Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 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 “classical education” curriculum. The experiment, which began in January 2023, took an unexpected turn because the real test wasn’t 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.
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.
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’s or Williams’ 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.
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’s education leviathan.
First Time in College students are the pulse by which a college’s 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’s First Time in College growth rate is nearly zero and is still below its own numbers from a decade ago.
Including transfers, the college’s current total undergraduate growth rate is under 2%. At this rate, New College won’t 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).
If it weren’t bad enough to relegate Florida’s designated “honors college” to having the lowest SAT scores of any of the state’s eleven honors colleges, the costs to achieve this failure have been enormous. According to the state’s 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.)
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’s other most expensive college: the Air Force Academy. New College is not only vastly outspending the public colleges in Florida, but it’s spending more per student than any private college in Florida.
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?
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.
As far as the “classical” 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’t just destroying the innovative verve that once made the college so admired; it’s extinguishing the college’s once-potent market advantage. New College increasingly looks like every other small college (it now has grades and remedial programs — this is the legislatively designated “Honors College”). Those who wanted a robust “classical curriculum” should be disappointed, but if it were only a branding stunt, the market isn’t responding either. Even if it were a cynical fundraising ploy, the “classical curriculum” billionaires (whoever they are) haven’t stepped up; the college’s endowment still sits below its 2001 number.
It should seem obvious to all — and particularly to fiscal conservatives — that spending so much of the taxpayers’ 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’être 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’s statistically irrelevant in the state university system.
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’ own performance metrics, it’s 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.
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’t 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.
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.
What will it profit a governor who eliminates a gender studies department, yet forfeits his soul? For the sake of Florida taxpayers, let’s hope that DeSantis doesn’t want to find out.
Nathan Allen, a New College alumnus, served as current New College President Richard Corcoran’s vice president of strategy and special projects in 2023-24.
