New College of Florida — FL SUS Budget Deep-Dive

Background

On October 29, 2025 the Florida Board of Governors released a 25-slide State University System Efficiency Study benchmarking all twelve SUS institutions on cost-per-student, cost-per-degree, FTE allocation, and job-placement outcomes. NCF was singled out on essentially every efficiency slide as the system’s worst-performing school. NCF then filed its FY 25-26 operating budget on November 24, 2025 — about four weeks after the report dropped.

The question this page addresses: did NCF’s budget moves reflect a response to the report? The directional answer is defensive accommodation, not structural reform. The detail follows.

First, scale: a $98M operating budget on fewer than 1,000 students

Six private comparators across the Florida private-college landscape, ranked by operating expense per student. NCF is the only public school in the comparison and the smallest by enrollment. Fragility scores (2023-24 IPEDS data, our published scores) added in the right column for context.

Privates: IPEDS FY 2023-24 (F2E131 operating expense) ÷ academic-year-start 2023 student FTE. NCF: FL BOG FY 25-26 operating budget submission ÷ ~880 2025-26 estimated FTE — the years are asymmetric, but NCF’s IPEDS-verified FY 2023-24 figure ($116,200) sits just above the FY 25-26 projection, so the headline gap is robust to the choice of year.

Two framing notes. First, this is operating spending only — capital projects, plant debt service, athletics auxiliaries, and food/housing pass-through sit outside these numbers. NCF’s total spend is meaningfully larger again. Second, NCF’s revenue is roughly 80% Florida state appropriation ($66.6M of $82.6M total revenue). The privates above run on tuition revenue subject to enrollment pressure. NCF has no such market discipline — every dollar of the gap is taxpayer-funded.

On the fragility column. Scores are our published composites for FY 2023-24 — Cash Position + Pricing Power + Debt Burden + Liquidity (0-25 each) plus the compounding-fragility bonus and endowment backstop, capped 0-100. ≤30 low, ≤60 moderate, >60 high. The ordering is striking: the most-fragile school in the comparison spends the most per student; the least-fragile (Florida Southern, score 28) spends the least per student. Higher per-student spend is not buying institutional stability.

What the report said about NCF

NCF appears at the negative extreme on five separate slides of the Efficiency Study. The single most striking metric is in the bottom row of the table: NCF has 18.5× the “Management/Professional Admin” staffing density of UCF per student, and 2.8× the SUS average.

Producing one NCF graduate costs the state 10.6× what it costs to produce one UCF graduate. The 33.3 Management/Professional Admin FTE per 100 students is the single most damning line — UCF operates at 1.8.

What NCF’s FY 25-26 budget does

Not what you’d expect from a school that just got publicly identified as the system’s least efficient. The directional read is defensive accommodation, not structural reform:

Inside the “Student Services” line — what $22M actually buys

Student Services grew 46% over two years to $22.4M — the largest growth area in the budget. It’s not student programs in any conventional sense. Roughly half is pass-through institutional aid, and most of the personnel line is recruitment infrastructure, not the kinds of services a typical liberal-arts budget would put under this header.

Three observations the breakdown forces:

1. $11.6M of the $22.4M Student Services line is institutional aid pass-through (Housing Support $6.1M + Financial Aid-Institutional Restructure $5.5M). At 880 students, that’s about $13,200 of aid per student. NCF’s published net tuition is near zero; this is the budgetary mechanism that gets it there.
2. 26.6 staff FTE are working on enrollment intake (Admissions 18.9 + Recruiting 7.7) for an undergraduate body of ~880. That’s one admissions/recruiting staff member per 33 students — and the budget grew the Recruiting line from $0.43M (5.5 FTE) in FY 23-24 to $0.86M (7.7 FTE) by FY 25-26, a 100% dollar increase in two years. The 5-year “triple enrollment” plan needs the intake machinery to make it work; this is where it’s being built.
3. Coach time embedded as recruiting time. NCF coaching contracts split salaries between coaching and recruiting duties (per local-source reporting on NCF athletics). A meaningful share of the 7.7 Student Recruiting FTE is likely coach time billed as recruiting time — which is how additional athletic-program cost finds its way into the Student Services line without showing up as “athletics.”

The 49 coaches and the headcount gap

Comparing the state operating budget to NCF’s EADA athletics report — the federal-mandated athletics participation disclosure — reveals a striking gap in headcount, which is not necessarily the same as a gap in dollars:

The gap is at least in part a measurement artifact of how Florida state agencies classify personnel. Personnel costs in the state operating budget are reported in two layers:

• Salaries & Benefits (object code 110000) — permanent positions that count toward FTE.
• Other Personal Services / OPS (object code 121000) — part-time, temporary, contract, and adjunct personnel. Paid through E&G, but does not count toward FTE headcount.

Coaches paid under OPS appear as dollars in the operating budget but as zero FTE — which is the pattern visible in the ATHLETICS - ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPORT line itself (5 FTE of named positions plus OPS and benefits dollars) and plausibly in adjacent lines too. STUDENT RECRUITING ($0.86M, 7.7 FTE) and ADMISSIONS ($3.25M, 18.9 FTE) likely carry OPS coach allocations since NCF coaching contracts split salaries across coaching and recruiting duties.

The implication is about transparency rather than concealment: the coach-personnel cost is probably in the operating budget — but is spread across multiple Program Component codes and partially classified as OPS in ways that prevent a single roll-up. The aggregate athletic-personnel cost (Salaries + OPS, across Athletics, Student Recruiting, Admissions, and any other affected line) has not been presented to the board as a single number, and the published Budget Schedule does not separately tag OPS dollars to athletics. That is the data point to ask for, regardless of how the dollars net out.

The “deferred maintenance” deflection

NCF’s public framing on the cost question is consistent: most of the spending anomaly is attributed to deferred maintenance and capital investment on its historic campus. The budget data does not support that framing.

Three things to notice:

1. Operating-budget Physical Plant spending fell 46% over two years. If deferred maintenance were the cost driver, this line would be growing aggressively to absorb the backlog. It’s shrinking aggressively. A school addressing real maintenance debt does not cut its plant operating budget nearly in half.
2. Capital expenditure does not flow through this budget. The Florida BOG SUS Operating Budget covers operating expenditures (Budget Schedule Type = 5). Capital projects are funded separately through PECO (Public Education Capital Outlay) and bond issuances, recorded on a different ledger. The “deferred maintenance and capex” framing conflates two distinct funding streams in a way that obscures what the operating dollars are actually paying for.
3. The growth is in administrative and student-services personnel, not in plant. Of the visible mid-year reallocation in FY 24-25, $9M shifted out of Admin Direction into other categories and Student Services grew by $8M. Communications and Marketing are up 64% YoY. General Counsel is up 26%. The Office of the President shed its visible line but a $10M PERF FUNDS-PRESIDENT OFFICE pool appeared one row over. This is admin spending, however reorganized, not capital investment.

It’s possible NCF’s capital plan (separate from this operating budget) does carry substantial deferred maintenance and that the school is genuinely addressing it through the PECO and bond channels. That would be a worthy debate. But it’s a debate about a different ledger. The operating budget question — why does NCF spend $116K per student when Ringling spends $64K and Eckerd spends $44K — is not answered by pointing at capital spending that doesn’t appear in these numbers.

The directional read

The most telling thing is that headcount didn’t move. If NCF were taking the report seriously as a directive, you’d expect:

• A plan to reduce non-faculty FTE from 33.3 to something closer to the SUS average of 11.8 (would mean shedding roughly 180 staff)
• A reduction in total operating budget, not a $5M increase
• Line-item explanation of cost-per-degree improvement targets

None of that is in the FY 25-26 numbers. What is present:

• A $10M reserve under presidential discretion (could be deployed for severance, restructuring consultants, new programs to grow enrollment — or could just be soft-parked)
• Marketing intensification — the “grow-out-of-the-problem” play; if NCF can triple enrollment as planned, cost-per-student arithmetic improves without cutting costs
• A symbolic President’s-Office cut paired with the much larger PERF FUNDS parking one line over

That’s a wait-and-see posture — money positioned for redeployment without committing to any specific structural change yet. It’s consistent with an administration that believes the criticism is political weather to be weathered rather than a directive to be absorbed.

Three caveats worth knowing

1. The report’s $83K/student differs from IPEDS’ $118K/student. Both are correct — the report excludes auxiliary enterprises and research from the numerator, dividing by enrollment. IPEDS F1C191 includes everything. The report’s adjusted metric is the apples-to-apples figure for cross-SUS comparison.
2. The report’s 33.3 “Mgmt/Professional Admin” definition is broader than Orbuculum’s 18.1 “students per admin” calculation. We use IPEDS OCCUPCAT 300+310 (Management + Business/Financial Operations) only. The report includes Student Affairs (270), professional staff (330), and other professional categories. NCF being an outlier on the broader definition while looking middle-of-pack on the narrower one tells us that NCF’s administrative bloat is concentrated outside Management/BizOps proper — in Student Affairs, professional support, and ancillary functions. Worth broadening our metric to better surface this kind of outlier.
3. The 65% job-placement number recontextualizes the Comms/Marketing bump. It’s not just brand defense — it’s recruitment. NCF has been explicit about a 5-year plan to triple enrollment, and lower-quality outcomes in the system give them a marketing problem they have to outspend.

Outstanding questions a trustee should ask

1. What is the $10.12M PERF FUNDS – PRESIDENT OFFICE line for? A performance-funding pass-through allocated to discretionary reserves with zero attached FTE is unusual. Normally performance funds get programmatically allocated. Read literally, this parks $10M of presidential spending authority. The board should require a deployment plan with measurable targets.
2. Where is the response to the 33.3 vs 1.8 Mgmt/Professional Admin gap? UCF runs the system’s lowest cost-per-degree at 1.8 admin FTE per 100 students. NCF runs 33.3. Closing half the gap (to ~17, still 9× UCF) would mean shedding ~120 staff. The FY 25-26 budget moves 6 FTE — net of new hires and attrition the workforce is effectively unchanged. What’s the multi-year plan?
3. Why is Physical Plant down 46% in two years ($12.4M → $6.7M)? Possible benign explanation: auxiliary maintenance moved off the operating books (Housing now appears in the “auxiliary” bucket at $4.1M). Possible concerning explanation: deferred maintenance accumulating against a historic-property campus. The board should require a capital-plan reconciliation.
4. Why did Admin Direction get reclassified mid-year? Between the initial FY 24-25 budget and the revised view, $9M of Admin spending moved into Physical Plant and Student Services. Either the original classifications were wrong (an internal controls question) or there was a substantive reorganization (a transparency question). Either deserves an explanation.
5. Is the 5-year “triple enrollment” plan financially modeled? Tripling enrollment from ~830 to ~2,500 mathematically improves cost-per-student to about $42K — still 2× the SUS average and 3× UCF, but inside the realistic-cost range for a small selective college. The board should see the full enrollment-cost model before approving incremental admin growth.
6. How does NCF justify the per-degree cost to the legislature? At $495K per degree vs UCF’s $47K, the state pays 10× per NCF graduate. The political-takeover thesis is that NCF’s mission is now distinct enough from the other SUS schools to justify a different cost structure. The board should be prepared to articulate what that mission is and what cost basis is appropriate for it — because the status quo is plainly unsustainable as standard SUS-style oversight.

Methodology & sources

• NCF expenditure detail (FY 23-24 through FY 25-26): Florida BOG SUS Operating Budget files NCF_OB.OB_202408 + NCF_OB.ACCT_202408 (submission 202408 = FY 24-25) and SUS_OB_OB_2025-11-24 + SUS_OB_ACCT_2025-11-24 (system-wide FY 25-26). Obtained via two public-records requests filed by Mike Sanderson with the Florida Board of Governors in 2025.
• System-wide efficiency comparisons: Florida Board of Governors, State University System Efficiency Study, released October 29, 2025 — 25 slides, available from the BOG public records portal.
• IPEDS reconciliation: Orbuculum’s standard ingestion of the IPEDS F1A (GASB finance) and HR S2023_OC (Fall 2023 staff occupational categories) files. See the methodology page for the variable map.
• Filter for operating expenditures: Budget Schedule Type = 5 only. Schedule 1 (fund balance), 3 (receipts), 4 (transfers), and 6 (non-operating) are excluded from totals on this page.
• FY conventions: NCF FY runs July 1 – June 30. “FY 25-26 budget” here refers to the Current (C) view in the 2025-26 submission filed November 24, 2025. “FY 24-25 revised” refers to the History (H) view in the same submission, which is NCF’s mid-year actual/estimate.

This analysis was prepared by Orbuculum staff using the source documents above. It is editorial commentary in addition to data presentation; the framings in the “directional read” and “outstanding questions” sections are our interpretations, not official Florida BOG positions. Errors and omissions belong to us.