New College of Florida costs nearly half a million dollars to produce a degree. The institution absorbs that price and shrugs. That is not a number the college disputes. It is what a state efficiency study confirmed in November 2024: New College, a 900-student liberal arts institution now remade in the governor’s ideological image, costs $494,715 per graduate. The next most expensive school in Florida’s entire public university system, Florida Polytechnic, comes in at just under $155,000. New College is three times costlier than any alternative in the state, and the transfer engineered this month will close down an entire campus serving working-class students, nursing programs, and older adults in order to expand it. Richard Corcoran, a former state House speaker with no higher-education experience, was installed as New College’s president in 2024 at a salary package of $1.2 million — four times what his ousted predecessor made.
That is the math. The math is the grift.
The campus DeSantis is eliminating is not a failure. It is a school the community actually used. USF Sarasota-Manatee — a 32-acre campus with a new residential hall, a $44 million student center, 2,000 enrolled students — has served nurses finishing degrees between shifts, hospitality workers climbing into management, and older adults who drive across Sarasota and Manatee counties because the alternative was no degree at all. It ran at a fraction of New College’s cost. It produced graduates with professional credentials. It did what public higher education is supposed to do: serve the public that uses it, at a price the public can survive.
DeSantis is shutting it down to make room.
The consolidation transfers the USF campus to New College, controlled now by a governor-appointed board that purged its library, removed diversity programs, and commissioned a statue of the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. When photographs of hundreds of library books dumped by the college went viral, DeSantis-appointed trustee Christopher Rufo said the school was “throwing out the trash.” That was the attitude toward the books. Toward the programs. Toward the students who had built a community on that campus. And now the attitude has expanded to encompass an entire university campus — the buildings, the faculty, the students who are not the right kind of students.
The transfer proceeds against near-universal opposition from students, faculty, and local business owners who watched the campus operate and preferred what it was delivering. Nursing students at Sarasota Memorial attended night shifts just to make a Friday lecture. Tourism and hospitality graduates filled positions at the Longboat Key resorts that line the Gulf. These were not hypothetical goods. They were goods in place, functioning, priced within reach of families living on two service-industry incomes. Even USF’s president, Moez Limayem, acknowledged “significant uncertainty and anxiety,” and the plan includes a four-year teach-out period before the programs close — an institutional admission that the programs are being killed.
The administration’s own efficiency numbers condemn the architecture of what it is building. The takeover tripled the governor’s preferred school’s physical footprint while offering no evidence that any cost would fall anywhere in the system. The losses are concrete and specific: the nursing program is gone, the tourism curriculum set to close. The hotel industry in a place that depends on tourism will lose its pipeline of educated workers. A region with several hospitals will lose its pipeline of credentialed nurses.
In what world does the governor who spent years campaigning on government efficiency now propose abolishing the credentialing capacity of the school that was already being cost-efficient? The answer is in the numbers: it was never the most expensive institution that he wanted to cut. It was the cheapest one that he needed to eliminate, because cheap and practical do not serve what New College is now for. New College is a vanity project. That is not an epithet; it is a line item. The DeSantis administration has thrown money at it the way you throw money at a thing whose purpose is to validate its owner rather than to serve its students.
Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, in A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, traced the proprietization playbook: it begins with a claim about a failing system, then destroys the programs where people actually learned, then whittles down what remains until the only option is an expensive alternative aligned with governance vision, and charges the taxpayers more for what they were getting cheaply before. The playbook is operating here. The cheap option is the expensive option. The school that costs three times the average is not the school being cut. It is the school being tripled.
Folded into this architecture is a legislative maneuver that bypasses every meaningful channel of public consent. Fentrice Driskell, leader of Florida House Democrats, called the move what it was — “a grift” — while Republicans inserted the transfer into the state budget, rendering the state Senate effectively irrelevant. The proposal was not debated on the floor. It arrived.
Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine provides the framework: interrupt a system’s current equilibrium, refuse to name what you are replacing it with as anything more than efficiency, and render the response structurally impossible before the facts are understood. The shock works because it arrives in a budget line, not as a policy debate. The campus deals are being done on conference committee and signed by governors. The public is not consulted. The public learns after the fact. And the governors get points for efficiency while the institutions about to be disassembled were the ones already running at the cost the public needs them to run at.
A public university campus is not a luxury. It is how a family like mine, a generation ago, made the math work. My parents sent three kids through Catholic school on a postal supervisor’s salary because the local public options were solid and the in-state tuition, when it came, was reachable. That calculus is already broken for my generation. The Pell Grant, which at its peak covered roughly 80 percent of a public university degree, now covers about a quarter. And now a governor can simply seize a campus and give it to a college whose per-degree cost would be embarrassing even if the college were producing graduates the state needed, which it is not.
The contrast with what other institutions are trying to build is instructive. As Fisk University, the historically Black university in Nashville, announces a $900 million campus overhaul — a generational investment in a mission-driven institution — Florida is looting a campus from the students who use it and handing it to a political project that costs the state a fortune and educates almost no one. One of those is a university. The other is a monument.
The same maneuver is playing out in Ohio, in North Carolina, in higher education institutions whose governing boards were seized after election cycles. The campuses that get defunded are not the flagship research universities in the metro. They are the satellite campuses, the community-college partners, the places where working-class adults earn the credentials they need without requiring relocation or six-figure debt.
What is being lost is not a campus. It is not a program or a budget line. It is an available, affordable education path for adults in a community who will not get it in any other form. The nurse who already works nights. The bartender at the tourist resort who needs Friday availability for a class. The forty-year-old who is finishing a degree her parents’ generation could afford and hers cannot. These are the people whose paths were eliminated — not by market failure or declining demand, but by legislative maneuver, in a budget deal, with no public debate and no alternative offered, in order to expand a school that costs more than three times what the closed campus cost to operate.
There is a Taylor Swift song that has, against my better judgment, become the unofficial anthem of the millennial parent’s relationship to public education. “You’re on your own, kid.” The bridge is a catalog of the things the narrator did — the blood, the sweat, the tears — in pursuit of a future that was supposed to be waiting, and the recognition that the future was not waiting. The friendship bracelets at the end are the only safety net: the other people who are also on their own. That is what the DeSantis higher-education project is building: a state where every student is on their own, where the only campus that matters is the one the governor wants, and where the rest of you can sort out your own degrees.
DeSantis is killing the college that worked to build the college he wanted. The half-million-dollar degree is the receipt.