The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Raymond J. Rice is the president of the University of Maine at Presque Isle.
This week, UMPI will hold two commencement ceremonies in a single day in Presque Isle with more than 550 graduates crossing the stage. Behind those caps and gowns are 1,752 people who have submitted their materials for graduation this academic year, the largest class in our university’s history. Some of them are sitting in Presque Isle right now. Others are in Portland, Maine, or Portland, Oregon, or a military base overseas. A few will be walking across our stage for the first time having never set foot on our campus before commencement day. All of them earned what they are about to receive.
What makes this commencement unusual — and, I think, worth talking about — is who these graduates are. Some are exactly who you would expect at a University of Maine System campus: 22-year-olds from Aroostook County and other parts of Maine who came to Presque Isle for a residential college experience, played on our athletics teams, studied education or business or criminal justice, and are heading into careers in the communities where they grew up or want to build a life. They are the traditional heart of this institution, and they always will be.
But many of our graduates this year don’t fit that description. They are working adults who came to UMPI through YourPace, our competency-based education program for adult learners. They are parents who studied after their children went to bed. They are veterans who translated years of military service into academic credentials. They are healthcare workers and human resources professionals and small-business owners who started college years ago, had to stop, and have now finished what they started — on their own schedule, at a price they could afford, by demonstrating that they know the material rather than sitting in a classroom for a prescribed number of hours.
Among this year’s graduates: a student in their 40s who could not finish college the first time around, worked more than a decade in higher education, and came back to earn both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree through YourPace. A 52-year-old professional who had been in the workforce for 35 years and said this was the first program that fit the life they were living. A consultant at one of the nation’s largest firms who can only study on weekends because the weekday schedule is too demanding for any kind of synchronous learning. Every one of them is exactly who this program was built for.
This matters for Maine, where too many adults started college and never finished — where the cost, the schedule, or the distance kept them from the credential they needed. Maine’s workforce needs are real: employers are looking for people with degrees and professional credentials, and too many qualified Mainers have been shut out by a system that was not built for their lives.
UMPI has tried to change that, both through YourPace and through Free for Four, the state’s first comprehensive free tuition program, which guarantees all full-time, Pell-eligible Maine residents pay no out-of-pocket tuition or fees. Two pathways, one commitment: that cost should not be the thing that keeps anyone from earning a degree.
The results have followed. Since 2020, UMPI’s enrollment has grown by more than 237 percent, to 3,731 students, at a time when many universities across the country are contracting.
Our students are not just enrolling, they are finishing. The competency completion rate in YourPace is 87 percent, meaning that most students who start a course demonstrate mastery and earn the credit. This reflects the work of faculty who designed every assessment, set every standard, and held every student to the same threshold regardless of how quickly they arrived there.
There has been a great deal of national conversation lately about whether higher education is still worth it, whether the cost is justified, whether the degrees mean what they should. I understand the skepticism. But this week, in Presque Isle, 1,752 people will have an answer to that question. They did the work. They met the standard. And many of them will tell you that a small public university in northern Maine gave them something that the rest of higher education said wasn’t possible: an affordable, rigorous degree on a timeline that fits their life.
I will be on that stage this week handing out diplomas for my tenth year as this college’s president, and, truthfully, it never gets old. Every handshake is a story. Every name is someone who decided this was the year. From Madawaska to Miami, from the traditional 22-year-old walking with her parent in the front row to the 50-year-old whose children are cheering from the back — they all earned the same degree, held to the same standard, and they are all ours. We built this here in Aroostook County. And I could not be more proud.
