It looks like Florida may start awarding OOS students Benacquisto Scholarship, which would pay full cost of attendance (COA) at Florida public universities. If you are a NMF, keep an eye on that, we should know for sure in a week or so.
http://www.floridastudentfinancialaid.org/SSFAD/factsheets/FIS.pdf
Miami is a private school, so the scholarship would only be about $21K toward the overall cost of UM. New College doesn’t offer Engineering.
UF is viewed as having the best Engineering program in the state. UCF and USF both are viewed as being only a step or two behind UF (in engineering). These two schools are usually the 2nd choice (after UF) for engineering. For some students, UCF and USF are the first choice, usually due to generous in-state merit scholarships.
The FSU/FAMU shared engineering program isn’t as well established as UCF or USF’s programs.
To give you a better idea about UCF (based on the common data set info).
https://ikm.ucf.edu/files/2016/12/Common-Data-Set-2016-2017.pdf
UCF has over 55K undergraduates and over 8K graduate students, for a total of 64K+. It’s a fairly young, school, and the campus has been well designed to handle the growth. If you view a map, you’ll see it’s been built up in a hub and spoke type layout.
Fall 2016, 34,886 students applied, 17,441 were accepted (50%) and 6,403 enrolled (38% yield). UCF’s acceptance rate and yield, is better than most state flagship universities in the southeast (lower acceptance rate, higher yield). This reflects how much interest in-state students have for UCF.
Test scores for enrolled Freshman:
OLD SAT (25%/75% and Average score)
SAT CR: 540 to 630; average 588
SAT M: 540 to 640: average 593
SAT: W: 510 to 600: average 558
ACT Composite: 24 to 28; Average 26
33% are in the top tenth of their high school graduating class
71% are in the top quarter
Average GPA (weighted) is 3.92
All of the above are comparable to most of the State Flagship universities in the southeast (exceptions being schools like UF, Georgia Tech, Georgia, etc.).
UCF takes on more transfer students than true freshman (6,958 transfers students in the fall of 2016 vs 6,403 enrolled freshman). But all of the Florida publics take on large numbers of transfer students. Even at UF, close to 1/3 of the undergraduate students are transfer students.
If you want more information on the UCF engineering program (or any other engineering program), I recommend the program profiles at ASEE. It will list which majors are offered, how many students are enrolled in each program, the number of engineering faculty, research funding, etc.
http://profiles.asee.org/profiles/7375/screen/1?school_name=University+of+Central+Florida