Having nearly completed his freshman year as chancellor of the University of Maine System, Richard Pattenaude is ready to start over again. The chancellor, who previously had been president of the University of Southern Maine, has spoken to 27 Rotary Clubs and Chambers of Commerce over the last few months, making the case that investing in higher education is essential to the state’s future. If Maine had the same number of college grads as the New England average, its economy would be 25 percent larger, he said. That’s a compelling statistic.

Dr. Pattenaude’s engaging and likable manner suits his mission as chief ambassador for the state’s colleges and universities. That enthusiasm should not be dampened, and the chancellor should continue to make the argument to anyone who will listen. But Chancellor Pattenaude and other university officials also must be cognizant of the long-term cloudy fiscal forecast for Maine.

The university system just raised tuition by 10 percent to offset flat state funding, high energy costs, a pension set aside required by law, and higher health insurance costs. The university plans to increase assistance to help those students and their families who will struggle to cover the higher tuition, but many families will have to dig deeper into loans.

“It’s always our revenue of last resort,” Dr. Pattenaude said last week of the tuition hike. The university system did take steps to avoid a higher increase. Some 139 positions from among 4,800 were eliminated system-wide, though all but 25 were vacant. That saved $15 million. The system office cut $1 million, and $300,000 will be saved by not giving high-ranking employees – including the chancellor – a raise this year.

The tuition hike as a “last resort” is similar to what played out at the State House this winter and early spring, except tax hikes were the fix to be avoided there. The governor and Legislature largely succeeded in doing so, and they did it by making hard spending choices, which meant cutting programs whose efficacy was not in doubt. The UM system will likely face these kinds of choices in the coming years. It must be ready to consider bigger class loads for instructors, relying more on part-time instructors, reviewing how it provides employee benefits, and consolidating administrative functions across the system.

The mission of colleges and universities was once understood as providing young men and women with a liberal education. That phrase meant exposing them to academic disciplines such as philosophy, history, physics, psychology, literature and geometry for their theoretical but not necessarily practical benefits.

Today, taxpayer-funded higher education increasingly must justify its ties to skills and jobs. There is some good in that trend, but seeing the value of education as an end in itself is vanishing, and that’s a loss. But even if taxpayers see the long-term gains for our state by providing access to higher education, the university system must function within the real-world economic realm, where double-digit tuition increases are not sustainable.