PORTLAND, Maine — Although incoming University of Southern Maine President Harvey Kesselman isn’t officially scheduled to start the job until July, he already has become an active figure at the school.
He has fielded local reporter inquiries from afar — he technically still works as a top administrator at Stockton University in New Jersey — and has made special trips to Maine for events such as USM’s Accepted Students Day in April, when he delivered a keynote address and mingled with hundreds of prospective students.
Kesselman’s message is that he personally is committed to turning around years of declining enrollment figures at the school, and if he has to make sales pitches to individual high school seniors from the president’s office, that’s what he’ll do.
Kesselman was hired in part because he’s a big believer in the “metropolitan university” model USM administrators plan to implement and are convinced will unlock access to more students and more donors. That model involves heavy interaction between the school and surrounding community, with students learning by becoming directly involved with community projects and trying to solve problems facing Greater Portland.
But the enthusiastic and optimistic new president, who will be the fourth person to hold the job since 2012, will be inheriting a school that has seen its share of controversy in recent years.
Tension between the faculty and recent administrations has been palpable, and current interim President David Flanagan’s elimination of more than 50 faculty positions and five academic programs met stiff opposition — including protest demonstrations — from professors and students.
Enrollment at the university fell from more than 10,000 students as recently as 2008 to fewer than 7,500 this year, contributing to what administrators called a crippling financial vise of dropping tuition revenues, increasing costs of operation and flat funding from the Legislature.
USM and the other University of Maine System campuses aren’t out of hot water yet: The system’s administrators have said more budget cuts may be necessary next year, and faculty have argued reducing academic quality and offerings will only make the schools less attractive to prospective students, driving down enrollment further.
But not all available data are causes for distress. There are signs USM is beginning to get its enrollment decline under control or even potentially turning the corner toward an increase in the near future.
— Yes, undergraduate applications are down this year compared with last. But in recent weeks, those numbers have rebounded somewhat. In late March, overall undergraduate applications were down by 10 percent, compared with the 4,593 submitted for the summer and fall of 2014. The university was bruised at the time in news reports, which fairly noted cash-strapped USM spent $2 million in advertising and scholarships over the last year but was unable to generate an increase in applications.
During the last month, however, the school has received nearly 50 more forms, bringing this year’s total up to 4,220, cutting the application decrease to 8 percent. It’s a stretch to call the undergraduate figures good news, as it’s unlikely a big enough flood of new applications will make up the remaining difference during the next four to six weeks. But this shows the school is whittling down that deficit.
— Transfer applications are actually increasing. With 952 applications from prospective transfer students as of April 20, USM is seeing a 3 percent increase compared with last year at this time, when the school had 922 of the forms.
Why does this matter? Well, any increase in enrollment is a positive. But interest among transfer students could be viewed as a sign the university’s recent struggles aren’t hurting its reputation as badly as it may seem. Transfer students already are in college somewhere; if USM didn’t offer them an attractive proposition of some kind, many of them simply could stay where they are.
— Graduate student enrollment is increasing, too. With recent cuts to USM’s high-profile Muskie School of Public Service and the outright elimination of graduate programs in Applied Medical Sciences and American and New England Studies, it wouldn’t have been a shock to see this population go down. But the university actually is attracting more graduate students this year.
The school has 156 graduate students enrolled for the summer and fall, 5 percent more than the 148 on the books last year at this time. This is a critical population for a school that — with campuses in the state’s two largest cities — needs to establish itself as a go-to spot for working professionals seeking postgraduate credentials for career advancement.
— USM’s Accepted Student Day was a success. The day Kesselman made the trip to USM’s Gorham campus for Accepted Student Day was April 10. With an estimated 800 people in attendance, including parents, administrators described it as the most highly attended such event in recent memory.
Accepted Student Day is just what it sounds like: a day when all prospective students who have been accepted to attend the school are invited to check out the facilities, meet with representatives of various student groups and ultimately decide whether USM is the place they want to attend.
Ninety-one percent of those prospective students who pre-registered, or 326 prospective students, turned out for the event. Many received one-on-one welcomes from Kesselman. Perhaps it is early to know whether a large crowd at one particular event will translate into any significant enrollment boost, but it could be looked at as a sign of student interest in the university, which is a good first step.
