July 11, 2023
Governor Mills signs budget funding Free College Scholarships for High School Classes of 2024-25
AUGUSTA, ME –Tuition-free community college in Maine was extended to two more graduating high school classes under the budget passed by the legislature and signed today by Governor Janet Mills.
The $15 million investment will allow students graduating from high school or its equivalent in 2024 and 2025 to attend any Maine community college without paying any tuition or mandatory fees – a value of more than $3,800 a year.
“Extending Free College to the Classes of 2024 and 2025 tells today’s high school students that the State of Maine believes in them and is willing to invest in them and their future,” said Maine Community College System (MCCS) President David Daigler.
“The scholarship means they won’t have to work multiple jobs while they study or take just one or two classes at a time because they can’t afford more. They’ll have time to focus on learning a trade or becoming a nurse or a police officer or a chef, or pursuing any of the hundreds of degrees or one-year certificates we offer. And they’ll graduate as the kind of skilled workers Maine desperately needs right now and for years into the future. It’s a bold move that benefits workers, employers, and the entire state of Maine,” Daigler said.
Following a proposal from Governor Mills, Maine launched the Free Community College program in April 2022 with a one-time state investment of $20 million, benefiting the pandemic-era high school graduates from 2020-2023. In the first year, 6,400 students attended community college tuition-free.
Earlier this year, some students told lawmakers what a difference the program made for them. Maya Eichorn, now a top student at York County Community College, said she wasn’t even considering college.
“One year ago … I was dropping out (of high school) to take the HiSET exam,” she said. “Today, I am a full-time college student with a 4.0. Without the Maine Free College program, I would be aimlessly moving through life.”
Tuition-free education at Maine’s community colleges is also available to current high school students through OnCourse, an early college program, and for anyone enrolled in most short-term workforce training programs.
May 19, 2023
Winnie LaRochelle of Rangeley is a scholar athlete at CMCC in Auburn
AUGUSTA, ME – The Maine Community College System (MCCS) welcomes Winnie LaRochelle of Rangeley as the new student trustee on the Board of Trustees.
LaRochelle graduated this spring with an associate degree in criminal justice from Central Maine Community College (CMCC) in Auburn. She will continue her studies at CMCC next year, pursuing an advanced certificate in police operations.
“This is quite an honor,” said LaRochelle, who added that living in the campus dorms and being involved in sports and other campus activities will allow her to gather valuable information to share with the board. “I am able to see firsthand and understand the colleges at a different level than someone from the outside. Board members can ask me for the student perspective.”
Her goal is to become a Maine game warden and work with young people. LaRochelle has mentored younger students when she was in high school and through Big Brothers Big Sisters.
“Winnie’s community service and experience in so many aspects of community college life makes her an outstanding addition to the board,” said MCCS President David Daigler. “She’s a top scholar, an athlete, a dorm resident, a community volunteer, works, and is now stacking her academic credentials with an advanced certificate on top of her associate degree. I’m looking forward to her contributions to the important work of the board.”
LaRochelle was nominated by Governor Janet Mills and confirmed by the Maine Senate. She serves a two-year term.
The Maine Community College System’s Board of Trustees is the policy making authority for the system and consists of 13 appointed voting members, one ex-officio voting member, and one ex-officio non-voting member.
May 12, 2023
HospitalityMaine has teamed up with York County Community College to offer the New Cook Bootcamp.
Toby Nye began working in Portland kitchens as a Waynflete high school kid. He wanted some experience in the work world and needed to make money. Though his first job ever, at Flatbread Pizza, led to other kitchen jobs, he never took restaurant work seriously.
But something shifted this year when he started as a dishwasher at Tipo. Restaurant kitchens stopped looking like a job to him, said Nye, now 24, and began looking like a career. One day, he approached Tipo’s chef de cuisine with a question: Could he switch from dishwashing to cooking?
At about the same time, Tipo co-owner Paige Gould was invited by the nonprofit trade group HospitalityMaine to attend an informal job fair at York County Community College in Wells. A small group of students there had just completed the three-and-a-half day New Cook Bootcamp, a program begun by the school this spring – so far there have been four sessions – in conjunction with HospitalityMaine. The win-win idea behind the fast-paced crash course in cooking is to equip Mainers with entry-level training to begin a career in the professional kitchen, and to help the state’s beleaguered restaurants find enough staff fast, just as the busy summer season bears down. Waiting for culinary students to complete one- and two-year programs isn’t an option when a restaurant needs staff now.
Gould drove down for that particular boot camp’s final day. As it turned out, only one of the students needed a job, and he was moving to Massachusetts. As Gould headed back to Portland, she wondered how she could get something out of her trip. Maybe, she thought, Toby Nye would like to attend the next session.
On Thursday, Nye and eight other students completed the hands-on course, cooking an array of fish (salmon with caper sauce, baked haddock, mussels marnier), as well as crepes with chicken fricassee, and a tray of handsome grilled vegetables (the students had mastered nice, even grill marks). They “graduated” at noon, although that’s probably too grand a term for finishing the short program. Each got a certificate from the college, to applause from college administrators, as well as ServSafe certification, which testifies to their food sanitation training on the first day of the course.
Tipo, Nye said, is very fast-paced. Experienced cooks don’t have time to slow down and thoroughly explain things to the new kid. The boot camp allowed him to focus “without the element of urgency,” he said. “This is about getting a stronger sense of the foundation of cooking. I’ve had a great week.”
The course is taught by Joe Pirkola, a chef and longtime college and high school culinary teacher, who seemed to have eyes in the back of his head, able to teach the students – almost simultaneously – how to neatly slip a stuffed crepe from a china plate to a steam table pan and how to clean up a plate that had shattered on the floor (a broom! Don’t use your hands!), while reminding them to provide utensils for each of their dishes and to sprinkle chicken wings with sesame seeds. In the restaurant world, presentation matters.
That chicken, by the way, started out on Day 1 of the class as a raw whole chicken that the students learned to break down. Over the next few days, they used bits and pieces to make chicken stock, soup, sauteed chicken breast, veloute sauce, chicken fricassee and wings. In the world of restaurants, Pirkola explained, “That chicken is sold five times. Everything we’ve done would be a sellable product, and also a technique that I was trying to teach.”
Over the several-day course, students tackled – among other skills – blanching, searing, braising, knife cuts, the French mother sauces, egg cookery and useful tricks, like anchoring your cutting board with a wet kitchen towel so it won’t slip when you’ve got a sharp knife in your hand. The curriculum got its start in lists compiled by HospitalityMaine and local employers about what very basic skills they seek in new kitchen staff.
“No. 1, baked haddock,” Pirkola said about taking basic skills and basic dishes to heart. “There are probably not too many restaurants around here that don’t have a baked haddock, so we do haddock – a white fish – then seared salmon, so it’s a fatter fish. Steamed mussels, so it’s cleaning mussels, identifying which ones are alive and which ones are not, because if they go work anyplace, they are probably serving mussels in Maine.”
The class was a mix of students – male and female, 20-somethings and 50-somethings, restaurant staff (one shifting from front-of-the-house to back at Dockside Grill in Falmouth), retirees, a University of Southern Maine Ph.D. student in agritourism, a property manager with a catering sideline in oysters, and a young woman who happily works at a local farm but thinks one day she may want to sell her sourdough bread. The course is not only free; students actually get a $350 stipend for completing it. The program is supported by a grant from the Harold Alfond Center for the Advancement of Maine’s Workforce.
HospitalityMaine not only hopes to continue the program at York County Community College, but also to replicate it throughout the state, according to Derek Fassett, director of Education & Workforce Development at the HospitalityMaine Education Foundation. He added that, ideally, students who attend boot camp, what he described as a pre-apprentice program, will go on to sign up for the nonprofit’s longer, more-intensive apprentice program.
When Gould first asked Nye whether he’d like to attend the crash course, he was excited, but he doesn’t own a car and had no way to get there. “All right, all right, let’s figure this out,” she told him. In the end, Nye’s girlfriend drove him to the first day of class, Tipo’s general manager drove him another day, and Gould herself ferried him for two days.
“I really wanted him to be able to do it, and he wasn’t going to be able to do it unless he got help,” she said. “I’m always happy to help someone who wants to move up.
“If your community college is offering to do some of the training for us, I’m not going to say no,” she added, with a laugh.
May 9, 2023
Northern Light = Kennebec Valley Community College partnership highlighted
A program that launched in October 2021 has mostly reversed a major Maine hospital system’s shortage of emergency medical technicians after staffing dropped 30 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The program through Northern Light Medical Transport and Emergency Care includes seven weeks of training, in the ambulance and the classroom, for students of all backgrounds.
Students are hired and paid as full-time employees while they train, committing to two years with Northern Light Health. After they pass a national exam and obtain their Maine license, they are promoted to basic EMTs.
With 45 students from four cohorts graduated, positions for basic EMTs are close to full across five ambulance divisions, and having a few openings is normal, said Andrea McGraw, associate vice president of emergency medical services. Bangor’s division, the largest, has filled its full-time vacancies for EMTs.
The staffing crisis among emergency medical workers is not unique to Northern Light or even Maine but reflects a nationwide problem, McGraw said. The hospital system has seemingly found a solution to rebuild its force of EMTs, though advanced EMTs and paramedics are still needed. This means more complete crews and the patients they transport are breathing easier.
“We knew there was a problem. We tried something different because we were at the point that we needed to do something,” McGraw said about the Work to Grow program, a model used in other Northern Light departments. “We tweaked it along the way, and it has been successful.”
Program leaders have heard from EMS agencies in southern Maine curious about how they achieved success, lessons learned and what could be done differently.
Now the Northern Light team is working to get approval for an advanced program for EMTs and thinking about how to adapt the model for people interested in per diem work. They have considered a similar training program for paramedics, though the logistics are harder to coordinate, McGraw said.
Across the five divisions, there are openings for about 10 advanced EMTs and 25 paramedics, said Karen Sanborn, a Northern Light Health spokesperson.
During the pandemic, short-staffed crews worked longer days and picked up extra shifts, leading to burnout and fatigue. Leaders joined them in covering ambulance calls. Fewer EMTs and other emergency responders meant delays in transporting patients, for example, from a hospital to a nursing home, and more reliance on mutual aid partners.
Some workers left due to exhaustion or Maine’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, while others retired or chose to advance their careers, said Crystal Bagley, education and training supervisor for Northern Light Transport and Emergency Care.
“Now we can say yes to more of the discharges from facilities to a patient’s next stop on their journey versus doing it in a day or two. We can do it in real time,” she said.
The Work to Grow program is based on a model that Northern Light Health uses for registered nurses, certified nursing assistants, respiratory therapists and other positions. The model has been in place for more than five years, but it has evolved over time, Sanborn said.
Bagley, who taught students along with paramedic and operations coordinator Josh Carr, thinks the program appeals to people because they get to learn from experienced professionals while earning a paycheck, which provides stability.
In a traditional program for EMTs, unless a sponsor is involved, students must pay tuition and plan to take time away from work, Bagley said, noting there is far less hands-on learning that prepares them for the real world. This program gives students nearly 100 hours of clinical exposure on the ambulance, which typically begins their second week, she said.
Students are hired as full-time emergency vehicle operators, making $17.75 an hour as they go through training, which includes learning how to drive ambulances. Once they are licensed EMTs, their title changes and they get paid 20 an hour, Bagley said.
She builds schedules for students, pairing them with mentors and arranging for ambulance training at locations that interest them. For instance, a student living in the Northern Light Mayo Hospital EMS region may want to work at one of three bases — in Dover-Foxcroft, Dexter or Corinth — once licensed, so she works with them to coordinate.
The program’s students were of varying ages and occupations. The youngest was 18, while the oldest participants were in their late 50s or early 60s. They included a former newspaper owner and electrician, as well as jail guards and certified nursing assistants.
Sherralyn Robbins, 22, recently completed the program and now works as an EMT in the Bangor division. The Eddington resident graduated from the University of Maine with an English degree in 2019. She stumbled across the EMT job on Indeed.com and decided to go for it, not having any medical workers in her family.
“I had an experience last summer where I was met with the death of somebody close to me,” she said. “The EMTs who came to try to resuscitate were wonderful people, and I guess that always stuck in my mind. I wanted to be that for other people.”
The program moved fast, but Robbins liked that the learning experiences were meaningful and much more involved than reading a textbook, she said. She recalls learning about EMS history on the first day, when a presenter advised students to set aside their judgment when treating a patient.
“It’s about meeting people where they are and treating them,” she said.
Bagley typically gets from two to three requests a week from people inquiring about when the program, a partnership with Kennebec Valley Community College, will reopen. It’s on pause because EMT positions are nearly full, but she would “do it again in a heartbeat,” she said.
April 5, 2023
Biden-Harris Administration’s “Investing in America” Tour to Spotlight Free Community College Initiative Proposed by Governor Mills
Governor Janet Mills issued the following statement welcoming First Lady Jill Biden and U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to Maine today:
“While I am unable to join our visiting dignitaries in person, I am excited to welcome the First Lady and Secretary Cardona to Maine. My Administration’s free Community College initiative and other crucial investments from the Biden-Harris Administration are providing important new opportunities for Maine people to get a high-quality education at little or no cost that allows them to take good-paying jobs in rewarding careers – a win for our students, for our employers, and for our economy.
“I hope the success of our free Community College initiative – which has led to record enrollment in the Maine Community College System – can serve as a model for other states. I look forward to working with the Biden-Harris Administration in the years to come to provide more pathways to education and good-paying jobs for Maine people. When we invest in our greatest asset – Maine people – we build a stronger, more prosperous state.”
Dr. Biden and U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, along with Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, will visit Southern Maine Community College (SMCC) this morning as part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Investing in America Tour to highlight how President Biden’s economic policies are benefiting hardworking Americans across the country.
Governor Mills had been scheduled to participate in the visit but is isolating, working remotely, and continuing to feel fine after testing positive for COVID-19 on Sunday. In the Governor’s absence, Commissioner of Economic and Community Development Heather Johnson will represent the Mills Administration.
During their visit to SMCC, Dr. Biden and Secretary Cardona will learn how Maine’s free community college initiative and historic Federal investments from the Biden-Harris Administration allocated through the Governor’s Maine Jobs & Recovery Plan are creating rewarding new career opportunities for Maine people.
In 2022, Governor Mills proposed, and the Legislature passed, Maine’s free community college initiative to help students whose aspirations for higher education were disrupted by the pandemic pursue affordable higher education and prepare for good-paying careers.
The initiative provides Maine high school graduates from the classes of 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 with a scholarship to cover the cost of Maine Community College System tuition and mandatory fees, once other available state and federal aid is applied. In the first year of the initiative, enrollment at Maine’s community college system increased by a record 12 percent. Governor Mills has proposed continuing the program for students from the high school graduating classes of 2024 and 2025.
Historic investments by the Biden Administration are also creating jobs and career opportunities for Maine people in in-demand fields such as precision manufacturing, clean energy, and health care. Through the Governor’s Maine Jobs & Recovery Plan, Maine has delivered $35 million in federal American Rescue Plan funds to create 8,500 new workforce training opportunities at Maine’s seven community colleges in health care, clean energy, manufacturing, hospitality, education, computer technology, and the trades.
March 20, 2023
Seven of the eight women are incarcerated residents at the Southern Maine Women’s Re-entry Center in Windham, a Maine Department of Corrections facility.
AUBURN, Maine — A group of women made history in March when they graduated from a new welding certificate program at Central Maine Community College.
Seven of the eight women are incarcerated. They are residents at the Southern Maine Women’s Re-entry Center in Windham, a Maine Department of Corrections facility.
DOC vocational trades instructor Corrine Bailey found the new welding program at CMCC in Auburn and signed up these women for the course. Bailey said a career, not simply a job, offers better outcomes for the incarcerated women when they leave the prison system.
“Doing things like this really builds them up and really gives them a future to look forward to, because they can go from here and sky’s the limit,” Bailey said.
Many of these women have been in prison before, gotten out, and have been arrested, convicted, and sentenced again for a new slate of crimes because of a combination of factors upon release: no skills, no work history, no income, and more.
“I’ve gotten out, and not having any foundation, not having a solid plan in place, it’s setting yourself up for failure,” Amber Morin of Lewiston said.
Morin, 29, is serving a four-year sentence for drug trafficking.
“When I got out [of prison] before, I did well for about three years. And then I messed up again,” Sarah Denbow of Bangor said.
Denbow, 38, is currently serving time for a drug trafficking sentencing.
According to a MDOC report from the end of 2022, 49% of women residents and 26% of men residents in 2022 were serving a sentence for furnishing drugs.
“A lot of women have been beaten down over time — they’re not good enough for things, they can’t do this, or they can’t do that, and it really harms people,” Bailey said.
She said she estimated about 95 percent of women in the prison system suffer from past trauma.
” was really lost. I had no self-esteem. I was just broken,” Morin said.
The women all said gaining skills they can use to apply for meaningful careers after serving time gives them hope.
“Since being here I’ve found myself, and I have self-esteem now, and just having that is a big step,” Morin said.
The next obstacle they face after prison is the job application, which asks them to reveal if they are convicted felons or not.
“It’s hard to get a job. People look at you a certain kind of way when you have something on your record,” Denbow said.
“They want to put that behind them. They’ve done their time. They’ve paid their dues, and it’s time to move forward,” Bailey said. “But if they have to check that box every time. It’s a reminder of where they were, not where they can go.”
The women said that whether being offered another chance, having a path and a purpose helps them put together the pieces of a new chapter.
“It gives me hope,” Denbow said.
These women are the first prison residents and first women to graduate from the new welding program in the new lab at CMCC. The Center for Workforce and Professional Development at Central Maine Community College unveiled the new welding lab at a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Wednesday, Oct. 26.
A $950,000 grant from the Harold Alfond Center for the Advancement of Maine’s Workforce and the Maine Jobs and Recovery Plan paid for the lab. It is home to the Center for Workforce and Professional Development’s Welding Academy.
The academy is a four-week, 160-hour training program that covers a variety of welding techniques, including MIG and TIG welding, industry-standard weld joints, print reading, basic metallurgy, sheet metal forming, tube welding, and grinding and polishing.
The training is free to those who are unemployed, underemployed, or whose job was negatively impacted by COVID-19.
Each student contributed time and at least one of their required projects to a sculpture that will go in the SMWRC flower garden that residents maintain this spring.
“They were very proud of the piece and to donate it to the facility to demonstrate what education can do for both future residents and staff/administration. What a great group of students,” class instructor Forrest Stone said.
Bailey has been approved to chaperone a second cohort and already has enough for full enrollment, Stone said. He wants to use this second cohort to do instructor training with Bailey.
March 13, 2023
A year after the onset of COVID-19, I had the privilege of speaking with students at Lewiston Middle School, which has a large number of first- and second-generation immigrant students, including many from Somalia. During the discussion, the students expressed their hopeful excitement that they would be the first in their families to attend college, with aspirations of becoming politicians, doctors and other professionals.
Many of these students come from families with limited financial means, which hinders their college prospects. Fortunately, Maine has joined several other states in making community college free for recent high school graduates, making higher education more accessible to many who would otherwise struggle to afford it. I take pride in knowing that our state is taking steps to provide its residents, especially those from underrepresented communities, with the opportunity to attend college.
The pandemic amplified the uncertainty faced by minority communities, leading to lower college enrollment and higher school dropout rates. The financial burden of tuition fees only adds to the stress for students, especially those with no other means of support. The free community college tuition program already has led to a rise in enrollment, with many immigrant students taking advantage of it with a vision of a future for themselves in the state. That’s why the state should consider making the community college plan a permanent fixture.
In addition to that initiative, a proposal from Sen. Mike Tipping, D-Penobscot, to cut the cost of tuition at state universities in half would be a tremendous boon for immigrant communities and a significant step toward addressing the financial barriers for all to higher education.
Many young Mainers, including immigrants, have had to leave the state in search of better opportunities. If the Tipping plan moves forward, more young people will stay in Maine and new generations of immigrants will have something to look forward to.
As someone who attended college in Maine a few years ago, I know firsthand the worries and challenges of paying for school without adequate resources or parental support. Many young Maine immigrants feel a sense of responsibility to contribute to their families, both locally and abroad. When I enrolled in Southern Maine Community College in 2015, less than a year after arriving in the U.S., I had to find a job while attending college to support my family back in Mogadishu. After transferring to a four-year university, the struggle to pay for college and support my family persisted.
With community college now more accessible, young Mainers can start their academic journey with an associate degree, which could lead to better job prospects and better earnings. This is the American dream and we must continue to work towards making it a reality for more individuals.
By providing financial support for higher education, we can keep more talented and motivated residents in Maine, ensuring a bright future for the state. Let us work towards creating more opportunities for those who wish to pursue higher education, regardless of their financial background, and create a brighter future for all of us.
February 10, 2023
PRESQUE ISLE, Maine (WAGM) -The President of the Maine Community College system was in the County today, allowing students at Northern Maine Community College the opportunity to provide feedback about their college experience.
President David Daigler: “I think higher education in general is going to focus in on the population of students it serves best, those are the students that a community college serves and that’s where we need to do better work.”
The students that Maine Community College System President David Daigler is talking about, are those from NMCC’s trade programs. Thursday, these students had the chance to share their experiences with Daigler, who is visiting each of the seven Maine Community College campuses
Daigler: “One of the remarkable experiences about coming onto the campuses and looking at the work being done is how the students respond to the faculty, the supports are there, the caring is there. How can we do a better job of making sure that those faculty, the staff that support that faculty, the staff that supports the students in financial aid, how can they be better resourced to meet the need of those students.”
Students and faculty spoke about a number of topics such as; course structure, improvements that could be done to the campus, and scheduling. One thing a lot of people were talking about was the continuation of online courses.
Daigler says he can see where they are coming from.
Daigler: “I do think that students are finding flexibility, adaptability in online learning but they also need that personal approach, that personal touch, and so a question we need to be asking ourselves is how can we bring those two together to make sure that that human contact is there, to make sure that caring touch is there while also providing a certain amount of content online that gives them the fliexibility they need to continue with their education, to continue with their lives.”
Daigler adds that NMCC along with the other six community colleges are seeing a large number of people who qualify, utilizing the free college tuition program established by Governor Mills.
Daigler: “The free college program has been very instrumental to bring students back who especially during the pandemic stepped away from education, stepped away from higher education just stopped going to college and stopped their learning, they also when they did that, many of them from the classes of 20 and 21 are recognizing that they put the brakes on their career opportunities that they really needed that education they also needed the financial resource to get them back in college. So we’ve seen a tremendous number of students who wouldn’t have gone to college if it weren’t for the free college program and they’re now in our classrooms and they’re now gonna be able to help our businesses fill those vacancies that exist.”
Currently, Daigler says, there is a bill before the legislature that if passed would expand the free college program to make more students eligible to receive a no-tuition higher education at any of Maine’s Community Colleges.
January 24, 2023
Maine has emerged as a leader in helping students seamlessly transition from community colleges to state universities, defying a national trend that has troubled officials in other states.
The already low proportion of students nationally who transfer from community colleges to bachelor’s degree-granting universities fell by about 10 percent over the last two years, according to the Hechinger Report, a national news outlet that covers education. In part, that drop stems from an overall lower number of people going to college. But in Maine, the percentage of students who transfer from a community college to a four-year institution has declined by less — 6.8 percent — according to the University of Maine System.
It is getting increasingly difficult for students at community colleges nationally to transfer to four-year institutions, according to a new report by the higher education consulting firm HCM Strategists.
According to a 2018 report by the New England Board of Higher Education, Maine is one of only two New England states that have guaranteed transfer agreements between community colleges and the state’s universities, and course equivalencies, two key steps in ensuring students can transfer credits.
A $20 million program rolled out by Gov. Janet Mills in 2022 to provide two free years of community college to Maine students who graduated from high school between 2020 and 2023 is part of a collaboration between the Maine Community College and the University of Maine systems to boost the number of Mainers who seek out higher education.
“I would say that most of the transfer counselors at the community colleges, and most of the transfer admissions counselors at the UMaine System schools, think of ourselves as partners,” said Sharon Oliver, director of Transfer Admissions at the University of Maine.
Nationally, the other reason for a decline is the complicated process of transferring that creates an “an uphill battle” for the student, according to a new report by the higher education consulting firm HCM Strategists.
Other states, such as Rhode Island, provide community college students with few resources to ensure they can move seamlessly from a community college to a state-owned university. But in Maine, UMaine System chancellor Dannel Malloy said the Maine Community College System is seen as a feeder into his university system.
“In the long haul, having more students in the community college is better for us because it’s the second largest place we get our students from,” Malloy said in a December 2022 interview. “Their strength ultimately is one of our strengths.”
Since the community college system’s reshuffling and founding in 2003, its leaders have worked to form institutional partnerships with the University of Maine System, said Janet Sortor, vice president, and chief academic officer of the state’s community college system.
The partnership between the two institutions started with an initiative called “AdvantageU” — a streamlined, guaranteed credit transfer process from community college to a Maine public university for students enrolled in liberal studies.
That means students can transfer to a University of Maine System campus with essentially half of their course work completed to earn a bachelor’s degree at a fraction of the cost.
These agreements between the two higher education institutions, which number in the dozens, outline explicitly what courses at the community college level are equivalent to courses offered at the University of Maine System, according to Oliver.
That means students at the community colleges can move directly after completion of a program to a University of Maine System school to essentially pick up where they left off, she said.
Within the two systems, over the last five years, 15.8 percent of the students that transfer from the community colleges come from Southern Maine Community College and go to the University of Southern Maine, according to the university system’s most recent transfer student report.
In the fall of 2021, 48.9 percent of all community college transfer students came from Southern Maine Community College, according to the report.
On average, students who transfer from the community college system to the UMaine System tend to be academically higher performing than students that start directly in the UMaine System, according to the system’s most recent transfer report.
In 2021, on average, Maine Community College students who transferred into the UMaine System had a 3.15 grade point average at the end of their first term, whereas first-time students at the UMaine System averaged a 2.78 grade point average.
One successful program is nursing, which has been a fast-growing and successful pathway for students, Sortor said.
“We are trying to get these populations of students who didn’t go to college to go to college, and to get a credential, to transfer in to get a baccalaureate degree,” she said. “We need all of these things. We don’t just need electricians and plumbers. And even in the health professions — not all of them will get a bachelor’s degree but nurses typically need one.”
Another key reason for the success is dual advising, which means students at the community colleges that have expressed their desire to transfer to a Maine university will get advice from both institutions at the same time, according to Oliver.
While only one semester into the state’s free community college program, the hope is that it will yield more transfers to the University of Maine System down the road, Oliver said.
January 13, 2023
AUGUSTA, ME – More than $8 million in federal funding for Maine’s community colleges was included in the recent federal omnibus funding bill, led by a $2.2 million investment for a new wind turbine safety training program at Northern Maine Community College.
“We deeply appreciate the hard work of the delegation in securing the funds for these important projects,” said David Daigler, president of the Maine Community College System. Senators Angus King and Susan Collins were instrumental in securing these investments benefiting Maine’s students, parents, environment, and businesses.
The wind turbine safety training program establishes Northern Maine Community College as the first internationally certified training provider in the wind power industry in the northeastern United States. It builds on the existing wind power training program at the Presque Isle college and will be launched in collaboration with Maine Maritime Academy to serve both land-based and offshore wind industries.
“Maine has an important role to play in the development of renewable energy. This program will help grow Maine’s wind power workforce, which is essential to addressing climate change and developing a clean energy economic force for Maine and beyond,” said Northern Maine Community College President Tim Crowley.
MCCS projects funded in the FY23 Appropriation bill are:
- $2.2M to Northern Maine Community College, for developing a wind turbine safety training program.
- $1.5M to York County Community College, to expand and renovate a welding training facility.
- $1.35M to Eastern Maine Community College, to expand remote health care training programs that provide hands-on and remote training to rural health care students.
- $1M to Southern Maine Community College, to purchase a facility and launch a new certificate program in greenhouse management and horticulture.
- $750K for Southern Maine Community College, to support the college’s new electric vehicle repair certification program.
- $660K for Kennebec Valley Community College, to make repairs on historic buildings on campus and create a student success center.
- $500K for Central Maine Community College, to install solar panels on campus buildings.
- $115K for Northern Maine Community College, to expand enrollment in the early childhood degree program.
Maine’s community colleges are also involved in other congressionally directed spending projects in Maine, including $8M for the University of Maine to create three new manufacturing training centers. Two of the new centers will be located at Southern Maine Community College, one at the college’s Brunswick campus and one at South Portland.
“We couldn’t be happier to partner with the university and Maine Maritime Academy on these critical projects that support the manufacturing and wind power industries in Maine,” Daigler said. “Once again, Senators King and Collins, along with Representative Jared Golden saw and understood how funding will benefit Maine’s students, our heritage industries and the Maine economy.”