One member of the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees the state university system, has repeatedly questioned spending by New College of Florida, which was taken over by allies of Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2023.
Now, with the small honors college angling to acquire 100 acres of land and facilities in Sarasota, including the University of South Florida’s Sarasota-Manatee campus and The Ringling Museum of Art, Eric Silagy said he is increasingly concerned that such a move would be bad for students and taxpayers.
The former chief executive of Florida Power & Light sparred with New College president Richard Corcoran at a September 2024 Board of Governors meeting over spending per student, which Silagy said amounts to $91,000. Corcoran argued it was $68,000. But by January, Corcoran admitted it was closer to $88,000, though Silagy still maintains $91,000 is the correct figure.
Silagy was appointed to the Board of Governors by DeSantis in 2019, and has about eight months left in his term. He spoke with WUSF’s Kerry Sheridan about why he thinks the board must be more involved.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Gov. DeSantis announced a Florida Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative in February. Has that come up with the Board of Governors regarding New College or other universities?
I have not had any meetings with anybody as of today on this DOGE initiative. I've not been briefed about what's being reviewed. I raised that during the last meeting that the Board of Governors should be – and frankly, I think we must be – involved. It's not only our duty, it's our constitutional obligation.
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I asked if there was a formal process and if there had been people assigned from the Board of Governors. And I didn't get a response at that time, and so I'm not aware of any details at this point.
The governor has been very clear that every dollar matters, and which is why he wanted to and has launched his own DOGE initiative, for lack of a better term, right? And I agree with him, we should all be very focused on being good stewards of taxpayer dollars and every dollar matters.
What do you know about the plans to possibly transfer USF Sarasota-Manatee to New College?
I have not been briefed on that by anybody at USF or New College or the chancellor at this point, so I don't know other than what I've read in the newspapers. I personally am concerned that people are focused on expanding the footprint of New College when, frankly, they're struggling to be efficient on their existing campus. They have a lot of work to do, in my eyes, both in getting student scores up and costs down before I would be supportive of expanding what they're doing.
Successful businesses are the ones who are able to incorporate growth. If a family business incorporates additional responsibilities or assets, often it accelerates failure because their approach or their business model is fundamentally flawed, and therefore creating a new shiny object to focus on doesn't fix the underlying problem.
Some of the documents that I got from New College in a public records request showed that its press release that it had pre-written ahead of this whole deal said that USF Sarasota-Manatee merging into New College would eliminate some repetitive class offerings, and would save money and things like that. But you're saying that that has not been discussed by the Board of Governors.
It has not been discussed at the Board of Governors, at least with me, or in any public forum. And, of course, we're subject to the Sunshine laws like any constitutional officers. So, I presume that other governors have not had conversations privately amongst themselves. But in the public forum at our Board of Governors meetings or in other briefings that have been noticed, it has not been raised.
And you think it should be?
Well, yeah. I mean, look, maybe I'm old school, but I take very seriously an oath. It's no different than when I took the oath to be a member of the United States Supreme Court bar. It's a solemn oath to meet the obligations as required under the governing law, and in this case, that's the Florida constitution.
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Corcoran is very persuasive. He's a former speaker of the House who knows the legislative process. He has had the full support of the governor and his staff. I think many times people just generally think, well, if it's $20 million (New College’s budget request), OK, it's not that much money. We're dealing in much larger numbers at the Legislature in the scheme of a multibillion-dollar budget. But you have to scale it. That kind of money could go a lot further if it was more efficiently deployed. That has been my point.
What are some of the main issues you’ve seen with New College’s finances?
New College stands out as a school that is spending an inordinate amount of money per degree, and the student outcomes are just not to the caliber that we would expect of a university that is technically Florida's only honors college. As I pointed out previously, their SAT scores and their admissions have dropped in the past several years consistently.
Last year, the cost of a degree at New College was $512,000. That's the estimated cost based on the appropriations request submitted to the governor, to the Legislature. That's going up to $555,000 per degree next year.
You have the University of South Florida that has made extraordinary strides and accomplished great things under the leadership of president [Rhea] Law in just the last five years. When I look at their metrics, actually they're 50% more efficient on employees to student ratio than New College. Their 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 of a graduate from New College generating 10 times more earnings, which leads to more tax revenue?
New College has 43 administrators for 800 students.
Florida Polytechnic University is more than twice as large in student population as New College -– and, by the way, they graduate all engineers -– but they have almost half as many administrators. Florida Poly has an administrator for every 60 students.
The average for the system is 77 students per administrator. So New College is a third as efficient. And administrators are not inexpensive, right? Indeed, many of these people are highly compensated. So as an example, New College has seven employees that get paid $200,000 or more a year. That's not including the president, right? For 800 students, OK?
To put that in perspective, the next highest is Florida State. They have eight folks who make $200,000 or more. (FSU has about 44,000 students.)
These things matter, and it leads to what ends up being a very expensive cost structure, for the student and, importantly, the taxpayer. But going back to what I originally said, what do we really want? We want outcomes.
So what are the next steps? What will you be doing in particular regarding this USF handover to New College? And what do you think other Board of Governors members should be doing?
I'll go back to the (Florida) constitution, and what it says. It's Article IX, Section 7, and it says that the Board of Governors shall operate, regulate, control and be fully responsible for the management of the whole university system – period. It goes on to say that these responsibilities shall include, but not be limited to, defining the distinctive mission of each constituent university and avoiding wasteful duplication of facilities or programs. And any agreement between the Board of Governors and Legislature, or even a law that's passed, can't undermine the fundamental authority of the Board of Governors.
I will ask the questions about what is the plan, what's the rationale, what's the justification? I will do my best to get the information to form an objective viewpoint as to whether or not this makes good sense for the students who are currently at USF, as well as the students who are at New College of Florida, as well as the taxpayers who are paying for this, both today and in the future. And I think that should be done clear-eyed and objectively, not emotionally, and with an eye toward making sure that both constituencies are better off after any decisions made than before the decision was made.
You’ve spoken on these issues at Board of Governors meetings. Why do you want to speak to a larger audience now?
My father started working in a factory when he graduated high school making lead acid batteries and joined the military simply because he wanted to break out of that and couldn't afford to go to college. So he went and flew combat missions so he could get qualified for the GI Bill, and worked his way through night classes while he flew airplanes for the Air Force over a course of 15 years. And that broke the cycle in our family. I'm the first one ever, as an example, to get a graduate degree on both sides of the family. And so the importance of higher education just can't be overstated, in my opinion.
We have the best in the world in the United States, and Florida has been consistently ranked No. 1 in the United States now for seven years in a row as a university system. We should be very proud of that. But we also need to jealously guard that position and never be satisfied. Because in my experience in the business world, the moment that you start being satisfied is the minute you start going backward. Success breeds mediocrity.
You don’t have much time left at the Board of Governors, about eight months?
It's a seven-year term, with the understanding that the interest by Gov. DeSantis was to have people with real world business experience on particularly managing large entities, multibillion-dollar corporations, that they could bring that expertise to bear on the university system, which is also a multibillion-dollar entity with over 400,000 students and over 100,000 faculty. And so these are big, big businesses. They are clearly different because they are institutes of higher learning and have a critical mission of educating Florida's best and brightest, with the hope that they will then go out and help Florida continue to be successful and grow, and we'll be able to retain them here. But my goal has always been to try to help the universities be even more efficient and successful.
Note: WUSF reached out to New College for comment but did not get a response.
