Located in Sarasota, New College of Florida has educated intellectually curious students for lives of great achievement since its founding in 1960. That’s why New College has appeared in every edition of Loren Pope’s Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About College. As the State of Florida’s designated honors college, New College provides an exceptional undergraduate education that will transform your intellectual curiosity into personal accomplishment.
The College’s 110-acre Bayfront campus along the Gulf of Mexico is home to more than 850 students and 80 full-time faculty engaged in interdisciplinary research and collaborative learning. As one of the nation’s premier public liberal arts colleges, students with big ideas and even bigger goals for their future are welcome.
Chart Your Course
At New College, students with a passion for learning are supported. That’s why New College doesn’t assign letter grades to measure your mastery of new knowledge. It’s the reason all of your classes are taught by professors — not by graduate students — who evaluate your coursework every semester and provide you with a narrative evaluation of your progress.
And you will play an active role in planning your education by committing to seven academic contracts with your faculty advisor. Each contract is a written agreement between you and your faculty advisor in which you lay out not only your educational goals and pursuits, but also personal goals and activities. You and your faculty advisor will monitor your progress toward graduation alongside your holistic development.
With the College’s low faculty-to-student ratio of 10:1, you will enjoy much smaller class sizes than you would experience at a larger university. You can choose from more than 35 areas of concentration (majors) and over 300 courses offered annually at New College. Plus, you get the added benefit of being able to enroll in courses at any of the other four member institutions in the Cross-College Alliance: Ringling College of Art + Design, Ringling Museum (Florida State University), State College of Florida, and University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee.
New College does not have summer courses, but the academic year includes a January term used to work on Independent Study Projects, or ISPs. ISPs can be undertaken as an individual or a group and are supervised by faculty. ISPs can vary from lab experiments to scholarly papers to art performances. The time can also be used to participate in an off-campus internship or a study-abroad opportunity.
Outcomes
New College has been named one of The Princeton Review’s “Top 50 Colleges That Pay You Back,” based on remarkable outcomes — including 64 Fulbright Scholarships awarded to New College students since 2005. New College helps prepare students for whatever they have planned — whether it’s a career or a path to graduate school. Nearly 80 percent of New College students are accepted to graduate schools across the country, including schools like Columbia University, American University’s College of Law, and Carnegie Mellon University. Recent New College graduates have also gotten jobs with employers such as The New York Times and the Massachusetts Climate Action Network in Boston.
Affordable Price
New College is committed to making your undergraduate education as affordable as possible. Because its a public college, its in-state tuition and fees are significantly lower than those of private colleges. Florida ranks as the 6th best state for low student loan debt and New College graduates have the lowest average debt compared to their peers at all of the other state universities in Florida.* With more than 90 percent of its students receiving some form of financial aid, New College of Florida offers a full array of scholarships and grants. Every incoming student is eligible for an academic scholarship, with additional forms of aid available.
*Calculated for the Class of 2016 by The Institute for College Access & Success