A former top strategist at New College of Florida called Gov. Ron DeSantis’ proposal to transfer 32 acres of land and buildings — along with $53 million in debt — from the University of South Florida’s Sarasota-Manatee campus to New College “lethal,” warning it would drown the small liberal arts college in insurmountable debt.
The end result, said Nathan Allen, who resigned from New College in 2024, would be the closure of both college campuses and the state selling off their respective properties along Sarasota’s bayfront to pay the debt.
“How do you assume $50 million in debt against no revenue?” Allen said. “In the business world, if you were a CEO, you would be sued by your shareholders out of existence. Like, that's nuts. And yet, that's what's happening.”
New College relies heavily on special allocations from the legislature, private donations and hurricane recovery money, Allen said. Tuition brings in revenue, too, he said, but it’s essentially canceled out by how much the school spends on scholarships.
At the same time, New College far outspends its peers in the university system. It costs $494,715 to produce a degree at New College versus $72,252 at USF. And with per-student operating expenses at $83,207, New College is the least efficient public university in the state, according to a Florida DOGE report in November.
“It's currently a college that drives effectively no tuition revenue,” Allen said. “On one hand, people think that's great because higher ed debt, student debt, that's a huge problem. I totally agree. On the other hand, how do you know if you're doing a good job, if the only people who show up are people who don't have to pay anything?”
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Allen served as New College's vice president for strategy from 2023 to 2024 and has a background in private equity and higher education.
Adding to New College’s financial troubles, he said, is an “exorbitant amount of debt” that it has been carrying for years.
“They have about $17 million in debt. That's about two and a half times what they should have to hit the SUS (state university system) average. And this is why New College hasn't been able to borrow money for well over a decade,” Allen said. “So they're basically assuming a massive amount of debt off market. And that's important, because no bank would lend them this money.”
When colleges assume more debt than they can manage, they end up closing, often abruptly. This was the case with University of the Arts in Philadelphia, which shuttered in 2024; and Cazenovia College in New York state, which closed in 2023 after defaulting on its debt.
Based on that kind of history, Allen said, New College “won't be around in a couple of years. The land will be auctioned off to pay the debt.”
A key difference, however, is that UArts and Cazenovia College were private, while New College and USF are part of the State University System of Florida.
In 2024, the Florida Board of Governors approved New College’s strategic plan, which allowed the school to get $15 million from the state budget and put it on pace to request more than $200 million over the next five years.
“Here's the thing; huge caveat: The state has a lot of money. They can do, kind of, anything they want, and so who knows how this is going to play out,” said Allen, who nevertheless warned that relying on the state to pay off the dorm debt could backfire.
“Generally, colleges lease their assets from the state. The state is the owner,” he said. It’s possible the state could take on the debt itself, but it would also have to "guarantee those debt payments for the life of the loan. And the problem with signing paper with the state is the state can change its mind. Often it is legally allowed to just say, ‘Yeah, we're not doing that anymore.’”
Allen’s assessment was echoed by Ben Brown, a lawyer who served as head of the New College Alumni Association but resigned last year, alleging financial mismanagement by the college and loss of trust among alumni.
The $53 million in debt “that would come from the proposed acquisition of the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus would be financially crippling because the college doesn't have and wouldn't be acquiring anything that can produce enough revenue to service that debt on an ongoing basis,” Brown said.
“It's certainly possible that for the first couple years they can handle the debt service with appropriations from the legislature. The governor has requested $30 million in funding for New College in this legislative session,” Brown added.
“But if this extraordinary generosity from the state ever stops,” he said, “they don't have any revenue source that can pay the service on that kind of debt.”
Inside the proposed deal
In January 2023, DeSantis appointed six new members to New College’s 13-member board to remake the long-struggling institution in the image of the conservative Hillsdale College, a private school in Michigan.
Allen said he came on board at New College a month later and that talks began that autumn among school insiders about how it might merge with its bigger neighbor to the north. USF Sarasota-Manatee currently enrolls 1,638 students, while New College said this fall it had about 900.
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The deal would shift $53 million — incurred by USF to build new dorms at Sarasota-Manatee — onto New College, while giving it 32 acres of land, buildings, classrooms and a 200-bed dormitory — Atala Hall — that opened in 2024.
New College already pays USF $1.65 million per year for up to 144 beds in Atala Hall, said USF spokeswoman Althea Johnson. About 50 beds are occupied by USF students.
Last year, public records obtained by WUSF showed USF drafted the legislation, and New College prepared the press releases to announce the takeover of the Sarasota-Manatee campus. The plan did not surface in last year’s legislative session but did appear in the governor’s proposed budget, in late 2025.
The legislative language this time is similar. It mentions the New College Board of Trustees should “as soon as reasonably practical but no later than October 20, 2026, complete all steps necessary or appropriate to assume, legally and financially, the full liability for any outstanding debt for any facilities constructed upon the properties that encompass the USF Sarasota/Manatee campus.”
The text doesn’t give a dollar figure, but the dorm debt totals about $53 million. "According to the current debt service schedule, we pay approximately $1.95 million annually until 2052," Johnson said in an email to WUSF last year.
There is also a STEM facility that USF broke ground on in November 2025, for which the USF Board of Trustees had approved a $6.5 million investment.
The text of the governor’s proposal also mentions that from July 1, until legal and financial responsibility for the buildings and debt is assumed, New College must pay USF “monthly a payment equal to the outstanding debt service on the facilities contemplated in this act, which shall be $166,617.00 per month.” Failure to do so will “invalidate the transfer of facilities” and cause them to “revert to the University of South Florida.”
Speaking in mid-January, DeSantis touted the idea as good for both schools, but gave few details.
DeSantis described New College as being on “very valuable real estate,” and said “the taxpayers [were] funding something that was basically like a Marxist commune” before he came along. He dismissed critics who have pointed to its outsized spending.
“People say ‘Oh, they're spending so much money per student and all this.’ I said, ‘Well, no, that's because we're putting in capital improvements. These are not going to be expenses that are fixed going forward,’” DeSantis said.
“USF is not going to lose money. They're still going to get money like they're getting now. They can just apply that money in Tampa, rather than apply it there. So I think it's going to be really, really good,” added DeSantis.
Current and former leaders on the USF-SM campus say the deal amounts to an “eviction” of its hundreds of faculty and staff, as well as more students whose studies prepare them for fields that are much needed in the local economy, like nursing, accounting, hospitality and tourism.
USF Sarasota-Manatee enrollment in the past decade peaked at 2,215 in 2019, then dropped to 1,310 in 2023 before climbing again to 1,638 this year, according to figures provided by Johnson.
“I just can't figure out what the governor's angle is in all this,” said Bill Mariotti, who is CEO of Mariotti Site Development Company, Inc., and is the largest individual donor to USF Sarasota-Manatee.
“For New College to take that much debt. They don't have the income to support it. They need a lot more students,” said Mariotti. “Only way they can survive is if the governor ends up giving them a whole bunch of money to pay it off.”
In Mariotti’s view, USF-SM offers students options to live and work in the area, including many non-traditional students who are older than typical college students. Mariotti was one of them. He said he studied at USF-SM, while helping out with his family’s business, before eventually taking it over.
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“If it wasn't for this campus, I probably would have thought twice about going back, because I only took one class at a time,” said Mariotti. “That's the makeup of a lot of our students. They're working, they have families, they're going to night school, but they want to succeed, they want to get a degree and better their lives.”
Asked for comment, a USF spokeswoman referred WUSF to past statements by USF Board of Trustees Chairman Will Weatherford. At a meeting in December, Weatherford said “it's not something we dictate or control.” He also vowed to protect students and staff.
“Whatever commitments we've made to them, we will fulfill. And faculty and staff who work for the University of South Florida, regardless of what campus they work on, we are going to work with them, protect them, and make sure that there's minimal impact if and when they do come,” Weatherford said.
New College spokesman Jamie Miller pledged to "work with public policy makers and USF through the whole process,” according to an email sent to WUSF.
"Public policy makers are determining the best utilization of public assets and debt. It will be our job to implement what they direct," said Miller.
This story was written by WUSF reporter Kerry Sheridan and edited by Emily Le Coz, executive editor-in-chief of Suncoast Searchlight, an independent nonprofit newsroom based in Sarasota. This was done to ensure editorial independence.
WUSF broadcasts from studios at the University of South Florida, including one on its Sarasota-Manatee campus, which is the subject of this story. Its broadcast license also is held by USF.
No USF or WUSF officials reviewed this story before it was published.
