How Maine Became a Laboratory for the Future of Public Higher Ed

Long, harsh winters are a fact of life in Maine, but the state’s public colleges have never seen anything like what’s coming. A demographic winter, a relentless drop in the number of high-school graduates, extends into the foreseeable future. Many states in the Midwest and Northeast are facing shortfalls, but Maine’s promises to be especially brutal.

Every statistic about the state is more worrying than the next, and together they spell looming trouble. Maine’s population of 1.3 million is the oldest in the nation, with a median age of 44.2; the national median is 37.7. It ranks 47th among states in fertility and immigrant population; just 3 percent of residents are foreign-born. Enrollment has already been faltering at most of the state’s four-year public universities for the past decade, and the number of high-school graduates in the state is projected to continue to fall, by about 14 percent through 2032.

Maine is the nation’s most rural state, with most of its population clustered in the southern half, as are most of its seven public four-year campuses, which were organized as a system in 1968. But even its population centers are sparse compared with nearby states. Portland, its largest city and home of the University of Southern Maine, has only about 66,000 residents. The system’s flagship campus, in Orono, a town near Bangor, enrolls about 11,000 students. That’s about a third the size of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Capping the state’s northern end is Aroostook County, an enormous rural expanse nearly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. The county is served by two institutions 60 miles apart, the Universities of Maine at Presque Isle and at Fort Kent. Aroostook has lost almost a quarter of its population over the last 30 years and now has fewer than 70,000 residents. Census data indicate those residents are trending older, not younger. As Raymond J. Rice, president of the Presque Isle campus, puts it, “we’re in the worst corner of the worst corner of the country for demographics” for traditional college students.

These factors make the Maine system the canary in the coal mine for the challenges that public colleges face in many states. But these same factors have also compelled the state system and its institutions to embark on a bold and, in some respects, inchoate strategy to adapt. As a result, Maine has become a de facto laboratory for the future of sustainable public higher education.

At the campus level, institutions are experimenting with ways to build enrollment and serve the state’s education needs — providing scholarships to out-of-state students, beefing up retention strategies, and reaching out to new types of students with early-college programs and competency-based education.

Meanwhile, the system is trying to make itself and its campuses more efficient through an initiative called One University. Many back-office operations and decisions have already been consolidated at the system level. The system office, and administrators and professors across the campuses, are now wrestling with how to make the most of the academic resources the system has while still serving students effectively.

If these efforts are to succeed, they must contend with other challenges that are as intractable as declining enrollment. Public university systems are made up of individual institutions designed to work in parallel, not in tandem. Any attempt to encourage collaboration across those traditional institutional boundaries will run up against history, ingrained culture, and simple turf issues.

The challenge Maine’s system faces is, in some respects, the same one it always has, says Aims C. McGuinness Jr., a senior fellow at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, or Nchems, a nonprofit that gives policy advice to colleges. He has deep knowledge of the Maine system, having served as executive assistant to its first chancellor. “This has been the story back to 1968,” McGuinness says. “What you really need to have is Fort Kent being able to ensure services to the St. John River Valley, but to draw on the course content and capability of the other institutions, rather than having to develop its own thing.”

The Great Recession dealt a blow to almost all colleges, one from which many have started to recover. But Maine has found itself facing a sobering new reality. When James H. Page became chancellor of the University of Maine system in 2012, it faced a structural deficit that was projected to balloon past $75 million a year. “There had been red ink before,” Page says. “But there was always a sense that there was some cycle to it, and then you’d come back and make it up. And it became clear that wasn’t going to happen.”

Past levels of state support weren’t likely to come back, and, more worrisome, neither were past levels of enrollment. Fall undergraduate enrollment at Southern Maine, for example, fell from 8,133 in 2007 to 6,189 in 2016, a drop of about 24 percent. At the University of Maine at Machias, it dropped from 1,093 in 2007 to 746 in 2016, a 32-percent decrease. That struggling campus was merged with the flagship last year.

The state’s economy was changing too. While about 87 percent of Maine’s students graduate from high school, fewer than 30 percent of Mainers have a bachelor’s degree. A couple of generations ago, a high-school diploma was enough to land a job in manufacturing or the timber industry. But in the future, 60 percent of new jobs in Maine will require postsecondary education.

And the recession will have one last blow to land. The number of high-school graduates in Maine is already projected to decline by 9 percent through 2025, according to data from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. But the financial crisis in 2008 also caused a 13-percent drop in the birth rate nationwide that will hit higher education in 2026, according to Nathan D. Grawe, a professor of economics at Carleton College and the author of a new book, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. Grawe’s research indicates that Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont could lose as much as 23 percent of their likely collegegoers by 2029.

“New England is looking at a steady trickle downward for the next five or so years, and then they hit a cliff,” Grawe says. “Whatever problems Maine perceives right now in terms of the number of students they have and the institutional resources they have, it looks like it’s just going to get harder.”

The Maine system tackled its most immediate problem first, cutting back on expenses to bring its deficit under control. The cuts went deep: The campus at Southern Maine, for example, lost 51 faculty members and 119 staff members in one year, out of about 1,000 full-time employees.

The system and its individual institutions also began developing the One University idea. Some of those early conversations focused on ways that the universities could embrace mission differentiation, which in turn encouraged them to try different tactics. That helped seed a range of approaches to try to bolster enrollments and serve the state’s educational needs.

Southern Maine has focused, in part, on bettering its retention. Under Glenn A. Cummings, who became president in 2015, the university requires all new students to undergo a 90-minute one-on-one personalized orientation to manage their expectations and connect them with resources for when things get challenging. The university also identified its 18 most difficult courses — introduction to organic chemistry, for example — and hires upperclassmen to provide academic support to struggling students.

Presque Isle has taken a different tack: building a competency-based education program to appeal to the nearly 200,000 Mainers — about 14 percent of the population — who have some college credit but no degree. In the two semesters the program has been offered so far, about 150 students have signed up to pay a flat fee of $2,000 a semester to demonstrate competencies through an online platform to earn a degree in business administration. Two students completed degrees their very first semester, wrapping up about 30 equivalent credit hours each.

Fort Kent, on the Canadian border near the northernmost tip of the state, has built a substantial dual-enrollment program, first with its local high school (located on the grounds of the university), and now with about 100 other schools throughout the state.

Even the flagship has made unprecedented moves to bring in new students. Three years ago it began offering scholarships to qualified students from other states with the promise that they could attend UMaine for whatever it cost to attend the flagship in their own state. (Since the Maine system had frozen tuition for six years, this added up to substantial savings for students in some neighboring states, though they still pay more than Mainers do.) The scholarship — and a highway-billboard campaign in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Rhode Island advertising it — has nearly doubled the percentage of out-of-state students at the Orono campus. Five years ago, the number of out-of-state students fluctuated between 15 and 20 percent. This year it’s 36 percent.

Finding ways to bring in more students is part of any solution to the challenges Maine faces. But simply bringing more students into a traditional ecosystem of individual state universities that duplicate the same sorts of programs and resources isn’t going to fix the state’s problems, or the system’s.

Many people misunderstand the idea behind One University, says Page, the system chancellor. Sitting in a cafe in the State House complex in Augusta, he asks to borrow a sheet of paper. He starts by sketching a horizontal line, marked from left to right by points A, B, and C. The line represents the spectrum of collaboration, he says.

“Model A, this is the old confederated model that the system had for many, many years,” he says. There was very little collaboration among individual institutions competing against one another for students and resources. “Most people, when they hear ‘One university,’ they jump over here,” he says, pointing to C. That model is of a single indivisible institution with one president, one provost, and multiple locations.

“The difficult place to be is here,” he adds, pointing at B, in the middle. “That’s multi-institution, highly collaborative, and integrated.” That’s where he thinks the Maine system needs to be to survive the punishing demographics and fulfill its mission.

Page, and the system, face a number of challenges in steering this course. For one thing, no proven map or model exists for this kind of shift. “It wouldn’t work for me to sit in my office and say, Here are the 20 ways to realize One University. Now each of you go do the relevant subset of those,” he says.

Building collaboration requires communication and trust, and the structures that enable it take time and effort. Consolidating administrative functions is simpler than collaborating across academic departments. Page says that the system now sits in the middle between B and C on back-office collaboration. Academically, the system is still somewhere between A and B. “Numbers are easy,” he adds. “People are hard.”

Maine faculty received an early lesson in how difficult, and frustrating, building academic collaboration can be. In 2014 the system formed 17 “academic program integration” teams, each with professors from each institution, to study how to combine and strengthen the efforts of different disciplines across campuses. When Robert Neely arrived at the system office in 2016 to take over the new post of vice chancellor for academic affairs, he discovered two problems with the teams. First, professors felt like they’d been entered into a forced marriage. Second, there hadn’t been many tangible outcomes in terms of more collaborative programs. “Faculty were a little cynical about continuing a conversation that seemed to be going nowhere,” he says.

Meanwhile, another team had identified more than 50 barriers to the kind of collaboration that all of the teams were trying to foster. For example, every campus in the system used the same software to manage their student databases, but they had all implemented it differently, making it difficult to share data. Faculty committees are not positioned to fix complications with registration, financial aid, and revenue sharing.

Over the past two years, the system has worked to knock down such barriers, making it easier to cross-list courses, transfer credit, and budget across institutions. It has also seen some promising signs that academic collaboration across campuses can work.

Matthew Bampton came to Southern Maine in 1993 as an assistant professor of geography, the only person on campus who specialized in the then-emerging field of geographic information systems, or GIS. “It was pretty near impossible to run a one-person shop,” he says. “I realized I would make more progress if I could join a community of other people who were working on similar projects.”

He started by reaching out to GIS experts on the other regional campuses of the Maine system. They consulted with one another, referred to their colleagues’ queries from students that went beyond their own specialities, and went in together to get a good price on mapping software. In many ways, they began to function as a sort of virtual department, spread out across the system’s regional campuses.

When the system office put out a call for proposals for a round of program integration grants, Bampton and his GIS colleagues at the other Maine regional campuses submitted one — as did a separate group of GIS faculty at the flagship. The system office suggested that the two groups talk. The idea of a true systemwide GIS collaboration had appeal, bringing a much broader range of skills together, but it also presented some tensions. “It can be an effort to find the common ground,” Bampton says. “We had to sit down and hash out some details and make sure that everybody’s voice was heard.”

In many ways, the GIS program’s spread among Maine’s regional colleges had already been fostering the kind of academic collaboration that the system would like to see happen more broadly — GIS courses from a shared curriculum have been cross-listed across the institution for years. But there are still impediments. When one of Bampton’s students takes a course at another Maine institution, “That may be advantageous for my student, and it may ultimately be advantageous for me,” he says. “For my institution, it’s just lost revenue.”

The truth is that public universities, even those within a system, have traditionally been set up to compete as much as cooperate. Up in Aroostook County, the campuses at Presque Isle and Fort Kent had, for decades, collaborated very little, according to Rice, who taught and served in administrative posts at the university for 20 years before being named president last year. “Somebody would start a psych program, so then the other campus would start a psych program,” he says, “even if it didn’t really have the resources to do so, just because we were sticking our fingers in each other’s eyes.” Now, he says, “we’re way past that point.”

In fact, Rice says, in any other state, the two campuses probably would have been merged by now. Presque Isle enrolls about 1,300 students, and Fort Kent about 1,900, roughly 60 percent of them part time. But as small and close as they are, the campuses serve very different parts of the state — Fort Kent has a strong Francophone culture thanks to its proximity to Quebec.

Like many rural public colleges, Presque Isle and Fort Kent have programs that have struggled to attract students in recent years. Though it was founded in 1878 as a teacher’s college, Fort Kent’s education department has lost all of its professors. Its English department is down to three full-time faculty members. The two institutions are now in discussions about how they can collaborate so that the resources of both campuses can serve the students at each.

In the past year, Steven D. Gammon, provost at Fort Kent, has taken on a new title: executive director for collaboration and strategic alliances. He is, effectively, the person in charge of brokering academic partnerships with Presque Isle, and he serves in the cabinet of both campuses. It will be his responsibility to ease the way for academic collaborations, especially in struggling programs. “Otherwise,” he says, “if we continue to operate independently, these programs are going to go away.”

Undersubscribed programs and underused academic resources are not endemic to Aroostook County alone. It’s not that there’s no demand for certain English courses, says Joseph E. Becker, a professor of English at Fort Kent, but there may not be enough demand at a single institution. “We’re not getting enough people enrolled, because there are five at this campus and four at this campus and three at this campus,” he says.

Geraldine C. Becker, a professor of English and creative writing at Fort Kent, is part of a statewide group of faculty who have just begun meeting to try to figure out how to share creative-writing resources for courses that may be offered statewide. “The biggest challenge is going to be trying to coordinate who’s going to teach what,” she says. “I don’t think anyone’s going to want to give up anything.”

Despite the grim trends and forecast, Maine’s efforts to build enrollment have produced some encouraging signs. Southern Maine’s tactics to keep students enrolled contributed to a 6-percent increase in retention between the fall and spring semesters this year. Since the university had budgeted at its former retention rate, that leaves it 3 percent ahead of its current budget. “That has made an enormous difference for us,” Cummings, the president, says. “That means you can give more scholarships. You could add some advisers, do more training.”

At Presque Isle, Rice has seen interest in the competency-based program rise. He hopes for 175 students this fall. “If we market that correctly and are competitive,” he says, “that’s a demographic that won’t run out for a long time in this state.”

Some strategies being carried out by one institution may help others. Students in dual-enrollment programs like the one at Fort Kent often scatter to other institutions. Only about 15 percent of Fort Kent’s early-college students enroll there after they graduate. But in a state without a strong college-going culture, says Scott A. Voisine, dean of community education there, “if we encourage a student who is on the cusp of potentially going to college or not, and they are successful in their first class and they move on, that’s a win for the entire state.”

The idea of One University remains a work in progress, academically and administratively. Accreditation is a potential handicap for Page’s multi-institution, highly collaborative, integrated university system. Mostly because of the constraints surrounding financial aid, accreditation for academic programs is strongly tied to individual colleges in physical locations. The policies of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, the system’s accreditor, mean that the virtual GIS program must remain virtual for now. Page says that as the system moves forward with its plans, it remains “in continual contact” with its accreditor.

While combining much of the decision-making at the system level may have increased efficiency, it has also raised some complications of its own. Southern Maine, for example, has been eager to purchase new software that will allow it to better track its students for signs of potential academic trouble. In the past, Cummings, its president, could have simply cut a check. Though he supports the idea of cross-institutional collaboration, decisions like this are ones he can no longer make alone. “We’d like to move forward, but that requires a systemwide conversation,” Cummings says. “So you get a slowdown.”

There may be serious pitfalls for systems considering such top-down consolidations, according to McGuinness, the senior fellow at Nchems. While he credits the chancellor and the system for “dealing with realities and bringing about change virtually more than any other state that we’ve worked with,” he adds that taking some administrative decisions out of the hands of the president “immediately escalates to the system level things that really need to be dealt with decentralized. It also means that you really can’t hold the president accountable.”

Change is always daunting, especially on college campuses, but Page says he and the system leadership have worked hard to make clear that if the system had maintained its existing course, “that’s the riskiest, most dangerous path. And if we stayed on it, everything would fall apart fairly soon.”

One University offers a future for Maine, even if it’s far from certain. “We’re morphing, and I don’t really know what we’re going to morph into,” Neely, the system’s vice chancellor, says. As the son of a professor, he grew up in academe. “Frankly I’m saddened by some of the things I think we have to do,” he says. “But what we have to do is try to preserve the core suite of our ideals and values, but share those in a way we haven’t done in the past. We don’t have the resources to do everything individually.”

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.