Multiple perspectives, uniform approach at Maine's universities

The task force charged with recommending major changes to the University of Maine System as the seven-campus network grapples with a $43 million deficit over the next four years had two key underlying messages in the draft report it issued Tuesday.

Work with a strategy and work as a system, rather than as individual campuses.

That fragmentation has been the University of Maine System's downfall, according to the task force report. Even System Chancellor Richard L. Pattenaude, when he announced the plans to put together the report-producing task force, acknowledged it was time to end the incremental, cost-cutting approach to responding to dire budget news.

Campuses have acted without enough regard for what their counterparts have been doing, the task force determined.

When it comes to tuition rate-setting, the report says, the approach has been incremental and indicative of no long-term strategy.

"The campuses have used tuition increases as a stop-gap measure for years, and as other demands on the General Fund have grown, especially K-12 and Medicaid funding, the University System has been squeezed hard," the report reads. "Not only is such a strategy contrary to the goal of providing the opportunity for an affordable higher education in Maine to people with ordinary means, it is ultimately self-defeating, as the Legislature naturally will be inclined to favor other priorities, if it thinks the resulting revenue loss to the System can be made up from consumers."

And with semi-autonomous campuses, there's been no uniformity to rises in tuition. Only in setting tuition for the 2009-10 academic year, the report notes, did the system call for a limit to the tuition increase. The average tuition jump was 6 percent. Before that, tuition rises were all over the map, depending on the campus.

The strategy the task force report calls for is more market-based. Reduce tuition for freshmen and sophomores and take another look at the higher tuition charged out-of state students are charged to "encourage new perspectives in the student body."

The university system is looking for multiple perspectives, but a more unified approach.