Area colleges and universities sound off about how they’re supporting a modern student body’s social, academic and career goals.

Ask any college what their most in-demand majors are today, and you’ll get answers as varied as the niches that Florida’s many four-year colleges fill to launch the individual trajectories of not only in-state students but also those drawn in from all over the country and the world alike. There are some general constants, though: Whether students are considering a liberal-arts school, STEM-focused studies or a niche field, The Sunshine State’s higher-education landscape is seeing an undeniable technological trend driving the majors students pursue today; their entrepreneurial spirits, community focus and interest in multidisciplinary studies are further guiding career choices, too.

School leaders and decision-makers are keenly tapped into the trends impacting not only the student body’s collective college experience but also how that education prepares them for an ever-changing world. Those influencing factors range from the relatively recent ubiquity of AI and knowing how to both ethically and effectively embrace that modern tool, adapting to a generation who seeks meaningful careers that benefit their community, and helping new students navigate the collegiate world from applications to admission to academics. 

Orlando Family Magazine spoke with a number of Florida colleges and universities to learn more about how they deliver a high-quality in-state education without breaking the bank, work with their communities to offer impactful internships and significant classroom-to-career pipelines, and look ahead to benefit the students of both today and tomorrow. 

What resources are available to make the cost of college more accessible?
“We’re one of the most affordable public universities in the state university system in the U.S., and we’re the most affordable in Florida: In the U.S News & World Report ranking that just came out, we were listed at No. 3 in terms of best-value public schools in the south. … On top of that, we offer some incredible scholarships. We’ve built out need-based aid, focused on our students and mentoring support, we have student-success coaches, we have financial-aid coaches and admissions counselors to ensure that students aren’t left behind due to costs. I have yet to hear of an instance where a student has turned down us to go to another school because it was more affordable, and 100% of our full-time, in-state undergraduate students have received gift aid this year.”
—Bryan Brooks, VP student affairs, enrollment management and strategic communications, Florida Polytechnic University 

“College is expensive and the sticker prices are really daunting for families—so the No. 1 thing to understand is that sticker price is rarely what families actually pay. There’s so much money and financial aid available, both from federal aid but also from the state because here in Florida we have [the lottery-funded scholarships] Bright Futures, we have the EASE [Effective Access to Student Education] grants that go to students attending private colleges; at Rollins, we have $90 million in aid available. So if students take a little bit of time, there are all these external sites and all of these external places to find additional dollars. … Raise Me is a really great platform that students as early as their freshman year of high school can sign up for where they can start earning micro-scholarships towards college, even just plugging things into a search engine like ‘How can I get money for college,’ a lot of things will come up. There’s lots and lots of resources out there, and if students don’t have proper guidance, they can always contact the admissions office.
—Faye Tydlaska, VP for enrollment management and marketing, Rollins College

What new programs are you excited to introduce and keep developing? What demands not only inspired them but also do they meet?
“We continually monitor the industries we serve to ensure our programs align with current and future needs. In recent years, we’ve introduced several degree programs designed to address the growing demand in emerging technologies. These include our graduate degree in computer science, and our undergraduate degrees in user experience and artificial intelligence, and our undergraduate degree program in game business and e-sports, among others. Each was developed in response to evolving industry demands, giving students the skills and knowledge required to thrive in highly competitive and fast-changing fields.”
—Dr. David Franko, vice president of academic affairs, Full Sail University

“The new creative technologies program is a flexible BFA program that’s designed to let students pursue their art and design passion through the lens of technology as a tool for building a business or a career around that. The core of the curriculum is to take whatever kind of art and design courses you’re passionate about—including video, photography or drawing—and then learn to build apps, games, web experiences, anything where technology can help bring that to life and also bring it to market. The goal is that students have the experience over the course of their major of actually building and releasing products both in their junior and their senior years: We call it our Make It, Ship It curriculum. We want to take advantage of rapidly evolving technological capabilities in terms of the ability for it being easier than ever for someone to make software products, to make apps and games and things like that, and also the importance of having that entrepreneurial, practical experience in a world that is being disrupted by emerging technologies: Disruption is a time when, traditionally, the new entrants into the field have an advantage, when the incumbents are sort of back on their heels. What we want to teach, as much as anything else, is adaptability and curiosity.”
—Rick Dakan, creative writing professor/AI coordinator, Ringling College of Art and Design

“We’ve been developing our minor in data analytics that’s meant to be paired with any major, whether your major is in English, history, anthropology or business. That has really grown in interest, and definitely as we incorporate more AI learning across the curriculum. What we really try to do as a liberal arts school is to not just be so focused on one particular major but rather on how the interdisciplinarity of those work together to help students and their outcomes. Because if you think about the world of work today and how fast-paced it is, most jobs aren’t just about one particular subject or focus: They draw on a number of skills and backgrounds from a lot of different disciplines.”
—Faye Tydlaska

What kind of partnerships or programs are helping to develop impactful internships, robust professional pathways and stronger communities?
“A lot of students right now are coming to us to get the hands-on EMT training they need to have clinical experiences because they want to go to medical school or they want to go to PA [physician assistant] school. So students from University of Central Florida or University of South Florida will do EMT, will do paramedics here so they can get that extra training to have clinical work experience in the field as that stepping stone toward medical school or physician-assistant school. … EMT, paramedic and EMS is just one side of the house: We also have tremendous certification courses for anybody in the medical field—nurses, doctors, anybody—that needs to do recertification in things like basic life support, IV therapy, airway management. There’s so much more that we offer to those already actively working in the medical field, and we’re also an authorized training site by the American Heart Association. We do use ACA and AdventHealth for the clinical work on the clinical side so students can do a ridealong for the ambulances, and we do work with local hospitals in terms of clinical sites.”
—Christopher Dorelien, campus president, Orlando Medical Institute

“Our education model is built around real-world learning, and partnerships with local companies are a central part of that mission: These collaborations not only provide networking and career opportunities for students, but also serve as a strong talent pipeline for the entertainment, media, and technology industries—both locally and globally. We’ve developed partnerships with organizations such as Orlando Health, AdventHealth University and Echelon Fitness, all of which now have a presence on our campus. We also maintain ongoing relationships with companies like WWE and EA, leading to shadowing opportunities, networking events, scholarships and employment pathways for our students and graduates. For example, at WWE’s “Homecoming” event this past September, WWE presented 10 Full Sail students with scholarships as part of our ongoing relationship. … WWE has now granted more than $500,000 in scholarship funds to our students.”
—Dr. David Franko

What kind of social, academic or real-world trends has your school been proactively responding to?
“Even just being in a college setting can be intimidating to students socially. They’re coming in after part of their high school experience was moved to being online [during peak COVID], or the social norms in their high school experience were different: When you come onto a campus, not only are you exposed to so many different people from all over, you’re living independently for the first time. I think that’s a social response that we’re having to have: Since students are more dependent, they need more help. That’s not a bad thing since they’re also asking more questions, but there may be more things that we have to slow down and explain—and that’s okay! We just have to rethink what kind of customer experience we’re giving our students. 

We’ve done a lot with career services, which starts in freshman year instead of their junior or senior year and guides students through what their degree looks like and how that plays out into a professional career. With tutoring, we’ve had students who are more engaged with an AI chatbot than they are with, for example, an admissions counselor, so we’re finding that typical tutoring services with a professional tutor are less effective. We’ve started utilizing an Uber-style peer-to-peer tutoring service where students with a certain grade in a class can promote themselves as a tutor. That does two things: One, it allows for students to exercise their entrepreneurial spirit and real-life skills, and two, it allows students who need tutoring to have access to an environment where they’re a little more comfortable working with another student who knows what they’re going through.”
—Josh Jones, director of admissions, Florida College 

“I think that all of higher education is trying to figure out how to make education not just more accessible but easier for students to get the education needed to get into their career fields. Now, it almost feels like, ‘I’ve got to go get that master’s degree if I’m going to be competitive in the job market.’ Our 4+1 [graduate] program is very innovative: We have discovered a way that we can condense the program without removing any courses or learning material, which saves the students some time and money on the back end. If you think about the field of AI, a field that’s rapidly changing, do you want to get your undergraduate degree and then go sit in the classroom again for another three years, only to discover that when you get out, everything’s changed again? You almost want to get that degree as fast as you can, and you can save yourself a year or two with 4+1 when you’re not sure you have two or three years to spend on getting a master’s degree.”
—Bryan Brooks

“Because we have people coming from all over for our specialized training, we adopted a hybrid model of classes online and on campus: For example, for our paramedic program, where the students are already working on schedule at their fire department, they have online components they can do away from the school, where we have the videos, theory courses, PowerPoint presentations, all the components that students can learn online—we can’t substitute hands-on practices and lab work with online learning so those will always be taught on campus, but the classroom theory can be delivered online.
—Christopher Dorelien

What are the benefits of pursuing an in-state education, as well as keeping those home-grown and locally developed talents in Florida?
“We hire a lot of Ringling grads, and there are obviously a lot of big employers here—lilke this place called Disney World (laughs) and Universal, too. With the entertainment industry here, a lot of students will stay based out of Florida as they’re setting up as solo entrepreneurs doing design and art work. We do want more, which is part of why we’re really trying to build an incubator here to help build those businesses in Florida, in Sarasota. … Having a network of support and connections that they can rely on in times of stress and build on in times of ambition, there’s some real virtue to that, which applies to institutional connections, as well. We’re deeply involved with our community, and our community supports the college tremendously.”
—Rick Dakan

“It can be fun and feels enticing to go far off for college, but I think that thought process has been challenged a little bit, especially after COVID. Some of the benefits of staying here are that you know your state, you know your environment already, you’re familiar with the way things function. Even if you live in Orlando and want to go an hour and a half away to Tampa, you’re exploring your state without going to a place that’s completely unfamiliar. And with college being such an unfamiliar experience, sometimes having a little stability can actually benefit you and boost your confidence going into it. And the other cool thing is, as a college student local to the state, you can build relationships with out-of-state students by being the one to show them around. … There is some encouragement for students to stay [after graduation] and be a part of what Florida has to offer beyond the school, to benefit from local connections, our network and alumni here so they get those experiences and feel like, ‘Hey, I loved my time here in college, let me give back to the state now.’ For those who want to stay, we’ll help them find job opportunities and make sure they’re plugged into our alumni network. There is some encouragement for students to stay and be a part of what Florida has to offer beyond the school, to benefit from local connections, our network and alumni here so they get those experiences and feel like, ‘Hey, I loved my time here in college, let me give back to the state now.’”
—Josh Jones