BOLD UNIVERSITY IDEAS

Chancellor Joseph Westphal’s bold ideas to boost state funding and reshape higher education in Maine is a necessary shakeup for the university system as it tries to meet increasing demands for education on smaller and smaller slices of the state budget. The suggestions will force lawmakers to rethink their views of education in Maine.

The University of Maine System chancellor has two proposals. The first raises the rate of increase for the system from 2 or 3 percent annually to 13 and 17 percent in FY 2004 and ’05 respectively, worth $23 million and $34.5 million plus a $30 million general-obligation bond to upgrade facilities. He is asking for this as legislators are preparing to cut programs to meet an expected budget shortfall. The imperative behind the request is improved access.

Specifically, the chancellor wants to freeze tuition – while universities across the country are raising their prices – and increase the amount of scholarship money available to make higher education more affordable. This not only gets more Maine residents into college, but gets them into college in their home state, making them more likely to stay and contribute to their communities as adults. The plan would expand research and development, increase support for K-12 education, including educating new and current teachers, and improve technology outreach to engage more students. In addition, the system would undertake a dozen cost-saving measures, from capping the number of faculty to reducing debt costs. It would also subject its goal of providing a high-quality education to more citizens to the performance-based budgeting system it has participated in with the state since 1996.

These forward-looking and energetic proposals pale, however, next to an informal proposal – he called it an opinion – the chancellor offered this week. He would encourage the Maine Technical College System’s plan to become technical-community colleges, but merge his and that system into a larger higher-education system for Maine. The university system might then end its own offerings in community-college courses, perhaps making University of Maine at Augusta a four-year campus and, locally, working out a union of some sort between the University of College at Bangor and Eastern Maine Technical College.

Technical College President John Fitzsimmons, not surprisingly, dislikes this plan. The public, which has not heard enough to form an opinion, should expect further details in the coming weeks if the plan is to move beyond merely a concept. But a couple of thoughts as the idea takes shape:

. The prime question for legislators is whether students are better served in the current system or in the one the chancellor suggests.

. If Maine is unable to fund higher education at the level is would like, would this plan create efficiencies and make the current funding amounts more effectively spent?

. The distinction between the universities and the technical colleges has slimmed as the technical colleges have expanded into associate-degree programs. It would be erased further should the techs’ community-college plan be enacted.

. A recent study from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education concluded, “The baccalaureate degree is becoming the entry point to the workforce for the majority of students, making it increasingly important that 2/4 transfer [from a two-year to four-year college] works well.”

The chancellor is wisely using his first year in his post to make gains that might be less likely later on, and the mood in Augusta certainly is toward consolidation. How, specifically, such this merger would work probably would be found in the several Maine studies in the 1970s and 1980s on the subject. The next step now is for the university and technical-college boards to take whatever white paper emerges from the chancellor’s office and weigh the positives and negatives.

The common theme in the funding request and the merger idea is that higher education in Maine can be made more effective and more efficient, that a seamless system picking up where K-12 leaves off can better serve both the high-achieving scholar and the student still looking for a niche and that higher education can be more productive for the state. Whether or not these thoughts survive the legislative session, the chancellor deserves credit for bringing powerful ideas to debate in what is otherwise a penny-pinching time.