Meanwhile at New College

From Inside Higher Ed:

More than two years into a conservative takeover of New College of Florida, spending has soared and rankings have plummeted, raising questions about the efficacy of the overhaul.

While state officials, including Republican governor Ron DeSantis, have celebrated the death of what they have described as “woke indoctrination” at the small liberal arts college, student outcomes are trending downward across the board: Both graduation and retention rates have fallen since the takeover in 2023.

Those metrics are down even as New College spends more than 10 times per student what the other 11 members of the State University System spend, on average. While one estimate last year put the annual cost per student at about $10,000 per member institution, New College is an outlier, with a head count under 900 and a $118.5 million budget, which adds up to roughly $134,000 per student.

According to this piece, some legislators have started to question the "blank check" to DeSantis for his pet project. 

A big issue at New College is student retention; from what I can tell neither the old liberal students nor the new wave like what they are getting from New College now, which has led to the college spending heavily on recruitment. One anonymous professor said:

It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme: Students keep leaving, so they have to recruit bigger and bigger cohorts of students, and then they say, ‘Biggest class ever’ because they have to backfill all the students who have left.

Obviously university education is to some extent a political project, and I don't have any problem with state leaders getting involved in setting overall direction for the university system. But the experience of New College shows that you can't make it just a political project. You have to offer students something that they want, or they will go elsewhere. As I said when I wrote about DeSantis' university reforms, the real problem is not that they are conservative, it is that they are horribly clumsy. Like, handing out a bunch of baseball scholarships for a school with no baseball field, and floating wild ideas about "classical" education that are never implemented because students have no interest in them. We are seeing the results of that clumsiness already, and the ultimate result of DeSantis' little crusade may be the end of New College.