New College of Florida makes elite "Best Buy" listing in Fiske Guide to Colleges 2015

New College of Florida continued a year of prominent accolades with its selection as a “Best Buy” college – one of just 44 in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom – in the respected Fiske Guide to Colleges.
New College has appeared on the Fiske list since 2003. Other noted institutions to make this year’s “Best Buy” list are University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Indiana University and Trinity College of Dublin.
The Fiske “Best Buy” colleges must meet the guide’s criteria for a top four- or five-star academic rating, and be in its moderate or low price groupings. The guide, founded by former New York Times education editor Edward B. Fiske, is in 31st year.
The Fiske Guide ranking joins an impressive list of achievements for New College and its students:
From National Rankings:
• The Princeton Review and USA Today named New College the #2 Best Value Public College in America in their 2014 list of “100 Best Value Colleges” – this is the sixth year that New College made the top three. New College is one of three U.S. public colleges to appear in the top 10 for each of the past six years.
• Ranked #5 among all public liberal arts colleges by U.S. News & World Report in its annual rankings of the Best National Liberal Arts Colleges for 2014. This was the ninth consecutive year New College has been ranked one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges overall, and the ninth year in a row New College has been ranked in the top six among public colleges, with the nation’s three military academies and VMI taking the top four spots.
• Ranked #6 among all U.S. colleges by U.S. News and World Report’s 2013 supplemental data for the percentage of students who go on to graduate school within a year of graduation.
• U.S. News & World Report also included New College as #21 in a list of public and private schools whose students graduated with the least debt. Its data also show New College ranks #10 in the nation for the percentage of students with no debt at graduation.
• Listed as a “Best Buy” school in the 2014 Fiske Guide to Colleges, one of 41 institutions – 21 public and 20 private – to earn that distinction. New College has been consistently rated a Best Buy by Fiske since 2003.
• Rated #7 by Kiplinger’s in its “100 Best Values in Public Colleges” for 2013. This marks the 10th consecutive time that New College placed among the nation’s top 20 colleges overall on the Kiplinger’s list.
From Our Scholars:
• Graduating seniors Timothy Duff and Kaitlin Statz won Frost Scholarships to attend Oxford University for one-year, full-time Master’s courses in STEM fields. The new Frost Scholarship Programme funds ten current students from Florida SUS institutions, supported by the generosity of the Phillip and Patricia Frost Philanthropic Foundation. Students must be admitted to Oxford to be eligible.
• The College garnered five Fulbright Scholarships for 2014-15, for graduates who will spend next year in Belarus (Erich Bargainer), China (Katharine Williams), India (Laura Robinson), Germany (Richard Zay), and Taiwan (Robert Klinkel). Two alternates were named for Mongolia (Lorna Hadlock) and Sweden (Robert Hincapie).
• In addition to her Fulbright grant, graduating senior Katherine Williams received a U.S. Dept. of State Critical Language Scholarship to continue her study of Chinese. This is the sixth consecutive year that New College students have earned these awards, which cover a years’ worth of intensive language study in a super-intensive summer program in the country of the target language.
• In New College’s history, 80 students have received Fulbrights to 35 countries on six continents, with 60 scholarships awarded in the last ten years. This year was a first for grants to Belarus and India.
• Third-year Natural Sciences student Abigail Oakes was awarded one of 50 Udall Scholarships nationwide for college sophomores and juniors committed to careers related to the environment. Oakes was also named a 2014 Newman Civic Fellow by Florida Campus Compact for her service to the community.
• Eight students won National Science Foundation “Research Experiences for Undergraduates” (NSF-REU) awards for funded summer research. Anne-lise Emig will participate in an international NSF-REU sponsored by the U. of North Carolina at Greensboro in synthetic organometallic chemistry and hosted at the Universities of Bristol and Bath. Zachary Decker will go to West Virginia U. for research on nanotechnology and chemistry. Alexander Galarce will go to Rochester Institute of Technology to study mathematical biology. Brenna Kirk will carry out electrochemical synthesis of oxide clusters for use in thin film electronics at the U. of Oregon. Reed Meyerson will conduct computational chemistry research for non-bonded dimers at Texas A&M U. Nicholas Scheffer will excavate and analyze a 12th century pueblo at the U. of Arizona and the Arizona State Museum. Nancy Shipley will work on mangrove ecology at the Smithsonian Marine Station, Fort Pierce, FL. Daniel Xie will participate in a high performance computing program at U. of Maryland supported by NSA, addressing problems posed by industry and government agencies.
• The PUSH/Success Program, sponsored in June by Professor of Biology Sandra Gilchrist to provide three weeks of intensive coursework and mentoring to middle school students from under-represented groups on health and science careers, received support this year from Publix and the Florida Sea Grant Program, funded by U.S.NOAA.