How Florida Universities Became World-Class

Florida is known for many things—theme parks, retirement communities, deer-eating pythons—but academic excellence is typically not one of them. The state boasts no prestigious Ivy League–like schools. To the extent that it has a collegiate reputation, it is as a mecca for out-of-state students who come to get blotto during spring break.

Yet, the numbers don’t lie. In the Washington Monthly’s 2025 Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars, seven Florida universities rank in the top 100 (out of more than 1,400 schools). These include Florida International University (number eight), University of Central Florida (17), and New College (25), all of them public institutions. Four Florida state universities also make the Monthly’s 2025 Best Colleges for Research ranking, including the University of Florida (number 27) and Florida State (76). And 10 of the top 20 colleges on the Monthly’s Best Bang for the Buck ranking for the Southeast are in Florida.

Why do so many Florida universities do so well on the magazine’s rankings? Part of it is that Florida is a populous state with lots of universities. But Michigan and Pennsylvania have about the same combined population as Florida (23 million). Yet only two Pennsylvania colleges, both private—Haverford (19) and Swarthmore (37)—make the top 100 in the Monthly’s Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars, and none from Michigan do.

You might also wonder if Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s famously aggressive crackdown on faculty and curriculum he deems “woke” has anything to do with the state’s high rankings. The answer is no. Florida universities did well on the Monthly’s rankings years before DeSantis was elected governor, and the data underlying the 2025 rankings comes largely from actions before his tenure.