New College of Florida enrolled 1,015 students for the 2026-2027 academic year. That's a record. That's also more than the 1,000-student goal the school set after Governor Ron DeSantis appointed conservative trustees in 2023 and every liberal pundit in America declared the institution dead on arrival.

Three years later, the corpse is thriving.

Classes began on August 17, and the school isn't just hitting benchmarks — it's already looking past them. New College has set a target of 1,200 students by 2028 and 1,800 by 2034. The college released a statement saying it is "operating with exceptional momentum" and that the growth "creates a more vibrant campus."

The expansion is physical, too. Over the summer, New College absorbed the University of South Florida Manatee-Sarasota campus through a 32-acre land transfer, gaining access to new residence halls and a laboratory facility. That's the kind of infrastructure investment schools make when they're building something, not when they're circling the drain.

Remember the narrative. When DeSantis appointed conservative scholar Chris Rufo and other trustees to the board, the media treated it like a funeral. Faculty quit in protest. Opinion columns ran with headlines about the "destruction" of academic freedom. The prediction was unanimous: students would flee, enrollment would crater, and the whole experiment would collapse into an embarrassing cautionary tale.

None of that happened.

Nathan Allen, a former vice president of strategy and special projects at New College, tried a different angle of criticism. "Everyone focuses on enrollment numbers, but that is absolutely the wrong thing to focus on." Which is a convenient position to take now that the enrollment numbers are record-breaking. When critics predicted the school would empty out, enrollment was apparently the right thing to focus on. Now that it's up, we're told to look elsewhere.

What the numbers actually reflect is something the education establishment doesn't want to examine too closely: parents and students are choosing a school that prioritizes education over ideology. When you strip out the activist programming and replace it with actual academics, it turns out people show up.

The local community has noticed. Don Borden, owner of Four Winds Technology Group in Sarasota, said his company has hired 12 or more interns and currently employs 5 New College alumni. "Keeping the talent and diverse skill sets here really helps the community because it keeps businesses and the economy vibrant," Borden said. A college producing graduates that local employers actually want to hire. Revolutionary concept.

Some employees left when the new board took over. Others stayed and have acknowledged that academic freedom is still respected on campus — a detail that never quite makes it into the national coverage.

The DeSantis higher-education experiment was supposed to prove that conservative governance and quality education are incompatible. Instead it proved that a school can fire its DEI bureaucracy, refocus on academics, absorb an entire neighboring campus, and set enrollment records — all in three years.

Funny how the schools that stop telling students what to think keep filling up seats.