For the last 12 years, the seven campuses of the University of Maine System have struggled with consecutive year-to-year declines in fall enrollment numbers. But UMS officials are now reporting a 1.6 percent increase over last fall’s head count, with 29,465 students enrolled.
Dan Demeritt, a spokesman for UMS, says this year’s turnaround in systemwide enrollment was no accident.
“It reflects the work that the Maine universities are doing to maintain affordability and extend access,” he says.
The university system has struggled to maintain high-quality programs, Demeritt says, and staged an aggressive marketing campaign to attract more students to the various fields of study offered at each campus.
“You know we’ve done a lot of work at the universities,” he says. “Hard choices, but strategic choices, that positioned the universities to be a stronger more responsive partner. It’s really about service to Maine and helping take on those workforce and demographic challenges that we have, and we’re seeing some real results now and our programs are getting attention beyond the state borders. We’re doing a better job extending access and helping students and it’s putting us in a position where we can invest in the future and be a stronger partner in moving Maine forward.”
Demeritt says part of the uptick in the student population is attributable to the system’s efforts to attract out-of-state students, who now account for just over 9 percent of all students in the system. That’s a 32 percent increase from four years ago.
And he says given the state’s aging demographic profile, Maine employers will be happy to see those out-of-state students fours years from now.
“We’re going to lose so many people from our workforce through retirement in years to come that we have to have new people come to Maine, get their education here and, hopefully, many of them will stay here, as has typically been the case,” Demeritt says.
He also cited the early college program for high school students at UMaine Fort Kent as another factor that helped to boost enrollment at that campus.