Recent national news accounts depicting thousands of University of Maine at Presque Isle students earning online degrees in weeks versus years have spurred accreditation officials to explore the university’s popular YourPace program.
The probe was launched in April after a Washington Post article raised questions about the competency-based program offerings. The New England Commission of Higher Education asked the University of Maine System to answer questions about YourPace, and next week will review the system’s 20-page response, Commission President Larry Schall said Friday.
The commission has clear policies and procedures and wants to make sure all accredited institutions follow them to ensure degree integrity. That’s what the commission will consider with the UMPI program, according to Schall, who said the university’s accreditation is not at risk.
It’s a routine practice, he said.
“We have the ability to take notice of things in the press and then the commission needs to decide if it is worthy of the commission looking into it further,” Schall said. “In this case, they thought it was.”
Competency-based online education is not new, but its popularity has boomed in recent years. The Presque Isle university first offered it to students in 2017 with 100 students. Today the YourPace total enrollment is 3,553, a tribute to how much the program was needed, President Ray Rice said.
“When the University of Maine at Presque Isle is featured on the front page of the Washington Post for growing enrollment and possibly transforming people’s lives, that’s a pretty good day,” said Sam Warren, the University of Maine System’s chief external and governmental affairs officer.
Warren said the Washington Post story is a little misleading the way it is framed – students earning 120 credits for a bachelor’s degree in a year – but the reality is most of these working adults bring 15 or more years of professional experience and transfer an average of 90 credits.
They aren’t completing four years of college in a year, but completing a year or less of college in that year, she said.
The commission seeks updated information on enrollment trends, analysis of course loads completed by students each semester, student learning and programmatic assessment and program faculty oversight, including their interaction with YourPace students.
The university knew they needed the program back in 2012 to reach thousands of Mainers who started college but never finished, Rice said.
About 8,000 students have come through the YourPace program, and it accounts for the majority of this fall’s enrollment. It grew because it fits the needs of people who are often in professional careers, he said.
Despite the Post’s reporting calling the program’s quality into question, Rice and Warren said YourPace competency-based courses are fully accredited and follow the same learning outcomes and assessment standards as in-person courses.
The fact that traditional full-time faculty design, teach and test the students makes a public university’s competency-based program unique, Rice said.
“There’s no world in which I can view this as a negative because it is actually doing what it was intended to do,” he said. “This incredible growth is a reflection of that success.”
The speed at which students complete their degrees in competency-based education varies because of their experience, Rice said. Someone with 20 years professional work experience will complete the work much faster than an 18-year-old just starting out.
“We have an Amazon executive this semester in the program who has been an Amazon executive for two decades and is working to finish a four-year degree,” Rice said. “That student is in the business program so you can imagine the level of knowledge that person has, and individuals like that are going to move through the program rapidly because they are applying their knowledge.”
Students at all University of Maine System institutions can transfer up to 90 credits for an undergraduate degree. An older student who has taken courses at multiple institutions has accrued a lot of transfer credit.
“There’s nothing magical about the competency program,” Rice said. “That’s the same standard for an on-the-ground program.”
Most YourPace students take about one-third of their 120 credit hours at UMPI.
“We not only have to meet NECHE standards, we have to meet high-level national standards for competency education,” Rice said. “For example, each student has to achieve an excellent or near excellent, an A or a B. The standards they must meet to succeed in these courses are actually higher than standards in a conventional course that includes Cs and Ds.”
