At first glance, the state universities in Maine and New Hampshire look a lot alike. But for Danielle Thompson, the University of New Hampshire has something special.

“It’s not incredibly far from Boston,” said the Bangor High School senior, who plans to attend the out-of-state school, a three-hour drive to the south.

Even with the financial aid she’s hoping for, UNH could cost a lot more than the University of Maine, said Thompson, who will have to pay tuition as a nonresident. She plans to major in speech language therapy and audiology – subjects she could find at the Orono campus.

But her parents are willing to shell out the extra tuition because they understand her need to “get out of Maine for a little while,” she said recently.

Thompson is among the 54 percent of Maine students who leave the state to go to college, frequently to UNH or the University of Massachusetts or the University of Vermont – all institutions similar to UM.

There are many more like her than there are students who come here to pursue their postsecondary education, according to Phil Trostel, a research professor in economics at the University of Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy. The 54 percent figure is from research done for 1994-98, according to Trostel.

The issue is about more than choice. Since graduates tend to settle near where they went to college, the exodus hurts the state’s ability to muster a large, well-educated work force. This has been cited by analysts such as Trostel as one cause of the state’s mediocre economic performance.

“High-paying businesses tend to gravitate to where the highly skilled workers are being produced. It’s no coincidence that high-tech clusters are located near important universities,” said Trostel.

He blames some of the problem on the high tuition at Maine’s public colleges compared to public schools in other states.

While the percentage of students coming into the state to attend college is somewhat higher than the national average, the flow of Maine students south far exceeds the national average, said Trostel.

In fact Maine has nearly the worst college-student “balance of trade” in the country, says Trostel. Only Alaska, Connecticut and New Jersey lost a higher percentage of students to out-of-state schools.

The fact that Maine is a net exporter of college students is the major reason Mainers have a lower attainment of higher education compared to the rest of the country, Trostel said. According to 2000 Census figures, only 23 percent of adults 25 and older have four-year degrees, placing Maine 28th among the states. In contrast, the state is 13th in the percent of people with high school diplomas.

Other reasons he cites are a net out-migration of college graduates, probably because of the state’s “relative lack of good jobs,” and fewer Mainers going to college to begin with. But these factors are less important than the unbalanced student migration, he said.

During the 1998-99 academic year, 3,799 new college freshmen left Maine to attend schools elsewhere, while 2,375 out-of-state freshmen enrolled in the state’s two- and four-year college programs. The difference of 1,424 is equivalent to 14.1 percent of the total number of Maine students entering college that year, according to Trostel’s analysis. The out-migration trend has been worsening, rising 1 percentage point since 1994-95.

If Maine had a net inflow of new college freshman equal to the national average, then about 1,490 more students would be enrolling here each year, he said. That’s equivalent to the enrollment of the University of Maine at Presque Isle.

But some people suggest that the so-called “brain drain” isn’t nearly as dramatic as it has been made out to be since the number of students who go out of state initially and then transfer back to complete their education hasn’t been taken into account.

Also, since the state doesn’t track high school students after graduation, it isn’t clear to how many who said they were going out of state to college or not attending college at all ultimately changed their plans.

John Beacon, UM’s dean of enrollment management, said since enrollment statistics are nearly always based on where students go to college right after high school, “the story that’s overlooked is that, every year, a certain percentage of students quietly drift back into Maine.”

Kathryn Markovchick of Mount Vernon is an example. The 2000 Mattanawcook Academy graduate knew right away that she had picked the wrong school. Alfred University in rural New York was too small, provided few campus activities, and didn’t offer the major she ultimately picked.

Although she once had been determined to “get out of Maine,” Markovchick found herself wishing she were closer to home.

After visiting friends at UM, she concluded, “This is what college is supposed to be,” and transferred to Orono last fall.

“I wish I’d applied here in the first place,” she said.

Transfer students such as Markovchick account for nearly one-fourth of new students each year at UM, generating around $4 million in tuition, said Beacon.

The number is increasing every year, he said. UM received 575 applications from transfer students for next fall, a rise of 22 students, with 389 from Maine and 186 from outside the state.

“We need to get away from the idea that there’s a wholesale out-migration of kids who are packing up their U-Hauls and never coming back,” said Greg Gollihur of the Finance Authority of Maine, which lends money to college students.

He agrees that many students are returning to complete their education. While more than half of the state’s high school graduates who go to college head out of state, nearly 80 percent of those who earned a college degree in 1998 earned it from a Maine school, according to a report by Gollihur and David Silvernail of the University of Southern Maine’s Center for Education Policy, Applied Research and Evaluation. They studied a sample of FAME borrowers.

But Trostel isn’t swayed by the transfer argument. The FAME study isn’t “a representative sample of all Maine students,” he pointed out, because it included only FAME borrowers. And because there has been little information on transfers, it’s impossible to judge how much they reduce the brain drain, he said.

More students probably transfer back to Maine than out of state because there are more initially going out than coming in, said Trostel.