Dear YourPace students,
You may have seen this weekend’s Washington Post article on accelerated degree programs, which features UMPI and YourPace prominently. While receiving this kind of attention underscores the significance of our program within the national higher education landscape, I understand that it also may raise questions about the meaning and legitimacy of the degrees that programs like ours award. I want to write briefly to say what I hope you already know, but which deserves saying directly.
The degree you are earning–or have already earned–is both real and rigorous. YourPace is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE), the same body that accredits every university in the University of Maine System and many of the most respected institutions in the country. For every competency you have completed, you were only able to do so because you demonstrated mastery of that competency, assessed against rubric standards that require “near excellent” or “excellent” on every line, precisely as required by NECHE. That is the point of competency-based education, and it has been the point since we built this program: the measure of your learning is what you can show, not how long you have been expected to sit in a classroom.
At its heart, what the article captures is something I hope you feel as well–that YourPace serves students for whom traditional pathways have not worked, and that it does so at a cost that makes a college credential genuinely accessible rather than aspirational. And that is absolutely a mission worth defending.
So, to all of you, we say: Keep going. The work you are doing is real, and, as a campus, we are so proud of the doors it is helping you open.
