ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. – Flagler College consistently gets coveted recognition, including high rankings in the U.S. News and World Report as a top college.
It has also been picked as one of the top 10 prettiest campuses in the world, joining the University of Oxford in England and Stanford University in California.
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“We have picked up 40% more revenue in just the last three years,” said Flagler College President John Delaney. “We’ve been adding majors and reaching out to different directions. It is a wonderful place.”
Delaney is in his fifth year as president and feels this is where he needs to be. “This is home,” he said.
About 2,300 students are enrolled at the school. Delaney said it’s thriving, but that did not happen overnight.
Establishing the college goes back to a man named Henry Flagler.
Flagler and John D. Rockefeller were business partners.
“They became the billionaires of their day,” Delaney said. “In fact, they were two of the richest people in the world at one point.”
In 1888, Flagler opened the property as a hotel, which remained in operation for more than 80 years.
“It arrived as a hotel for many, many years,” Delaney said. “After the Great Depression, and the 1950s and 1960s, it was not really functioning as well.”
Flagler ultimately converted the hotel into Flagler College in 1968.
It started out with just about 100 students. Now it boasts a student population of a couple of thousand.
Delaney said the intimate classroom settings are a characteristic he wants to hold on to.
“When you have those small classes, when it is in person, face-to-face learning as opposed to online or with 2,000, 3,000, 4000 students, it is a different learning experience,” he said. “It is a great bond that the college has with its students and its alumni.”
Delaney said revenue annually has jumped significantly from $57 million to $81 million.
He said the plan is for that extra money to be reinvested into facility improvements, increasing staff salaries, and hiring more faculty.
“There is a lot of competition in higher education,” he said. “There are some people questioning whether the degree is worth it. Particularly male students are kind of questioning that you are going to earn $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 more with a college degree than without. We want our degrees to be relevant to this society so that there are jobs out there.
Delaney said that with the interest in attending the school, his vision is to increase enrollment by 200 more students at the most.