Higher education must rebuild public trust. That much is evident, and many of the ideas to address this challenge come from our country’s wealthiest and most selective institutions. In contrast, the evolving discussion about trust in higher education has yet to fully incorporate the views of the regional public institutions that serve as the backbone of America’s higher education system.
I lead one of those institutions. The University of Maine at Presque Isle is literally located in Aroostook County, the northernmost county in Maine, where the median household income is $56,700. For more than a century, UMPI has served our communities as a primarily residential institution with deep roots in teacher education, the liberal arts and the professional preparation of first-generation students. Our mission, to provide affordable and accessible education, remains unchanged. In 2017, we created YourPace, a new way to deliver.
An online education system based on knowledge, YourPace is designed to be truly affordable with a very different cost structure, built around the demonstration of merit instead of the accumulation of credit hours, around the achievement instead of the time of residence, in what the student can demonstrate rather than how much time he spends in the physical class. So the financial incentive goes hand in hand with the educational one: The sooner a student demonstrates success, the lower the cost of a degree.
A common objection to skill-based education is that skill-based graduation must be costly. But the data says otherwise. To receive merit credit, a student must achieve “near excellent” or “excellent” on every line of the rubric. Every skill in this program is designed and tested by faculty, holding students accountable to standards no different from those in our traditionally taught programs. In addition, our accreditor, the New England Commission on Higher Education, has reviewed our programs in five official actions over a seven-year period and granted UMPI general approval to develop new CBE programs at the institution’s discretion. Our system therefore meets all legal and traditional definitions of sustainability.
I am raising a strong case because the recent discussions have been focused on the vineyard where some students finish their degrees, and not on what those students have shown. This concern has merit only if one acknowledges that time is the measure of learning. But that foundation is exactly what competency-based education competitions are. If a working adult with 15 or more years of professional experience and significant prior studies demonstrates success against a rubric designed for creativity, the relevant question is not how long it took but whether the creativity is real. Speed is a student-level variable; rigor is a constant level of rigor. Combining the two is an assumption that needs a lot of testing.
There is a very important point about art-based graduation. At least 43 million Americans who started college but didn’t finish were cut off because they left too soon. They are underserved because the traditional model is often slow, expensive and offers very little flexibility in the lives they lead. When our graduates complete the degrees they’ve spent years working on in months rather than years, they don’t take shortcuts. Their success is proof that traditional timeline conventions, no matter how well-intentioned, should not be the yardstick by which we judge that learning has occurred.
The issue of providing alternatives to higher education is growing in urgency. This spring, Jeffrey Selingo argued The Atlantic that the demographic cliff lowering America’s higher education will produce an enrollment death spiral at many regional institutions: Campuses will close, students will be unable to find a place to attend college and higher education will become a luxury within the reach of the rich and elite.
Selingo’s analysis could not be more surprising. But his framework rests on the assumption of the student age, who lives in the area as the primary consumer of higher education. He does not ask what happens when the regional center rethinks who it serves. UMPI is now an institution of two identities: a residential liberal arts campus again a national provider of skills education, with shared expertise, shared governance and shared standards. Our growth did not come from competing with a shrinking pool of 18-year-olds. It came from reaching out to millions of working adults who left the mainstream pipeline while maintaining a residential campus that catered precisely to the local, traditional-age students Selingo lost. Death spiral is not a law of nature. It is the result of a failure of structural imagination.
In the 2024 article of The Atlantic, Dartmouth College President Sian Leah Beilock invokes Solomon Asch’s psychological studies on conformity from the 1950s to argue that it only takes one experienced denier to break the concept of conformity. He then applies this insight to the pressure placed on students and teachers to suppress ideas that deviate from campus orthodoxy. I would argue that the most important consensus in American higher education is not ideological—it is structural. It is the idea that the best education is residential, lasting four years and organized by credit hours. That thinking has eroded public trust more than any other argument, because it has made higher education unaffordable, unattainable and unaffordable for far too many Americans.
The most important disagreements right now are what we charge, how we measure learning and who we are willing to serve. Until higher education is willing to recognize its many avenues of accreditation, and judge those avenues by the learning they produce rather than the conventions they maintain, it will be difficult to help the millions of Americans who start college but never finish.
