doesn\u2019t want to find out.<\/p>\n
Nathan Allen, a New College alumnus, served as current New College President Richard Corcoran\u2019s vice president of strategy and special projects in 2023-24.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gov. Ron DeSantis\u2019 experiment with New College of Florida was intended to excise DEI (and DEI-adjacent gender studies)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13747,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12181,28,30,29,1422,12180,12179,12183,412,12182],"class_list":["post-13746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-college-students","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-florida-state-university","tag-liberal-arts-college","tag-new-college-of-florida","tag-private-college","tag-ron-desantis","tag-state-university-system"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}