The Case for College

Maine's Challenge

Today's "Knowledge Economy" rewards people who have college degrees and punishes those who do not. Since the early 1970s, people with college educations have lived in a world of expanding opportunities and growing incomes. Many people without college educations have faced dead-end jobs and stagnant incomes.

The road to the American Dream now runs directly through college--there's no way around it. Yet for Maine residents, that road is strewn with obstacles.

Consider the fate of the 19,000-plus young people who were ninth-graders in Maine's public and private schools in 2002.

If these 19,000 young people are like their recent predecessors, a little over 15,000 will graduate with their high school class. At this very first turn, almost 4,000 will swerve off the road, failing to earn even a high school diploma--the minimum educational requirement in the old economy.

Fortunately, about 3,000 more will earn high school diplomas or GEDs later. But of the 18,000 total who eventually earn diplomas or GEDs, just over than 10,000 will enroll in college before the age of 40. At this critical junction, almost 9,000 of those original ninth-graders will have been bumped off the road, scared off by high college prices or just not interested in college in the first place.

Finally, among those 10,000 who do go to college either directly from high school or later in life, many will be sidetracked by financial difficulties or conflicts with work or family, and wind up leaving college before earning a degree. Just over 7,200 will earn any college degree before age 40. Fewer than 5,000 will earn a bachelor's degree.

The statistics are grim. Six of every 10 Maine ninth-graders will veer off the road to college--and off the road to the American Dream.

Many Maine high school graduates who begin college leave Maine to do it. The concern is that those Maine residents who do earn a degree outside Maine may never return. In the year 2000, 3,296 Maine freshmen--43% of the total--left Maine to begin their higher education. (In contrast, only 2,351 freshmen from outside Maine came into the state for college.)

Unfortunately, these trends have been playing out among Maine's young people for a long time. Year upon year of lagging educational attainment has left Maine with an undereducated adult population. Just 25% of Maine adults, ages 25 to 64, hold bachelor's degrees, compared with 35% of all New Englanders. And in some rural Maine counties, only 15% of working-age adults hold the four-year degrees.

Many adults have completed some college courses but have not earned degrees. About 112,000 Maine working-age adults fall into this category today. This figure is expected to rise to 118,000 by 2014.

A population that is undereducated is also underprepared for today's knowledge-intensive, technology-intensive workplaces and communities.

Benefits of Higher Education

Benefits to Individuals

The more you learn, the more you earn. Americans with high school diplomas earn an average of about $29,000 annually, according to the latest national data. Those with bachelor's degrees earn an average of about $47,000. Over the course of the average work life, a person with a bachelor's degree will earn a whopping $800,000 more than a person with a high school diploma only. And with each level of education--master's degrees, doctorates, professional degrees--this earnings "premium" rises higher.

Raising levels of education not only benefits individuals. It is a must for Maine's economic future.

Benefits to Maine's Economy

Fifty years ago, about one-half of the jobs in Maine were in the manufacturing sector. A Maine resident with a high school diploma could earn a decent living at a paper mill or a textile factory. Good on-the-job training was often available. No college was needed. But those jobs have all but disappeared.

The new jobs of the Knowledge Economy--office jobs, education and health care jobs and technology jobs--require lots of problem-solving and interpersonal skills.

What manufacturing jobs remain will likely be in "high-performance" workplaces where the latest technology takes care of rote, manual tasks, and frontline workers are responsible for making critical decisions at the point of production and service delivery. These jobs increasingly require college degrees.

No wonder employers point to the supply of educated workers as among the top reasons they choose to locate or expand in a given area.

If Maine residents don't have the credentials demanded by the new high-performance workplace, employers will simply go elsewhere in search of educated workers. They already are. As the nationally respected higher education analyst Thomas G. Mortenson has noted: "Economic welfare and the prosperity of individuals, families, cities and states [has been] redistributed according to educational attainment."

Increased levels of educational attainment are important to Maine for other reasons as well. The more people learn, the more they earn. And the more they earn, the more they contribute to society in the form of taxes. For each additional bachelor's degree in Maine, we can expect at least $2,100 in new state and local tax revenues per year--and as much as $100,000 over a 45-year work life.

This report lays out the goal of generating 39,500 additional bachelor's and associate degree holders in Maine by 2019. That will generate up to $60 million in additional annual tax revenues for Maine--to say nothing of the money all Maine taxpayers will save as a result of reduced demands on corrections, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and social services and expanded economic activity.

With every child who fails to earn a college degree, another bit of Maine's economic future is lost. And that's not all. People who graduate from college not only get better jobs, earn more money and pay more taxes than those with high school diplomas. They're also more likely to vote, more likely to do volunteer work, more likely to serve on civic boards, and better prepared to understand the increasingly complex fiscal, educational and environmental questions facing local communities from Jackman to York.

Educational attainment promises many other benefits for both individuals and society. College-educated people tend to be healthier than their less-educated counterparts and are more likely to have health insurance. They are less likely to run into trouble with the law, less likely to experience poverty. Their children tend to do better in school.

These are some of the reasons behind the establishment of the Maine Compact for Higher Education.

A Paradigm Shift: College as Right and Responsibility

For a half century, America has viewed completing high school as the minimum education accomplishment. Today, Maine faces the opportunity--and the imperative--to raise this bar. College attainment must become as ubiquitous as high school attainment is today.

To achieve that goal, Maine should do something that no other state has yet done. Maine should boldly declare:

A college education is the RIGHT and RESPONSIBILITY of all Maine people.

We assert that:

• All Maine people must have the RIGHT to adequate preparation for college in their local schools. Likewise, they have a RESPONSIBILITY to work hard to meet college admissions requirements.
• All Maine people must have the RIGHT to a college education that is affordable. At the same time, they have a RESPONSIBILITY to explore their financial and academic options carefully and to invest in their own education to the extent that they are able.
• All Maine people must have the RIGHT to the support they need, whether they are youngsters or adults, to stay on the road to college. And they have a RESPONSIBILITY to stay focused on earning a degree.

The people of Maine also have a collective RESPONSIBILITY--to invest adequately and consistently in the physical and intellectual infrastructure for teaching and learning in Maine's local schools, colleges and universities and adult education centers and to nurture a culture that supports higher education.

This is an ambitious goal. But Maine is extraordinarily good at making change when its residents and its leaders set their minds to it. Consider the recent transformation of Maine's K-12 education. In 1993, the Maine Coalition for Excellence in Education envisioned and began promoting a statewide system to raise the quality of Maine's elementary and secondary schools. Four years later, Maine implemented a set of rigorous K-12 standards known as Learning Results that helped propel Maine's elementary and secondary schools from among the worst-performing in the United States to among the best. Today, Maine students consistently rank among the top 10 nationally in science and reading.

The pioneering Maine Learning Technology Initiative providing all 7th and 8th grade students with laptop computers is another example of our state's can-do approach to educational improvement and equity.

We succeeded in these efforts because every single Maine community dedicated itself to the goal of high education standards. In many ways, Maine really is one large community. If we dedicate ourselves to increasing college attainment, we'll succeed at that too.

Building a New Road to Higher Education

The Maine Compact for Higher Education is not a Think Tank. It's a Do Tank. The Compact is committed to the goal of making Maine people among the best-educated in America. Here's how we will measure our progress.

Today, 37% of Maine's working-age people (ages 25 to 64) have an associate, bachelor's or graduate degree. The comparable figure for New England is 45%. Without any special intervention, the proportion of Maine residents holding degrees is projected to grow to 51% by 2019, while the New England proportion will grow to 56%. Eliminating this gap between Maine and the New England region will require an additional 159,020 degree holders in Maine by 2019 - the difference between the 259,860 degree holders we have in Maine today and our target of 418,880 in 15 years. This is roughly 39,500 more degree holders than the projected growth rate and brings us to the New England average.

Calculating the Compact's Goal

Source: Philip Trostel, Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy, University of Maine. See Appendix B for more explanation.

This is a major undertaking. The Compact's strategies are a plan for achieving 39,500 degree holders above projections. But, we cannot assume that we will easily achieve the projected growth rate of 0.83%. Only an annual accounting of results will keep everyone focused on maintaining our projected growth and adding new degree holders.

To complicate matters, slow birth rates and little in-migration will shrink the number of Maine public and private high school graduates from over 15,000 in 2003 to a projected 12,500 by 2014. So in order to realize an increase in college attainment, we must increase the percentage of Maine high school graduates who enroll in college directly from high school from today's 52% to 75% in 2014. That will raise the number of Maine high school graduates enrolling in college from 7,700 in 2000-01, the latest year for which good data are available, to a little more than 9,400 in 2014.

At the same time, we must increase the rate at which students graduate from Maine colleges and universities. In 2000-01, about 20% of full-time undergraduates earned associate or bachelor's degrees. We need to increase the percentage to 23% by 2014. This will result in an additional 1,031 college degrees awarded annually.

We also need to increase college enrollment and completion among Maine's working-age adults. Approximately 112,000 of Maine's working-age adults already have some college experience. We aim to help at least 11,000 of them complete college degrees over the next decade.

To be sure, increasing educational attainment among Maine residents will not by itself ensure economic competitiveness for Maine.

For example, we also need to forge policies and practices that will give college-educated Maine residents--and college grads from elsewhere--strong reasons to work and live in Maine. We need to help those educated people create new Maine jobs, new Maine companies, and maybe even new Maine industries.

Reaching these goals will cost Maine money. The good news is that raising educational attainment also pays hard cash for states. The more people learn, the more they earn. The more they earn, the more they pay back in the form of taxes and the less they draw on public resources.

Download the Action Plan