At their latest meeting on Sept. 21 at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, the University of Maine System (UMS) board of trustees unanimously approved appropriations calling for more funding from the state of Maine in order to keep tuition frozen across all campuses in the system.
In 2012, UMS officials and the state agreed to keep funding the state’s seven universities at their current level in exchange for the schools holding tuition levels flat.
According to the UMS Executive Director of Public Affairs Dan Demeritt, Maine’s public universities are currently receiving $5 million less in state appropriations than the level provided in 2008. The tuition freeze, which is currently in its third year, has allowed Maine public universities to keep tuition at the same level despite being flat funded over the last couple of years by the state.
The system received $176.2 million for fiscal year 2015 and is looking to extend the tuition freeze by another two years by asking for 3.4 and 3.8 percent increases for fiscal years 2016-17 respectively, resulting in a total baseline increase of 7.3 percent. This would push the system’s budget up to approximately $182.2 million for 2016 and $189.1 million for 2017 in order to offset the anticipated cost of inflation for the next two years.
According to Demeritt, if the request is granted by the Maine Legislature, it would mark the longest tuition freeze in the history of the system.
The UMS is currently facing a $69 million budget shortfall by fiscal year 2019. In order to address this deficit, trustees voted to cut $22.7 million from the fiscal year 2015 budget, which was achieved through the cutting of a number of academic programs. The system also pulled an additional $11.7 million out of its reserve funds.
The cutting of academic programs and faculty positions drew a lot of criticism from students and faculty earlier in the year, when the cuts were first announced. Several student groups from both USM and the flagship campus banded together in solidarity to protest the cuts, demanding more say in what was going on.
With the sponsorship of Rep. Ben Chimpan of Portland, students from the University of Southern Maine (USM) drafted an emergency bill that was brought before the Legislature in March. The bill, if passed, would have instituted a one-year moratorium on layoffs and budget cuts by the UMS in the hopes that another solution could be found in the meantime. It also called for the creation of a stakeholders group of students and faculty that would study the system’s finances and make recommendations over the course of the moratorium. The bill didn’t pass.
The trustees have also voted to scrap the USM’s American and New England studies and geosciences programs as well as the Arts and Humanities program at the Lewiston-Auburn campus. Trustees are also considering closing the Bangor office, which has a total operating cost of $141,000 per year.