Enrollment across the University of Maine System is up about 5% this fall.
It's the first time in three years the university system has seen year-to-year growth, though enrollment is still down compared to where it was five years ago.
More than 24,000 students are enrolled in Maine's public universities this fall.
University system chancellor Dannel Malloy attributes the growth, in part, to better communication with prospective students, particularly in how the schools helped applicants navigate problems with federal financial aid forms.
"I think we handled the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) debacle better than any other system in New England," he said. "That's why we've seen an increase in the number of people filing their FAFSAs, because we explained it to them. We told them what it meant, and we helped them through that process."
Malloy said universities are also processing applications faster than before, and prospective students are accepting and enrolling more quickly.
Updates that the schools are making in their physical infrastructure are drawing in students as well, he added.
"We are appropriately investing in ourselves at a much higher rate, addressing some of the challenges that people could see when they would walk into a building that hasn't been renovated in 50 years, or we're not offering the kind of housing that the market wants to see," he said.
More than 2,300 undergraduate students will transfer into the university system this year, the most in a decade. About 650 of those students will transfer from Maine's community colleges.
Malloy said the number of community college transfers should increase, as the public school systems have recently agreed to guarantee graduates admission to a UMaine school and proactively help them enroll.
And a record 4,700 graduate students are also enrolled in programs throughout the UMaine system this year.
Much of the enrollment growth is driven by increases in the incoming student population at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, which university officials attribute to the popularity for an online undergraduate and graduate program known as "Your Pace."
The University of Maine at Farmington, however, is seeing its first increase in enrollment since 2017. An online graduate nursing program at the University of Maine at Fort Kent is partly responsible for a modest bump in enrollment.
