Portland’s learning curve Why Maine’s biggest city and cultural center isn’t a college town — and likely won’t be one anytime soon BY SARA DONNELLY

In the University of Southern Maine’s Office of Graduate Studies (full-time staff of 5), Mary Sloan, Director of Graduate Admissions, tries to do more with less. With a budget so thin this year that the office has stopped printing graduate catalogs, some of the best students Sloan accepts to the school’s advanced degree programs can’t get enough financial aid to allow them to go. Five years after a board of Portland’s business and civic leaders reported more graduate programs are necessary to serve the Southern Maine community, one year after USM’s president announced a plan to dramatically increase the number of graduate students enrolled at USM, Sloan still struggles with a funding pool that is shallower than that of most of the school’s competitors, including the University of Maine at Orono and the University of New Hampshire.

"It’s really hard," she says. "But often students will choose to go somewhere else because of more financial aid or, if they’re geographically wedded to this area, they may choose not to go to graduate school at all."

In 2000, the Board of Visitors, a 17-member group of business, legal, and education leaders from Portland and Southern Maine charged with advocating for the University and helping its programming address community needs, published the results of several months of research on the relationship between USM and Southern Maine. The research was based on feedback from focus groups and individual civic and business leaders. Titled "A Southern Maine Imperative: Meeting the Region’s Higher Education Needs in the 21st Century," the report described a region disappointed with the program offerings at USM.

"USM’s external community believes that its needs are not being met by the current menu of academic programs," the report states. "The community should not be forced to rely predominately on universities 50 miles (New Hampshire), 100 miles (Boston), or 145 miles (Orono) away for talented faculty, quality programs, student employees, interns, and graduates."

Last week, thousands of USM students return to classrooms in a Portland, a city that has somehow managed to avoid beating out weak sisters like Gorham and Orono for the title of Maines unquestionably coolest college town. This is thanks, in part, to a funding formula which prioritizes graduate and doctoral program growth at the university system’s flagship campus in Orono rather than at USM in Portland. It’s a formula which pushes USM to siphon more of its budget from tuition, capital campaigns, private donations, and its own weakest programs to support expansion and financial aid. And it’s a formula which is slowing the growth of a graduate studies department that could otherwise be a formidable antidote to a phenomenon long plaguing the Pine Tree state — the brain drain.

Brain drain — it’s the freaky term for the equally freaky trend of young, bright Mainers getting the hell out of a home state which doesn’t have enough challenging jobs, fun places to live, or stimulating academic programs to keep them. In a state where concern about the exodus of Maine’s future has prompted a 2003 legislative task force, the 2005 Realize Maine! initiative by Governor John Baldacci, and countless independent and government-sponsored research papers, Portland — as the most youthful and most educated large city in Maine — would appear to be a ready-made target for legislators looking to hang on to nesting-age Mainers with a hankering for academia.

But it’s not. Even though USM supports a student body only slightly smaller than the university system’s largest University of Maine at Orono, and even though it has expanded to meet community needs, USM continues to receive the same share of state appropriations it did when it was founded 35 years ago. UMO receives twice as much from the state as our urban university.

Figuring out exactly why USM isn’t receiving more money from a state which wants to attract more of the kind of hipster, smarty-pants people who already gravitate to Portland feels a little like trying to solve a doctoral-level physics equation.

On the surface, funneling more money to USM seems like a no-brainer. USM is located in the only truly urban city in the state — a multicultural, youthful, funky locale a short drive from Boston which has lately won a handful of awards for its appeal. The median age in Portland, 35.7, is lower than any of the state’s other urban centers (although UMO’s nearby Bangor is close at 36.1). More Portlanders hold a Bachelor’s Degree or higher (36.4 percent of the population) than residents of any other Maine city.

Since it was founded in 1970, USM’s rapid and eclectic growth points to the dynamic and intellectually hungry nature of the Southern Maine region it serves. From its early days offering courses primarily in teaching and business management to its standing today as the public university in the state serving the largest number of Maine residents, USM continues to be the fastest growing public university in the state. Though it’s always been the second-largest university in Maine after UMO, recently its student population has expanded so much that this distinction almost isn’t worth noting. According to Fall 2004 figures for both schools, USM enrolled 11,089 students, UMO 11,358. The difference could fit in a lecture hall.

The University offers 26 graduate and doctoral programs (in addition to the University of Maine school of Law, which operates independently of USM’s Graduate Studies department), in subjects like Music, Social Work, and Creative Writing. The newest, the doctoral program in School Psychology, started this month.

But USM has six other sister schools to answer to, including one big sister (University of Maine at Orono) which is loathe to relinquish its position as the graduate and doctoral degree epicenter of Maine’s public university system. UMO’s advanced degree offerings currently put USM’s to shame — the school runs 89 masters, doctoral, and advanced certificate programs, more than three times as many as USM offers.

There are seven campuses in the University of Maine system — USM, UMO, UM Farmington, UM Machias, UM Fort Kent, UM Presque Isle, and UM Augusta — which split funding from the state. Unlike other states like New Hampshire and Massachusetts, where state-run offices dole out funds to state universities (and are theoretically more susceptible to lobbying from university presidents), the Maine university system chancellor and board of trustees, independent of the governor and state legislators, decide how much each campus receives. UMO, as the flagship campus, traditionally receives the bulk of the state funds — around 50 percent of the total. USM gets the second largest share, around 25 percent. This year, that translates to around $42 million for USM, or about three million more than last year. This accounts for slightly less than half of the school’s annual operating budget.