National trends often start on the coasts and move inland. Craft brewing first got big in Oregon, Maine and Vermont. Now it’s everywhere, and Maine is a major craft-beer state.

Another trend may have started in Vermont but hasn’t spread much, though it well might. And maybe it should. In the past two years, four colleges in Vermont have closed and two of the four state colleges have been merged into a single university.

Analysts of higher-education trends are predicting that the aftermath of COVID-19 may bring the closure of hundreds of colleges, perhaps 10 to 20% of our 4,200 or so colleges.

In Vermont, Southern Vermont College closed in 2019, as did Green Mountain College and the College of St. Joseph. Marlboro College was absorbed this year into Emerson College in Boston. The state merged Lyndon State and Johnson State Colleges into Northern Vermont University and in April came within a hairsbreadth of closing NVU. So Vermont has 12 four-year colleges where it had 17. NVU’s future remains uncertain.

Maine hasn’t taken such a big hit. In fact, we have a couple of counter trends, including the new Roux Institute of Northeastern University in Portland, a graduate center for STEM education. And the University of New England is moving its medical school to Portland from Biddeford.

At best, though, the reading is mixed. The University of Maine at Machias turned over its administration to the University of Maine and dropped athletics, sure signs of atrophy. Unity College has put its campus up for sale, saying it will stress online learning.

Maine has long taken the position that college should be easily available to all who qualify and want it. It has built campuses all over the state, then opened satellite sites of those campuses. UM Augusta holds the title for most satellite campuses with 10, spread geographically from Ellsworth to East Millinocket to Rumford to Saco.

The move to satellite campuses has a parallel. When I taught at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Gov. James Rhodes wanted to place a satellite of one or another of the 14 state universities within 20 miles of every Ohioan. Miami’s share was satellite campuses in Middletown (22 miles from Oxford) and Hamilton (14 miles).

A colleague in the English department calculated that the state could shuttle students to Oxford, running buses every 20 minutes or even more often, dawn to late night, for less than the cost of operating satellites at Middletown and Hamilton.

USM already runs buses between Gorham and Portland, and Colby runs vans between its downtown dorm and Mayflower Hill. So, why don’t politicians choose less expensive shuttles? Because no one will ever point to a bus and say, “Jim Rhodes built that for us.”

We learned in political science classes that the first goal of any bureaucracy is to grow. The best way to grow any bureaucracy is to make it appear indispensable in some way. The indispensabilities. The University of Maine is, of course, our research university. USM has built its strength on accessibility, UMF leads in teacher training. And so on.

With seven state colleges, Maine has seven centers of bureaucratic growth. As these bailiwicks build, each adds complementary programs. So, we have seven programs in environmental studies, six in business, five in teacher training. Etc.

No one in the Legislature or on the UMaine System Board of Trustees seems ever to ask whether we have too much of a good thing. If Maine were growing like, say, Texas, it would make sense to build up and maintain a large system. But Maine’s college-age population isn’t growing. According to the Wall Street Journal, in this decade the pool of people in Maine aged 15 to 24 will fall by 19.5%. And, Maine, at 26%, is a leader among states sending high school graduates out of state for college.

Local example. In 1989, when I joined the SAD 9 school board, Mount Blue High School had 1,100 students in three grades. In 1993, we moved the ninth grade to the high school. So you might think Mount Blue would be larger than in 1989. It isn’t. Today, enrollment in four grades is 675. That’s a drop of nearly 40%.

If colleges are to hold steady or grow, they must find students, and those students aren’t coming from shrinking high schools around Maine. Only Orono has attracted significant numbers of out-of-state students. About a third of its students cross the Kittery bridge on the way to school. But to do that, UMaine has stabbed the golden goose of out-of-state tuition, waiving the from-away fee for many of the imports.

The late Gov. James Longley may have been ahead of his time, though being a visionary certainly wasn’t his brand. When he wanted to close UMM and UMFK, he might have been foreseeing that Maine would not have enough young people to justify eight campuses under seven monikers with six administrations.

He may well have been wrong about how to go about shrinking the state university system to sustainable size, but correct that the job needs to be undertaken by the Legislature and the system board of trustees.

Bob Neal taught (journalism, English) at UMaine and at UMF. He imagines a future that holds more state aid for students and fewer campuses of the UMaine System.

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