From the Sarasota Herald-Tribune on 1-28-21:
Our legislators are grappling with a $3.3 billion projected revenue shortfall over the next two fiscal years. New College is joining the State University System (SUS) of Florida in examining everything we do.
New College students receive an Ivy League education at a public school price and with top-ranked quality. Thanks to our legislators, taxpayers and community supporters, New College – in particular — does well on both price and quality. The challenges Florida confronts require that we do even better.
Florida keeps tuition and fees at our state universities relatively low. The total cost of attendance (which includes tuition, fees, room, board, travel, incidentals) for a student at New College is $21,500, approximately the same as at the other state universities. However, the average cost to New College students is a little less than $8,000 per year because of scholarships and financial aid.
While an average annual cost of $8,000 compares well with other states, it exceeds what many students can afford. A third of our students come from families of four or more people, whose total income is less than $40,000 per year. Moreover, not all aid is need-based; a significant portion goes to students who have accomplished much but who have also grown up in families that had the financial wherewithal to afford enrichment activities for them. A student with more need might actually wind up paying more.
Happily, New College students have benefited from our region’s extraordinary private philanthropy. In the past year, the Community Foundation of Sarasota County; Charles and Margery Barancik Foundation; and, most recently, a wonderful bequest from local philanthropists Lee and Bob Peterson, have provided funds to support aid for students in need.
Increasing success for students in need calls for more than help covering tuition, room and board. Students who struggle to cover expenses graduate at substantially lower rates than wealthier classmates do. No state can afford to neglect educating large segments of its population needed for new industries and technologies that we cannot now fully imagine.
At New College, a student simultaneously encounters the broad range of disciplinary tools that not only allows a student to immediately enter the job market but also provides that student with the tools to keep learning. This is a unique strength of the New College liberal arts and sciences education.
Access to education does more than help Florida’s students; it benefits all Floridians. The SUS is ranked as the top public university system in the country. We should not forget how hard we have worked as a state to achieve this, and how easily it can be lost.
And it is no accident that our civilization is co-extensive with universities. They arose, seemingly spontaneously, a little less than 1,000 years ago. Students and scholars from all over Europe gathered in towns such as Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge and Padua – drawn by the lure of one another’s company — and they recently rediscovered the works of the Greeks as reinterpreted by Arab scholars. Seventeen of the greatest universities in America date to before the American Revolution. Florida has a dozen state universities that serve almost 350,000 students. Our state and our nation could not function without universities and the research enterprises associated with them.
As Florida’s legislators manage the state’s revenue shortfall, there will be calls to cut the SUS budget. Everything must be on the table and New College will respond to its share of proportionate cuts. We must take extreme care not to limit access or decrease the quality of the education the SUS offers.
Florida will call upon today’s graduates to solve the problems of healthcare, environmental challenges and the economy. We must persist in preparing our graduates in ably answering the call.