Gauging the long-range effects of the pandemic may take longer than the 38 months of the declared emergency. Maybe nowhere more than in the area of what comes after high school.

One thing seems certain. The post-secondary years will be different, whether grads are going straight to work or to career training or higher education. This may be an opportunity for Maine to grab the initiative and start designing the post-secondary world of tomorrow.

Come June, grads who go straight to work may be riding the wave of a sellers’ market. With historically low unemployment, they can expect a choice of types of jobs and pay levels.

But for the half or more of high school grads who are ready for more schooling, the question is whether the schooling will be ready for them. Or at least the right kind of schooling.

This came to mind when it became known that the University of Maine at Farmington may fire most adjunct faculty. UMF is about $2 million in the hole and hasn’t broken even since 2015.

Last spring, UMF fired nine profs, and nine others took early retirement. That eliminated the departments of world languages, philosophy/religion and gender studies.

On Tuesday, the Bangor Daily News reported that UMF may fire most adjuncts. Twenty-eight adjuncts taught 57 of 308 courses offered last fall, the BDN wrote, and 29 teach 37 of 242 courses this term. (A list of fired adjuncts was to be made known after my column deadline.)

Here’s what struck me. Colleges hire adjuncts to cut costs. If a tenured professor who teaches three classes a semester is paid $80,000, she gets nearly $14,000 a class. An adjunct might be paid $5,000 a course. So, a tenured prof’s pay is nearly triple an adjunct’s pay.

(Professors are tenured or on a track to tenure, usually a lifetime position. Adjuncts are part-timers. Usually, they teach but do no committee work or community or campus service.)

How does an organization save money by firing the lowest paid and keeping the highest?

UMF may be a harbinger of the UMaine System’s near future. UMF has lost nearly a quarter of its enrollment, down to about 1,500 from about 2,000, which greatly cuts tuition income. And, UMF has made some big mistakes over the last few years. It abolished its ski-industries program, one of few in the nation. It wasn’t huge but attracted out-of-state students. UMF shifted courses to four credits each, which creates difficulties for students transferring in or out.

I see no prospect that student numbers are going to increase.

Example. When I joined the School Administrative District 9 school board in 1989, Mount Blue High School had about 1,100 pupils in three grades. Now it has about 700 in four grades. That’s the story all over rural Maine: fewer grads to go to college.

The enrollment decline owes a bit to a good idea from Gov. Janet Mills: free tuition at community college for recent high school graduates. That lets students get the first two years at far less cost, then transfer to a four-year school. The flow of students to the community colleges has hit all four-year campuses, perhaps none harder than the University of Southern Maine.

(Aside. When running for the Legislature, I congratulated Mills on the free tuition idea and suggested adding second-career folks who need new skills. Nothing came of that idea.)

Here lies opportunity. Any campus can adapt to the loss of students in their first two years. Adjust offerings to stress courses for juniors and seniors. Send recruiters — yes, even small campuses hire recruiters — to community colleges. Admit pupils from high school through the community colleges, so a student works with the four-year college to plan all four years. When UMaine was over-enrolled 40 years ago, it cooperated with UMaine Machias in such a way.

These things are relatively easy if you aren’t encrusted with bureaucracy — now, there’s a topic for more columns — but the long range isn’t so easy. Maine is “overbuilt” for four-year colleges. That is, we have more campuses than we need. Here’s a comparison with another rural state.

Nebraska has about one-and-a-half times our population (2 million to 1.4 million). It covers more than double our area (77,000 square miles to 35,000). Nebraska has five state colleges and universities, we have seven colleges in the University of Maine System.

Nebraska’s five have nearly 50,000 students, 80% at university campuses in Lincoln and Omaha. Maine has 33,000 students on seven campuses, about a third at Orono. Nebraska has 38,000 community college students, and Maine has 17,000. As a proportion of population, Nebraska has nearly double our two-year enrollment.

Two conclusions. We have too many four-year colleges, and we have lots of room to beef up our community college system. Vermont has combined two of its three state colleges into Northern Vermont University and may fold in the third. UMaine Machias has all but given up the ghost and has turned its administration over to Orono and dropped athletics.

The late Gov. James Longley wanted to close the University of Maine at Fort Kent and University of Maine at Machias. If Nebraska is a model, we can serve much the same number of students on fewer campuses.

While closing a campus or two, Maine should continue to expand the community colleges, both academic and vocational sides, and get them to work more closely with the UMS schools.

There lies the future.

Bob Neal doesn’t believe that when one door closes another opens. He believes that when one door closes, you have to find another door and open it yourself. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.

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