This opinion editorial by UMPI President Raymond Rice appeared in Inside Higher Ed on 7/17/26.
Higher education has to rebuild public trust. That much is evident, and many of the ideas to address this challenge are coming out of our country’s wealthiest and most selective institutions. By contrast, the developing conversation about trust in higher education has not yet fully included the perspectives of the regional public institutions that serve as the backbone of the American higher education system.
I lead one of those institutions. The University of Maine at Presque Isle is physically located in Aroostook County, the northernmost county in Maine, where the median household income is $56,700. For more than a century, UMPI served our communities as a primarily residential institution with deep roots in teacher education, the liberal arts and the professional preparation of first-generation students. Our mission, to provide affordable and accessible education, remains unchanged. In 2017, we built YourPace, a new pathway to deliver on it.
A competency-based online education program, YourPace is designed to be truly affordable through a fundamentally different cost structure, one built around competency demonstration rather than credit-hour accumulation, around mastery rather than seat time, around what a student can show rather than how much time they spent in a physical classroom. The financial incentive is thus aligned with the educational one: The sooner a student can demonstrate mastery, the less the degree costs.
The standard objection to competency-based education is that mastery-based completion must come at the expense of rigor. But the data says otherwise. To receive competency credit, a student must achieve “near excellent” or “excellent” on every line of the rubric. Every competency in this program is designed and assessed by faculty, who hold learners accountable to standards that do not differ from those of our traditionally taught programs. Moreover, our accreditor, the New England Commission of Higher Education, has reviewed our programming through five formal actions over seven years and granted UMPI general approval to develop new CBE programs at institutional discretion. Our program thus meets all formal and traditional definitions of rigor.
I raise the rigor issue because recent discussions have focused primarily on the pace at which some students complete their degrees, rather than on what those students demonstrated. This concern has merit only if one accepts the premise that time is the measure of learning. But that premise is precisely what competency-based education contests. When a working adult with 15 or more years of professional experience and significant prior coursework demonstrates mastery against a faculty-designed rubric, the relevant question is not how long it took but whether the mastery is real. Speed is a student-level variable; rigor is a program-level constant. Conflating the two is the assumption that most needs to be examined.
There is a more fundamental point about mastery-based completion. At least 43 million Americans who started college but never finished are not underserved because they moved too quickly. They are underserved because the traditional model often moved too slowly, cost too much and offered too little flexibility for the lives they were living. When our graduates complete the degrees they’ve already spent years working toward in months rather than years, they are not taking a shortcut. Their success is evidence that the conventions of the traditional timeline, however well intentioned, should not be the measure by which we judge whether learning has occurred.
The case for providing alternative pathways through higher education only grows more urgent. This spring, Jeffrey Selingo argued in The Atlantic that the demographic cliff bearing down on American higher education will produce an enrollment death spiral at many regional institutions: Campuses will close, students will fail to find a college local to them to attend and higher education will become a luxury good accessible only to the affluent and the upwardly mobile.
Selingo’s analysis could not be more sobering. But his framework relies upon the assumption of the traditional-age, place-bound student as the primary consumer of higher education. He does not ask what happens when a regional institution reimagines whom it serves. UMPI is now a dual-identity institution: a residential liberal arts campus and a national competency education provider, with shared faculty, shared governance and shared standards. Our growth has not come from competing for a shrinking pool of 18-year-olds. It has come from reaching the millions of working adults who left the traditional pipeline while maintaining the residential campus that serves exactly the local, traditional-age students whose loss Selingo fears. The death spiral is not a law of nature. It is the consequence of a failure of structural imagination.
In a 2024 essay for The Atlantic, Dartmouth College President Sian Leah Beilock invokes Solomon Asch’s psychological studies on conformity from the 1950s to argue that it takes only a single well-informed dissenter to break the conformist mindset. She then applies this insight to the pressure placed on students and faculty to suppress views that deviate from campus orthodoxy. I would argue that the most consequential conformity in American higher education isn’t ideological—it’s structural. It’s the assumption that the best education is residential, takes four years and is organized around credit hours. That assumption has eroded public trust more than any other controversy, because it has made higher education unaffordable, inaccessible and inflexible for far too many Americans.
The dissent that matters most right now is over what we charge, how we measure learning and whom we are willing to serve. Until higher education is willing to recognize multiple pathways to its credentials, and to judge those pathways by the learning they produce rather than the conventions they preserve, it will struggle to serve the millions of Americans who started college yet were never able to finish.
Raymond J. Rice is president of the University of Maine at Presque Isle, where he oversees both a residential liberal arts campus and YourPace, a competency-based degree-completion program. He holds a doctorate in English.