Community colleges

The public and lawmakers should encourage the further development of a community-college system in Maine, recognizing that the proposed collaboration between the University of Maine System and the technical-college system still has a long way to go.

The immediate value of a community-college system is threefold: its associate degree programs would prepare Maine students for a range of good jobs that once required only a high school degree, but now have become significantly more complicated; it would provide a relatively low-cost way for students who are unsure of whether higher education is for them to try it out; and it would lay the academic groundwork for students interested in four-year degrees and beyond.

Maine students do well in grade school and high school, scoring impressively on national tests. But when it comes to college many don’t rate because they don’t go. Part of that may be cultural — Maine until very recently offered good lifetime jobs to high-school graduates — but a significant part can be attributed to the cost of college, according to a study in the mid-’90s by the Finance Authority of Maine. Priced right, community college can change that.

The approach by the two college systems so far has been right on. Even though Maine is one of only three states without a community-college network, its 1.2 million population does not need a third separate college system. Cooperation between the two existing systems should be sufficient.

There will be glitches along the way. The most obvious of these now is the disparity in pricing. Technical colleges cost a lot less per credit hour than UMS colleges. Depending on the course of study, an alert student is going to figure out quickly that it makes sense to stay at a technical college as long as possible to either earn an associate’s degree or gather course credit toward a bachelor’s at a UMS college or elsewhere.

Technical colleges and the smaller UMS colleges have different roles, but they aren’t that different and they are getting less different year by year. If the two systems are going to work together they eventually will have to establish common pricing for common courses. That sounds simple, but the thought must send UMS college presidents to their calculators, figuring out how much such a change might cost them and where that money might be made up.

Nevertheless, study after study shows how Maine residents would benefit from more formal education. The proposed community-college agreement is a practical way to deliver learning to a dispersed population that needs less-expensive access to higher ed. The state’s education leaders seem to be off to a good start.