Santa Fe College is one of the first institutions in the country — and one of two public colleges in Florida — to be designated an “Opportunity College” for its ability to serve diverse student populations and promote economic mobility after graduation.
The new designation, announced Thursday by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education, marks a shift away from the traditional research-focused model and toward metrics meant to prioritize student access and outcomes.
Santa Fe President Paul Broadie II said in a statement that the designation “reflects the result of our unwavering commitment to student success, access and economic mobility.”
The new Carnegie Classifications of Institutions on Higher Education are “the biggest update” to its framework since it was established in 1973. While past classifications often favored large, research-intensive universities, the 2025 revisions include indicators like student demographics — including race, ethnicity and Pell Grant status — and post-graduation earnings.
According to Carnegie, 41% of Santa Fe’s undergraduate population are underrepresented minorities. Thirty-two percent of Santa Fe students are Pell Grant recipients, and median post-graduation earnings sit at $39,067, nearly 30% above the national average.
Carnegie Foundation President Timothy Knowles said the goal of the new designation was to better reflect the mission and impact of institutions historically left out of top-tier classifications.
“We’re trying to incentivize student success,” Knowles said in a statement. “We’re not trying to incentivize the allocation of large tranches of capital to research activity, even if that’s not in your institutional mission.”
For Santa Fe, the designation represents a notable milestone. The college isn’t ranked by the widely popular U.S. News & World Report but has long served as a transfer pipeline to UF — one of the publication’s top-ranked public universities that also holds Carnegie’s coveted R-1 status, placing it among the nation’s top research institutions. While that role has benefited thousands of students, it hasn’t always brought national visibility to Santa Fe’s own merits.
The Opportunity College label shifts that dynamic, signaling a new kind of prestige for institutions focused on access, workforce development and serving students who are often overlooked in national rankings, such as first-generation, low-income and nontraditional learners.
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which awards the classifications alongside Carnegie, said the old model often ignored the lived experiences of students.
“You saw money, you saw structure, but you didn’t see students,” Mitchell told The Chronicle of Higher Education this month. “We want to put student success at the center of how institutions describe themselves and how others look at them.”
Contact Garrett at gshanley@alligator.org. Follow him on X @garrettshanley.
Garrett Shanley is a fourth-year journalism major and the Spring 2025 university editor for The Alligator. Outside of the newsroom, you can find him watching Wong Kar-Wai movies and talking to his house plants.
