Maine has long faced the kinds of demographic headwinds that loom for many other states. Now higher-education leaders in the Pine Tree State think they may have found a way to reach safe passage.
The Board of Trustees of the University of Maine voted unanimously on Monday to authorize the system to pursue a unified accreditation, a process that has run afoul of campus leaders and accreditors in at least one other state.
The system administration will submit a proposal to the New England Commission of Higher Education, known as Neche, to consider accrediting all seven four-year public campuses in the state as one accredited body, in what appears to be the first such arrangement in academe.
The Maine system has been considering such a move for years as a response to dwindling enrollment and constrained resources. If the unified accreditation is approved by Neche and by the U.S. Education Department, system officials hope they will be able to better build and offer programs across multiple campuses, and to combine administrative positions and services to save money.
A single accreditation for a public system could also set a precedent for other states with an ebbing flow of high-school graduates applying to overbuilt systems, and could provide a road map of how to pursue such a maneuver.
Maine may suffer more than any other state from the demographic forces squeezing college enrollment. Largely rural and sparsely peopled, Maine has one of the oldest populations in the nation and ranks low in both fertility and immigrant arrivals. The number of high-school graduates in the state is projected to fall by about 14 percent by 2032.
While the flagship campus, at Orono, and the University of Southern Maine, in trendy Portland, have increased their enrollments over the past five years, fall undergraduate enrollment on the Farmington and Augusta campuses have dropped almost 7 percent since 2015. And enrollment at the Machias campus, on the far northeastern coast, has dropped more than 16 percent.
Some sort of reckoning was inevitable. Campuses struggled to maintain departments with fewer majors. New programs, like cybersecurity, that would require faculty members and resources from across the system, met with obstacles over issues like registration, financial aid, and credit transfer. System administrators have looked for ways to cut costs by combining services and positions but feared running afoul of accreditors who expected each campus to sustain itself.
The question became, says James B. Thelen, general counsel and chief of staff for the system, “Can we really sustain all of that with all of them continuing to meet, by themselves, individually, on their own, all the accreditation standards?”
‘A Favorable Read’
The proposal to seek a unified accreditation didn’t show up overnight. James H. Page, who served as chancellor from 2012 to 2019, had begun considering single accreditation for the system as far back as 2015. About two years ago, administrators started exploring in earnest how, and whether, it might be possible, as part of a partial-consolidation strategy that Page called One University.
They had a willing partner in Neche, which, in cooperation with the system, hired outside legal counsel with expertise in accreditation and knowledge of Education Department policy. Having a close dialogue between system and accreditor “reduces the likelihood of a surprise,” says Barbara Brittingham, president of Neche. Both the system and the commission wanted to explore whether accreditation could be applied to the system; sharing a legal team ensured that they got “one answer to that question, not two answers,” she says.
The administrators and the outside counsel considered how a single accreditation that combined the existing accreditations of the campuses — rather than all campuses coming under the accreditation of one campus — might work. They shared their ideas informally with Neche and with Education Department officials. By last spring, Thelen says, “we got a favorable read” from both the accreditor and department officials.
When Dannel P. Malloy took over as chancellor, last summer, he took stock of Page’s work, including the study of single accreditation. At the board’s request, Malloy also reviewed the system’s priorities. At a board meeting in September, he recommended that the system pursue a unified accreditation.
Laying the groundwork and forming the plan were only the first steps. Malloy committed to visiting all seven campuses many times throughout the fall semester to talk about the plan and hear feedback from campus constituencies. Correspondence with Neche about possibly altering accreditation was posted on a website dedicated to the plan. Malloy wanted the process to be as transparent as possible, Thelen says, so that “when he made a recommendation, it didn’t come out of the blue.”
While Malloy is leading the effort, he “doesn’t want to dictate to any constituency how this model will be developed,” Thelen says. Whatever a campus does well on its own locally, it should continue to do. But where they “need to stand up a program that builds on faculty from multiple universities, we’re going to do that in the unified-accreditation model,” he says.
A single accreditation would not only allow the system to build programs but could also save them, proponents argue. If some campuses are having trouble sustaining, say, a French major, unified accreditation could allow them to combine professors and resources into one department that serves several campuses. “The answer,” Thelen says, “can be something other than you close down the program, lay off the faculty, and students lose the opportunity in that region to have access to a program.”
Eventual Accountability
The system will submit a proposal for a change of accreditation, and Neche is expected to act on it by the end of June. But other hurdles remain before a single accreditation can actually be put into effect; many things have yet to be worked out, and some questions dangle.
Unified accreditation may make some things easier for Matthew Bampton, a professor of geography at the University of Southern Maine. He is a member of the Maine Geospatial Institute, a collaboration that involves professors on every campus in the system, focused on the developing science of combining data and mapping. Bampton and his colleagues want to share students, courses, and resources across institutions, but traditional university arrangements have made that difficult. If the new unified accreditation, say, allows a student to carry credits for a course from one Maine institution to another, “that would be great,” he says.
But, he adds, he and some fellow professors are “really cautious and skeptical about how it’s going to play out. The devil is most certainly in the details.“
Faculty members will play the critical role in formulating the shared-governance structures necessary to make cross-campus programs like Bampton’s function, Thelen says.
But in practice, says Bampton, collaboration among campuses may not be simple. If one or two campuses dominate discussions, it could leave the others at a disadvantage. Programs on different campuses may have divergent standards or approaches. He and his colleagues at the Maine Geospatial Institute, for example, form a tight group because they’ve worked together — some for decades — and have earned mutual trust, he says. “Not all departments work like us.”
Professors will play an important role, but accountability will reach the system level, says Aims C. McGuinness Jr., a senior fellow at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems and a former administrator in the Maine system. The campuses have strikingly different missions, and the system will have to answer for whether resources are properly aligned with those missions, as well as for financial aid and other crucial functions.
While professors may design and oversee cross-institutional academic programs, “the academic buck, in this case, will stop at the system,” says Brittingham, president of Neche.
It remains unclear if unified accreditation would help the system lower its expenses in the long run, or by how much. The University System of Georgia consolidated 18 of its institutions into nine, but the financial savings amounted to only about 1 percent of the system’s annual operating budget.
What’s going on in Maine will be watched closely by other states and their university systems to see if unified accreditation might be a way to help them out of their own demographic and financial jams.
Brittingham believes that other state systems will give it a try, though it isn’t likely to serve as a good solution for everyone. Maine law was friendly to the process, and the state is relatively small, with a modest number of institutions and students. For a larger system, like California State University, she says, “that’s a different ballgame.”
In Alaska, cuts in the state budget compelled the state-university system to float a desperate plan last fall to put its three institutions under a single accreditation. But the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities pushed back, and the University of Alaska’s Board of Regents withdrew it.
The Maine initiative has already provided valuable lessons, McGuinness says. The process of thinking through a single accreditation “is a really good model for other people,” especially in “helping other places understand the number of moving parts you’ve got to deal with” when pondering such a move.
Perhaps the most important lesson the Maine proposal underlines is that “the initiatives that fail are those that have not been preceded by careful process and listening,” he says. “They not only crash — they create barriers in themselves that seriously impede major reforms.”
