Is 43 years enough time to fix what is blatantly broken in Maine’s higher-education system? State Sen. Mary Cathcart of Orono has been passing around a 10-part series from 1959 editions of the Bangor Daily News, with the problems described in the articles depressingly current. The series suggests, as clearly as any study that could be commissioned today, that long-standing failures of higher education will stay with Maine for decades and decades to come unless some definitive, focused action intervenes.

Called “What About UMaine’s Future?” the ’59 series found such problems as high tuition rates, low faculty salaries, a lack of research funding, inadequate building maintenance, a substandard investment in the university library and Maine’s low college-attendance rate. The articles themselves were quite brief and mostly cataloged shortcomings rather than looked for solutions. Legislators on the Education Committee today, however, can approve at least one solution and finally begin to get Maine out of its morass of underachievement by approving a plan to increase educational attainment statewide.

The plan, in the form of LD 2102, comes from a commission assembled by the Legislature last year to see what specific steps could be taken to move Maine away from the statistics that were as true in ’59 as ’99. The commission, which included Sen. Cathcart, other lawmakers and educators, concluded that the best action would be to establish a permanent council to advise to help both public and private institutions focus on expanded opportunity, earlier career preparedness, lower costs for students and increased options for graduates so they can stay in Maine, as explained in the commission’s final report released in January. Just as research and development received far more attention and expanded significantly when a legislative panel began to advocate for more resources, so should a higher-education council build support and goals for education after high school.

Key to such a council would be setting benchmarks – measurable goals with clear deadlines for attainment in such areas as graduation rates, expansion of services to nontraditional students and job placement. The council could be expected to lobby lawmakers for more support for higher education on one side and push the colleges and universities to improve performance on the other. In addition, businesses would be expected to contribute to the funding of the council, coming up with at least half its cost, providing the private sector with a stake in the council’s effectiveness.

Higher education in Maine has had action plans before, of course. Lots of them. Perhaps too many of them. What it hasn’t had is a single council looking over the spectrum of post-high-school offerings and setting an agenda to make them more powerful. It hasn’t had a permanent data-collecting advocate that would immediately be able to explain the ripple effect of raising tuition – fewer students enrolling, more going out of state and not returning, fewer bachelor degrees four years later, less attractive state to high-tech businesses, etc. – and could be persuasive in testifying before the Legislature.

The ’59 series of newspaper articles was written because of a UMaine report that predicted enrollment would double to nearly 9,000 by 1970. Despite the warning, the university was not prepared for all those new students and was forced by the mid 1960s to defer admittance for many freshmen (known as 101ers to mark the 101st year of the university’s founding) until the second semester in February when it could count on some other students flunking out and making room.

This lack of preparation for higher education in Maine has become an unwelcome tradition, one that the council proposed in LD 2102 could demolish. It ought to and, with the Legislature’s support, it can.