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AUGUSTA — It is not yet known how Gov. Paul LePage’s plan for early college offerings to high school students would interface with three already established programs in Maine.
Maine’s hypothetical education revamp — which is still not close to full development — has been described by many in state government as a fifth year of high school when college credits and associate degrees could be earned locally while still outside of the traditional college environment.
According to Commissioner of Education Stephen Bowen, he and the LePage administration are “talking in broad terms about it and getting a sense of what is out there,” while making sure they can execute the program nearly cost-neutrally due to state budget constraints.
In his February biennial budget proposal, LePage suggested higher education not receive any more or less funding than in the previous biennium.
In an October 2010 blog post on mainefreedomforum.com, Bowen, then an employee of the Maine Heritage Policy Center, a conservative think tank, proposed cutting remedial college courses, cutting non-instructional costs in higher education and redirecting resources spent on classes taken in high schools during senior year to fund the hypothetical program.
“It’s not about adding another year [to high school], but it is about providing opportunities for kids to access college courses in some way or other while they are still in high school,” Bowen said in an interview earlier in March.
Preliminary plans are built around LePage’s penchant for supporting technical education, something he has touted since the 2010 Republican primary.
In a November 2010 article in The Maine Campus, when LePage was the governor-elect, he said Maine’s K-12 education system does not focus enough on encouraging students to enter two-year vocational programs.
“No matter what happens in education in this state, not every student is bound for college,” LePage said then. “There’s got to be room for plumbers, electricians, designers, architects. These are all jobs we can build for the future, but our high school system doesn’t go down that path.”
Maine already has a number of programs in the university and community college systems that provide college credit and experience to high schoolers.
One such program, “Early College for ME” — perhaps the most logical program to combine with LePage’s technical education-heavy agenda — is run through the Maine Community College System.
The program’s director, Charles Collins, said last week that his program annually impacts from 1,400 to 1,500 students in their last two years of high school and first two years of college. He said 750 new high school juniors from 69 Maine high schools and five centers of technical educations are targeted each year. Schools nominate their own students.
Through counseling, support and other services, students in the program’s first two years are helped to make a decision on higher education based on their goals, he said.
When students choose the path they want to follow after high school, the program offers two-year scholarships worth up to $2,000 to pay for classes, books and other academic necessities.
“I think the work we’re already doing does some good,” Collins said. “I haven’t heard enough or seen enough out of the governor’s plans … to know what it is they want to see.”
Early College for ME, he said, “was never designed to get somebody a degree during high school,” as some in LePage’s camp have suggested.
“What we have done is engaged students who are not on a path to college to start thinking about it,” Collins said. “A full degree within a year of high school is a tall order.”
Early College for ME, he said, cannot expand past the schools already on board with the program due to staffing constraints. The program employs the equivalent of 11 full-time staffers — some of whom must visit schools statewide and deliver services “on the ground.”
Collins said nobody in the LePage administration has indicated that they would like to use his program as a springboard, but he would be willing to discuss it.
“Certainly, if someone sees this as a gateway or entryway into something bigger, then, yeah, absolutely, we’ll sit down and talk,” he said.
The University of Maine System features two major programs that offer college opportunities for younger students — web-based Academ-e and the oldest program, the classroom-based Maine High School Aspirations Incentive Program.
According to Ashley Burns, a graduate assistant and coordinator of Academ-e, which is based at UMaine, the program serves roughly 300 students per academic year. Burns said she has not heard of any developments in Augusta that would affect her program for better or worse.
All public high school students in Maine are eligible for nomination by guidance counselors and must have at least a “B” average to qualify for different slates of online course offerings. These courses are run simultaneously with regular college courses but with special sections for Academ-e students.
The Maine High School Aspirations Incentive Program, established in the 1980s by the university system and the Maine Department of Education, utilizes $280,000 a year in state funding to allow students, for reduced rates, to take courses at any of Maine’s community college and university campuses, including courses at distance-learning centers.
To qualify, students must be at least 16 years of age, a high school junior or senior and a Maine resident with at least a “B” grade point average and meet all course prerequisites, among other small requirements.
Under the program, the university system waives half the tuition for up to six credits per semester as the Department of Education will incur half the cost for no more than three credits per semester.
An email request for comment from LePage’s office was not returned for this story.
Amy Fried, an associate professor of political science at UMaine, said LePage’s focus on technical education has been striking compared to previous governors but that the plan is convoluted due to a lack of specificity at this time.
“If it is another year that is going to apply to college, I just am not sure how they implement that,” Fried said. “Why would they be considered to be in high school at the same time at that point rather than just being a college student? If they’re ready to go to college, they can go to college.”
Though skeptical of released plans, Collins praised LePage’s technical focus and said Maine’s higher education system has been using an outdated model from a time when agriculture and manufacturing dominated the state’s economy — a time when college wasn’t socially perceived as necessary for a better life.
“We haven’t really looked at bridging the need for higher ed. to accept a widening group of students who may not be as academically prepared as students 20 years ago were. They weren’t expected to go college [back then],” Collins said. “They were going to go out into other options. Those options aren’t there anymore.”
Reached for comment last week, University of Maine System Chancellor Richard Pattenaude praised LePage for his “focus” on higher education. He also said that the governor’s focus on vocational programs was “interesting.”
“I think it is important to support all of the vocational, community college, university continuum,” Pattenaude said. “I think baccalaureate education provides the most value added for students, but for the student who isn’t interested in that, it’s useful and important to have a quality technical program.”
Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a two-part series about the relationship between the University of Maine System, the Maine Community College System and the new Republican leadership in Augusta; Part 1 appeared in the March 24 edition of The Maine Campus.
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