University of Maine valedictorian Jim Leonard is a late bloomer.

“I never thought seriously about college. I wasn’t ready and on some level I knew I wasn’t,” said Leonard, 40, who graduated from Rockland High School in 1980 and enrolled at UM 19 years later.

Nontraditional students like Leonard are part of the reason why more Maine residents than ever have college degrees.

Census figures released this week indicate that the number of Maine residents age 25 and older with college degrees has increased 4 percentage points over the last 10 years. In 2000, 22.9 percent of Mainers had college degrees, compared with 18.8 percent in 1990.

Maine still ranks last in New England where 28.5 percent of people age 25 or older have four-year degrees. National figures are not available yet.

The results are part of another wave of census information, from the long form, that offers details about the state’s educational attainment.

The new data also reveal that the number of high school graduates in Maine who are 25 and older rose by 6.6 percentage points, from 78.8 percent in 1990 to 85.4 percent in 2000.

The figures highlight the problem that Maine has been grappling with for years. Although the state has the highest high school graduation rate in the nation, it’s only in the middle when it comes to college degrees.

Income link

A new report issued earlier this week by the Institute for a Strong Maine Economy argues Mainers’ lack of formal education explains why the state’s per capita income trails below the national average by as much as 15 percent and the New England average by 30 percent.

“Levels of education and income are closely linked,” said Paula Valente, president of the nonprofit, nonpartisan group.

So it comes as no surprise that census data show counties and communities with the most college graduates usually have the highest income.

For example, it’s no accident that Washington County, the poorest county in Maine, has less than half of the four-year college graduates as the richest, Cumberland County, as a proportion of its population.

The best-educated – and wealthiest – communities tend to be located in southern Maine or on the coast.

In Camden, No. 10 on the list of best-educated Maine towns with population of 500 or more, 43.9 percent of residents age 25 or older have college degrees. The per capita income there is $26,126, well above the average for the state.

The results did not surprise Superintendent Patricia Hopkins of the Camden area’s SAD 28. The community has a “commitment to higher education,” she said. Students going on to some form of higher education is “the norm in this school district,” she said.

Conversely, communities with the least number of college graduates have some of the lowest incomes.

In Mattawamkeag, which was ranked No. 2 on a list of communities with the smallest proportion of college graduates, the median per capita income is $12,573, half of Camden’s. Only 4.8 percent of its inhabitants over the age of 25 hold college degrees, according to Census data.

Those statistics are destined to improve over the next few years, according to SAD 67 Superintendent Fred Woodman. While residents once could be assured of good-paying jobs with the town’s now-defunct clothespin business or with the area’s paper industry, “they realize now that the future’s through education,” he said.

“It’s a much more forward-looking community now and [the schools] really are pushing their students to go on to higher education,” he said.

Still not enough

Reactions to the news that more Mainers have college degrees than a decade ago bordered on lukewarm.

“It’s encouraging, but it’s not enough,” said Harry Osgood, higher education specialist for the state Department of Education.

The number “doesn’t bode well for the long term. We need to significantly improve that,” he said.

The increase in the number of bachelor’s degrees likely stems from a combination of older students returning to school; an influx of people, including retirees, relocating to Maine; and new high school graduates who immediately continue with their education, Osgood said.

More young people and their parents are getting the message that postsecondary education is the key to a better future and that paper mills and shoe factories no longer are the source of secure jobs, he said.

Agencies like the Finance Authority of Maine also have made a difference by driving home that the cost of higher education isn’t prohibitive and that expenses may be covered in ways parents never dreamed, Osgood said.

Philip Trostel, associate professor of economics and public policy at UM’s Margaret Chase Smith Center, said the trend toward more postsecondary education began in the 1960s when people realized that a college degree yielded a bigger paycheck and when access to colleges increased as more financial aid was offered and university systems expanded.

“Young people got the message [about the benefits of college education] 30 or 40 years ago … and it’s because of how long it takes for these things to work themselves out” that there’s an increase in the numbers of people holding bachelor’s degrees , Trostel said.

The Census information didn’t make Henry Bourgeois, director of the Maine Development Foundation any too happy, especially in light of preliminary data that indicated 24.1 percent of Mainers held bachelor’s degrees.

“The good news is that it’s [only] about 1 percentage point lower than we thought,” he said. “But it’s dismaying that Maine’s figure is so far below the New England figure.”

Attainment council

Bourgeois is working to change that. He’s helping to form a Higher Education Attainment Council, charged with developing a plan for raising the number of people with baccalaureate degrees to the New England average.

That calls for doubling the number of people attending college, Bourgeois said. “To do that, we need to focus in large part on adults in the work force,” he said.

Recommended this spring by a legislatively created panel, the 16-member council will report each year to the governor and the Legislature.

After hearing about the latest Census results, Sen. Mary Cathcart, D-Orono, who chaired the Blue Ribbon Commission, said she was more determined than ever to make sure the council includes a “good demographic distribution.”

“We need people to focus on the rest of the state that has the lowest percentage of college graduates,” she said.

Colleen Quint of the George J. Mitchell Scholarship Research Institute in Portland said the Census results are reflected in her group’s experiences with Mitchell scholars and by research it is doing for a report coming out next month on barriers to college.

More first-generation college students come from Aroostook, Washington, Androscoggin and Somerset counties, where their parents have worked in the mill or at sea, she said. In Cumberland County, on the other hand, a much higher percentage of family members have a college education and work at professional jobs.

That gives young people in southern Maine an edge, Quint said. Students with someone in their immediate family who has gone to college have a significantly better chance of continuing their own education, she said.

“Someone else has broken the barriers; the family understands how to negotiate through the financial aid process and the college process,” she said.

But location doesn’t always play a role. Research shows that students who take advanced placement and honors classes – whether they’re from Portland or Millinocket – are determined to get their ducks in a row and go on to college, Quint said.

Students who chose not to further their education – many of whom hail from the central and western parts of the state – said they wanted to take time to earn money and figure out what they wanted to do, said Quint.

Is college necessary?

Brian Reeves, who will graduate from Hampden Academy next month, knows where his future lies, and it’s not with college.

Instead, he plans to go to California to learn to be an electrician.

As a sophomore, he said, he thought about getting a bachelor’s degree, but after seeing friends graduate from college only to find that no jobs were available in their fields, he changed his mind.

“There are lots of college graduates not working,” he said. “Why learn things you might never use? I don’t want to have a piece of paper that doesn’t mean anything.”

Many students who choose not to go to college share a number of characteristics, Hampden Academy Principal Katie Donovan said.

With average grades, “they’re just below the expectation group,” she said. Some part of the support network that propels kids to continue with their education probably isn’t in place for them.

If they’re not sure about going to college, they’re less motivated to trade four years of their lives to assume what could be a sizable debt, Donovan said.

Also, since the choices for people after high school are more complex and varied than ever, it can be difficult for a student to “sort through the alternatives.”

But it doesn’t take long to find someone who doesn’t fit the mold.

UM valedictorian Leonard, for example, had siblings and parents who went to college. His family would have been able to afford tuition, he said.

The problem lay within himself, according to Leonard, who joined the Army and later became a firefighter.

“It was fear of failure – of getting into the academic realm and being the only one to fail,” said Leonard, who plans to attend the University of Maine School of Law this fall.

“I always felt dumb,” he said. “I’ve gotten over that.”

Michael Moore, the NEWS computer-assisted reporting specialist, developed the numbers for this story, and provided analysis.