A Liberal Arts College’s Unique Approach To Planning For The Future: The New College Challenge

New College of Florida, although not a household name, is ranked number five among public liberal arts college by U.S. News and World Report. Located in Sarasota, it is the Honors College of Florida known for graduating smart problem solvers and thinkers. The College doesn’t have grades; it works to create an environment where students can try things and fail; where they can explore, grow and develop. According to the President, Dr. Patricia Okker, “growth and development happen when you take risks.” New College also differs from many liberal arts colleges in that recently it has been working to increase its relevance to students by integrating career education and learning; it pairs students with career coaches even before they set foot on campus freshman year and it integrates career education with the curriculum.

Despite its innovative curriculum, generous state government support, tuition and fees of less than $7,000 and generous financial aid, New College, with a capacity for more than a thousand students and has an enrollment of less than 700 students. In addition, it faces significant enrollment, retention and facility challenges including substantial deferred maintenance and high operating costs in part related to being under-enrolled. The College also has a 10-acre campus on Sarasota Bay with iconic residence halls built in the 1970’s by I.M. Pei and lies in the path of hurricanes. The problem: how to develop a model which is attractive to students, contributes to the community and provides a relevant, high-quality education at a sustainable cost.

In order to attack this problem, Dr. Okker took an innovative approach to invigorate the College, fertilize it with new ideas, and connect other colleges and universities as well as the community with the College. As she put it, “we need a 21st-century campus to meet the needs of 21st-century economic resilience, for our individual students and also for the region and state.” To accomplish this, she has launched the New College Challenge, which, unlike most planning processes where the college community gets together to rethink its future, New College has invited the outside in to help rethink the College. The Challenge is designed to bring together students, experts and leaders from a variety of top universities and industries to partner and collaboratively explore new ideas and develop solutions. Throughout The Challenge, New College will become a community incubator for brainstorming new ideas and solutions about the future to address social, economic and environmental challenges that face the region and the world. New College is partnering with experts from Harvard, Yale, the University of Florida, the University of South Florida, Kean University, Syracuse University, and the University of Miami who will lend their different perspectives to the planning process. This collaborative approach with widely diverse partners is unique in my experience and should provide a great cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches for the College to incorporate in its planning. Faculty and students from these institutions as well as others will work with New College to design solutions to the College’s problems and to engage them with the broader community and the world.

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The project is focused on resilience – coastal resilience, social resilience, and economic resilience. In terms of coastal resilience, that is very real and present for the College. In terms of social resilience, the College is looking at how design can influence the sense of belonging and how it can activate places to make the campus alive and welcoming not only to students but to employers, the community and others. Economic resilience will focus on the financial model for the campus as well as the business plan and the appropriate use of the College’s land and resources and will further consider the integration of the College’s honors curriculum with career education. It will include working with employers to encourage entrepreneurship and to develop programs that are responsive to their needs and to enhance their integration with students and faculty.

According to Dr. Okker, “New College of Florida is launching a grand experiment. Our campus will become a community incubator…We are doing things differently here at New College.”

The President is letting the process develop; she doesn’t know what the ultimate plan will be but she is excited that by collaborating with a wide variety of partners and integrating the student voice into the Challenge, she will be able to invigorate the College and ultimately develop an institution that will thrive in the 21^st century and have wide appeal to students. She is seeking a new model of liberal arts education which closely connects campus and community. As Teri Hanson, the President and CEO of the Charles and Margery Barancik Foundation said, “New College has the opportunity to be the academic and intellectual epicenter of our community.” Could this be the model for the new liberal arts college of the future? Rather than students and faculty remaining cloistered on a beautiful campus deep in thought, they will become part of a much larger, diverse, dynamic community working to develop practical solutions to challenging problems and contributing to knowledge creation. We will have to watch this process as it develops to see if it can lead us to a new model for the small liberal arts college of the future.