Last month, we brought you an interview with former Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy, who was appointed to the Florida Board of Governors by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2019.
Silagy talked, in part, about the high cost of New College of Florida, where uses about 10 times more in taxpayer dollars per degree compared with other state universities.
ALSO READ: Florida Board of Governors is not overseeing DOGE efforts
Silagy pointed out in his interview that the cost of a degree at New College was $512,000 in state spending. For 2025-26, that cost is estimated to rise to $555,000 per degree. At USF, by comparison, the cost of a degree is $46,500.
“That begs the question: are New College graduates obtaining a degree that is 10 times more valuable than those who go to University of Florida or Florida State or University of South Florida? Are taxpayers getting the benefit?" Silagy asked.
After that interview aired, we heard from a listener named Larry Warhall.
"Saying something ‘begs the question,’ well, all right, it begs the question, but then it gets left unanswered. And I just thought it should be answered," Warhall said.
Warhall is a retired Air Force veteran who lives in South Florida. He found the answer on the Florida Board of Governors website, in a spreadsheet that shows median wages of first-year graduates over the past seven years.
It shows New College consistently at or near the bottom of all 12 state universities when it comes to median wages for those employed full time a year after graduating.
"They've been the lowest all along over a period of seven years. And they're continually underperforming all of the other institutions," Warhall said.
What Warhall found is publicly available data, on a spreadsheet called "Performance-based funding" on the Board of Governors website.
It can be hard to find unless you know where to look.
Start at this webpage.
Scroll down to “Information Documents” and click on the year you want to see.
For 2024-25, the graphic on page 7, item 2, shows “Median Wages of Bachelor's Graduates Employed Full-Time One Year After Graduation.”
New College shows 56% of students are either employed and making more than $40,000 a year or attending grad school one year after graduation, the lowest percentage in the state system.
For median wages, New College grads earned $42,500 last year, compared with $56,500 at the University of Florida and $49,000 at USF.
The only year since 2018-19 that New College did not show the lowest wages in recent graduates was in 2021-22, when Florida A&M University was lower ($34,500) than New College ($36,500).
Warhall built a data table that includes an average over the past seven years of wages for those employed full time a year after graduation.
At New College, those wages were 24% lower than the averages of three schools combined: the University of South Florida, Florida State and the University of Florida.
"When New College of Florida is promoted as being this specialized program, and the state is into all kinds of extra funding for it, to me, it doesn't add up," Warhall said.
Asked for comment, Silagy said he was indeed aware of the answer when he raised the question, and he intends to keep talking about good financial stewardship for the entire State University System.
For his part, Warhall said he is not interested in the politics surrounding New College, a longtime liberal arts school which was taken over by allies of Gov. DeSantis two years ago and is striving to become a model for conservative, classical education in the south.
“I'm talking about time, clock, hours, structure. I don't care about anything else,” said Warhall.
He has also been looking at how New College accounts for its credit hours and said he believes that its approach of incorporating independent study, in part, allows the college to award four credits in classes that deserve only 3.2 credits, resulting in a less rigorous academic program overall than other state universities.
“So what's going on is New College is providing about 25% less instruction than they should over the course of their degrees," Warhall said. "And I'd argue that what's going on is that that's why people are making about 25% less in wages.”
Warhall did not attend New College, but earned a degree at the University of New Hampshire, which he said employs a similar course structure and that he feels shortchanges students.
Independent study “gives them the ability to discover their own areas of interest, but what they're really doing is they're not providing the instruction that they should in a structured program and collecting all the money as if they were,” Warhall said.
New College did not respond to a request for comment.
