ORONO, Maine — New England's land grant universities are trying to attract more out-of-state students, as the number of high school graduates continues to decline, annually, across the region.
Next fall, through a program called flagship match, the University of Maine in Orono is offering prospective out-of-staters the same tuition and fee rates that they would pay to attend their home universities.
The savings don't take into account other significant costs, such as room and board, but they do mean a big discount on UMaine's standard out-of-state tuition and fees.
A couple of years ago, Sherri Geller was advising a high school senior who really wanted to leave Massachusetts for college. Geller heads up college counseling at Gann Academy, a private Jewish high school in Waltham.
"Maine was the right size and shape and she was a nursing major and it was a great fit for her," she says.
Geller says the student and her family would have been thrilled to get the kind of email that showed up in her inbox a few weeks ago.
"I got a very helpful email from the VP of Enrollment Management at the University of Maine, talking about the new scholarship program," she says. "It says the award is a competitive scholarship program that guarantees academically qualified, first-year students from Massachusetts to pay the same tuition and fee rates as the University of Massachusetts at Amherst."
That means any high school senior in Massachusetts, with a 3.0 GPA and SAT scores of 1050 or higher, could attend UMaine next fall for $14,171, the tuition and fees that in-state students pay to attend UMass-Amherst. The offer is part of UMaine's new Flagship Match Program.
"We looked at our data," says Jeff Hecker, executive vice president for academic affairs and provost at UMaine. "We had students who applied to the University of Maine, and we accepted, but didn't come.
"And if you look at the students from out of state, fully 25 percent of them chose to go to another one of the New England land grant universities," he says.
Hecker says many of those universities are offering aggressive financial aid packages. So in response, UMaine came up with the Flagship Match. Under the initiative, out-of-state students from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey and Pennsylvania who meet the academic criteria could attend UMaine for the same tuition and fees they'd pay to attend the land grant university in their home state.
Hecker says the university hopes the program will give it an advantage in the increasingly competitive battle to enroll students.
"Well, we want to do this because there's competition for a dwindling resource in New England," he says. "If you look across the New England states, the number of students graduating from high school each year is dropping and is forecast to drop each of the next eight years."
Leaving the major land grant universities fighting for the same pool of potential students. Even when you factor in room and board, students from away would still end up paying far less to come to Orono than if they had to pay the full $26,640 out-of-state tuition.
One enrollment official at a fellow land grant university, meantime, is watching the Maine experiment closely.
"So, I think it's like any college or university," says Stacey Kostell, vice president for enrollment management at th University of Vermont. "They do things to attract students, from a marketing standpoint — new programs, new scholarships. And it's something we're always going to watch."
Out-of-state students have until Feb. 1 to apply to UMaine under Flagship Match.