New College of Florida

New College of Florida, located in Sarasota, Florida, is the only liberal arts school that is a part of the State University System of Florida. It is also the smallest, with enrollment between 750 and 800 students. The State of Florida's has designated New College as the "honors college for the liberal arts.” New College is a very selective school, where incoming students average a 1300 SAT score. There are students from 40 states and 25 different countries that attend New College of Florida.

Recently, the university has received a pair of top five finishes in Forbes Magazine’s list of top U.S. public universities. In 2007, New College of Florida tied for first place in the US News and World Report rankings of the twenty-two public liberal arts colleges in the United States, up from third place in 2006. The 2007 edition of The Princeton Review named New College the best value in public higher education, up from sixth place in 2006. New College was also ranked 2nd in the August 2006 edition of High Times magazine's article "Top 10 Counterculture Colleges."

The small liberal arts university began as a private school when it opened in 1960. In the 1970s, the school had accumulated a good deal of debt. To reconcile its financial problems while still remaining relatively independent, the school agreed to sale its facilities and land to the state in exchange for its debt being paid off and for it to become a separate unit within the University of South Florida. South Florida shared a Sarasota campus with New College, and New College received public funding at the per-student level of the University of South Florida. New College continued to raise private funds in order to maintain their expected level of functioning. The two schools shared a campus for 25 years while New College was called New College of the University of South Florida. In 2001, a reorganization of the state university system severed the difficult relationship between the USF and New College, turning New College of the University of South Florida into New College of Florida and making it the 11th independent university in the State University System of Florida.

Four core principles form the base of New College's academic philosophy: (1) each student is responsible in the last analysis for his or her own education, (2) the best education demands a joint search for learning by exciting teachers and able students, (3) students' progress should be based on demonstrated competence and real mastery rather than on the accumulation of credits and grades, (4) students should have, from the outset, opportunities to explore in depth, areas of interest to them. Students design individualized programs of study and areas of concentration. Because all classes are taught by faculty, students work directly with some of the country's foremost scholars and scientists. To the end of putting this philosophy into practice, New College uses a unique academic program that differs substantially from those of most other educational institutions in four key ways:

Narrative evaluations: at the completion of each course, students receive an evaluation written by the instructor critiquing their performance and course work, along with a satisfactory/unsatisfactory/incomplete designation. Letter grades and grade-point-averages are not used at New College.

Contract System: at the start of each semester, students negotiate a contract with their faculty adviser, specifying their courses of study and expectations for the semester. At the completion of the term, the academic adviser compares the student's performance with the requirements defined in the contract, and determines whether the student has "passed" the contract, or not. Among other requirements, completing seven contracts is a prerequisite to graduation.

Independent Study Projects: the month of January is reserved for independent projects at New College, when no traditional courses are held. Independent Study Projects run the gamut from short, in-depth, academic research projects to internships, lab work, and international exchanges. Students are required to complete three independent study projects prior to being graduated.

Senior Thesis: each student is required to write an original and lengthy thesis in their discipline, and to defend it before a committee of at least three faculty. Depending on the area of concentration of each student, a senior thesis may take the form of an original research paper, performing and documenting a scientific or social-scientific experiment or research study, or an original composition. This requirement is usually completed during the final two semesters of a student's fourth year.

The academic structure described above is implemented through classes and research projects in a diverse array of subjects in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Natural Sciences. With fewer than 800 students, an average class size of 18 and a student to faculty ratio of 10 to 1, the academic environment is small and intimate and known for its intellectual intensity.