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© St. Petersburg Times, published September 16, 2002
Want good academics at a cut-rate price? Check out the offerings close to home. Two of Florida's public institutions of higher learning rank among the top 10 "baccalaureate bargains" in the country, according to Kiplinger's Personal Finance. New College in Sarasota came in seventh and the University of Florida ninth on the magazine's list of the 100 best values in public colleges.
Also ranked in the top 100: Florida State University, 22; University of Central Florida, 61; University of South Florida, 75; and Florida International University, 88. At most of Florida's public universities, the official cost of attendance for in-state students is about $10,000 to $11,000 a year, dropping to $6,000 to $7,000 after taking financial aid into account. A big part of that aid is Florida's Bright Futures scholarship program, which pays up to the full cost of tuition plus a stipend for books for those with high enough grades and test scores to qualify.
The quality measures the magazine looked at included graduation rates, student-faculty ratios, spending on academics and test scores of entering students. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia topped the list.
Not all publications think so highly of Florida's higher education offerings. None of the state schools made last week's Wall Street Journal list of the top 50 business schools in the country. The newspaper surveyed corporate recruiters to find out how they rate the quality of the graduates. At the top of the heap: Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan.