As retail shopping outlets keenly remind us, it’s back to school time in Maine. As the share of state funding for public K-l2 schools – driven by last year’s Maine Municipal Association initiated referendum – ramps upward, support levels for the state university is, at the same time, gyrating downward.

Seemingly lost in the maelstrom of attention focused on public elementary-secondary education and a host of other government crises is the dilemma of public higher education.

There was a time not so long ago – 1988-89 to be exact – when the state university was garnering a whopping 72-percent of its operating budget from state appropriations. Though state subsidies have gone up by $45 million, as a percentage of total U-Maine spending the figure’s been dropping steadily.

It plummeted below the 50 percent level for the first time two years ago and is now at 48.6 percent. As a consequence, the tolling of the opening bell for classes each fall is accompanied by a dirge of hefty tuition increases.

This is also part of a national trend that increasingly regards higher education as a privilege to be paid for by its users rather than a birthright necessity.

In New York, for example, the share of state financing of the basic state university budget has paralleled that of Maine’s. There, in the last 10 years, the state share dropped from nearly 70 percent to just more than 55 percent. The share is even lower in some other areas, including Maryland, where the state appropriations have gone from 50 percent a dozen years ago to below 25 percent today.

Apart from this national trend is the more unique pressure our own state university must confront, the specter of a shrinking pool of Maine students. Just at a time when tuition is becoming the mainstay of support, the number of students is headed for a tailspin. By the 2017-18 school year, the number of public high school graduates in our state is projected to be more than 15 percent below those of 2002-03. Only about five other states are anticipating a steeper drop in prospective, homegrown students.

The university has already beefed up its recruiting and marketing efforts in a move to meet this challenge. Though it has long attempted to cultivate the entire Northeast in an effort to broaden the student base and with it enhance its coffers with the higher paying out-of-state tuition, its recruiting system has more recently ventured much further afield. Outside our region, there is a significant surplus of potential college students.

Thus, the Chicago area is for the first time a prime plucking ground for Orono’s recruitment effort, one that tries to market not just the four walls of a cluster of classrooms but also an alluring setting in which to spend one’s collegiate spare time and weekends.

“Put a lighthouse on a brochure in Maine, and people will just yawn. Put that same lighthouse on a brochure in Chicago, and people may at least look at it,” according to John Beacon, Orono’s outdoing dean of enrollment management.

Some of Beacon’s colleagues from elsewhere in New England are also able to offer a cultural landscape that’s attractive to students in a way that Maine is not yet prepared to do. Universities in Vermont and Massachusetts, for example, are a drawing card to gay teenagers from the rural South.

What all this means – the increased dependence on out-of-state student recruitment and the tuition dollars that come with them as a base of support – is that our university may eventually become not a university of Maine but only a university in Maine.

Moreover, without state sponsorship there won’t be much that distinguishes U-Maine from all the other mid-sized, private universities throughout the country. In effect, it could become a bigger Bates, Colby or Bowdoin that also offers graduate degrees but has lower SAT scores.

What’s a bit remarkable, however, is that it’s a route that Bates, Colby and Bowdoin have already traveled. All were founded with either generous state land grants and later subsidized by state appropriations. Bowdoin got an early boost with the sale in 1800 for $28,000 of two townships that had been gifted over to it by the state Legislature. Colby joined Bowdoin in 1813 as the beneficiary of a land grant, augmented with another by the Legislature in 1861, which by the end of the century had yielded a total of $75,000 in revenues to the Waterville-based institution.

Significant state appropriations and land grants also helped get Bates off the ground during the first 10 years after its founding in 1855.

As recently as the early 20th century – 40 years after the founding of Orono – both Bates and Colby pulled down state appropriations that sometimes rivaled those for the state university itself. In the 1903-1905 era, at a time when the state was picking up a $20,000 annual tab for Maine, it anted up $l5,000 a piece for new women’s buildings at Bates and Colby, for example. Bowdoin – then without women – received no state support. The last major grant for any of the three came in 1909 when Bates was given $45,000 for a new central heating plant.

Recent decades – even with the advent of some federal funding – has been a sink-or-swim time for private colleges. The collapse of Nasson in Springvale and Ricker in Houlton during the 1970s are reminders of such perils. These are risks that if the present trend toward privatization continues – especially if accompanied by a lighter flow of Maine teenagers in the pipeline – may also be visited upon some parts of our own state university system.

Though the university has redoubled its private and alumni fundraising energies, whether such efforts will be enough remains to be seen in this most intriguing time.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: [email protected].