What is the Blue Sky Project?
Depending on who you ask, you could get a variety of different answers. But regardless of how much you know about it, the Blue Sky Project has the ability to bring the University of Maine back on solid footing and help it gain national prominence; or, if implemented poorly, it could set the university back even further than it was before any sort of strategic mission was established.
“One of the things that really struck me at the University of Maine were these little pockets of excellence, whether alumni, students or faculty. But what wasn’t there was an organized focus that was really moving together,” said UMaine President Paul Ferguson. “I knew early on that we needed to get people together. We had to figure out how to get everyone on the same page.”
Ferguson’s arrival at UMaine marks the start of the Blue Sky Project: He was appointed by the board of trustees on March 14, 2011, and his Blue Sky Project was unveiled in July of 2012.
“Many people have suggested that it is my baby,” Ferguson said with a laugh. “Any new president that comes into the institution needs to take a hard look at where everything is. The actual strategic plan for the university [before Blue Sky] was over in 2011. It became a very good opportunity to say, ‘Do we need a new one, and how do we do it?’ A lot of people felt strongly that it was time for a new plan, but no one really wanted to do a new plan.
“I think as a new president you’re looking for any opportunity to bring the constituencies together,” Ferguson continued. “It evolved to a process that we wanted to have a strategic plan, but we wanted it to be different. We got together a strong planning team from across the campus, and from them evolved what is the Blue Sky Plan.”
The Blue Sky Project is a multifaceted five-year plan, with overarching goals of increasing enrollment to 15,000 by 2017, restructuring operating efficiencies as well as marketing and communications, refreshing the UMaine brand and improving camaraderie, increasing fellowships, assistantships and internships to increase networking opportunities, and restoring and enhancing UMaine’s physical representation by addressing cosmetic and maintenance needs across the campus.
“The most important difference is, [the Blue Sky Project] is a consensus-based plan that has the input of all constituencies,” Ferguson said. “This really dug into the university psyche.”
Blue Sky implementation
With so much promise and hope in the Blue Sky Project, there’s a sort of “sitting on needles” feeling as the implementation slowly gains speed.
“It’s that anticipation of this could really be a game changer,” said Brianna Hughes, a Ph.D. student of food sciences at UMaine. “I think things that come out of this Blue Sky Plan can achieve that in a way that can’t be achieved at the state, but I don’t think the culture [here] has accepted this yet. People are waiting and seeing.”
It’s that culture of acceptance that Hughes, the graduate representative to the Blue Sky Project and the board of trustees, sees as the plan’s biggest challenge in changing the overall feeling of UMaine.
“I talk to people all the time, and they don’t know what the Blue Sky Project is,” Hughes said. “I don’t think there’s a lot of people using the [UMaine] website and seeing this information. We need to get the students excited about this.
“It’s hard too, because some of it is in the planning stage, so it’s not like we can unveil something and get everyone excited,” she added.
Ferguson sees this dilemma and is stressing patience to help the process along.
“I think the challenge for any successful project like this is to manage expectations,” he said. “There’s no pushback, but there’s always impatience. You have to finish the first year to figure out where you’re going for the second year.”
But the overriding sentiment is that the majority of the student population knows of the Blue Sky Project, but they don’t exactly know what it is, or what it does.
“That is something that has been a huge problem for me, representing the graduate student body, is we’re predominantly masters students, who are here for two years,” Hughes said. “We’re not typically getting involved in things like this.”
To help counter that, a web page under Ferguson’s section of the UMaine website has beendedicated to tracking the various developments in the five pathways.
“This is probably the other aspect that is unique to the plan: Anyone can go to the pathway they’re interested in and see where those particular initiatives are,” Ferguson said. “We really are committed to our constituencies to show the progress.”
Yet almost one year into the project, students, alumni, business owners and other prominent people around the state still have little understanding of the mission.
“There are a lot of people in the state who aren’t aware of everything we have here,” Hughes said. “That’s a marketing issue we’re trying to address.”
Rebranding UMaine
One of the first things done in fall of 2012 was to realign UMaine’s marketing and communications department to better represent the entire university. On Nov. 7, constituents from all parts of UMaine converged to Wells Conference Center and discussed the revamping of UMaine’s brand. The summit helped to realign all of UMaine’s various departments and organizations under one umbrella logo and to provide a platform for how Ferguson would like to carry out the Blue Sky Project.
“If there was one No. 1 thing we heard in developing this plan was that marketing and communications was a huge issue,” Ferguson said. “People felt we weren’t organized to market the university well, that we weren’t doing our jobs. That’s why the communicators’ summit was right out of the chute.
“It was the first foray into how the Blue Sky Project would be implemented,” he continued. “We’d be doing this together. This was the first time people felt a part of the university and felt like they were serving the university.”
This rebranding of marketing the university has helped increase the number of out-of-state applicants for the first time in a number of years — yet still below comparable state universities.
“When I came, 18 percent of the student body was out of state. That’s way too low to be competitive,” Ferguson said. “We’re up to 20 percent now, which allows us to be more financially sustainable.”
Increased marketing doesn’t just help with an increase in enrollment. Hughes sees a scenario where a more marketable UMaine means more internship and assistantship opportunities.
“I think UMaine, historically, has never tapped into the alumni potential that’s out there,” Hughes said. “We have very poor records. I anticipate a lot of the fundraising coming through alumni and business relationships.”
However, the largest benefit from increased marketing would be an increase in enrollment, which is one of the top components of the Blue Sky Project: to bring UMaine’s undergraduate enrollment up to 15,000 by 2017. To help combat the challenge, the university added a new position: vice president for enrollment management.
“‘Enrollment management’ were dirty words”
On July 1, 2012, Jimmy Jung was named UMaine’s vice president for enrollment management — a new position set to tackle the double-edged sword of decreasing in-state applicants and competition for other out-of-state students.
“UMaine realized they needed a position like this to look at things from an analytical point of view and really get a plan in place and basically be more competitive in this market,” Jung said. “We’re not going to out-of-state students simply for the revenue. There is a decline in students in Maine. We need to fill that gap.”
Ferguson said that the addition of a enrollment management position was a necessity, indicating how the landscape of higher education has changed during his career.
“When I was starting my academic career, the concept of enrollment management was non-existent. Now, having a VP for enrollment management is a must,” Ferguson said. “The enrollment management function is to have a sophisticated recruitment strategy and then a sophisticated retention strategy for advising and the process of retaining our students.”
Jung was the assistant vice president for enrollment management at the College at Brockport before coming to UMaine. He worked in a similar capacity at Fordham University. Upon taking the job here, Jung asked various colleagues about UMaine. From their response, he sensed the university had a problem.
“I’d ask and they’d say, ‘Oh, they’re like the baby brother of the land grants. You don’t hear about them that much,’” Jung said. “Just from that, I got the sense that, ‘Hey, it could be a lot more.’
“One of the major reasons I came here was because of this challenge,” Jung added. “If you think about public institutions, 10 years ago ‘enrollment management’ were dirty words.”
To start, Jung focused on the students right in UMaine’s backyard, targeting those in state.
“The fact is, there is no better time for a Maine student to go to one of its state public universities, but I don’t think we ever had that conversation on how to make it more appealing to come to UMaine,” Jung said. “Value is the combination of cost plus academic excellence and [UMaine] has that, but I don’t think UMaine has ever said that to Maine or to the rest of New England. That was one of the big missions I had this year.”
Secondly, Jung wanted to target surrounding states that didn’t have as much of a decline in incoming college students as Maine did.
“Maine is 43rd in demographics, New Hampshire is 44th, Rhode Island is 45th and Vermont is dead last,” Jung said. “We broke 8,000 applicants last year, which is a measure of interest. UNH had 17,000, URI had 19,000 and Vermont had 24,000, just for some perspective.
“We didn’t communicate with the students in New England that well,” he added. “We weren’t really following up — there was no strategy.”
While it’s still early, there has been a slight movement of the applicant needle in UMaine’s favor.
“Our first big push out was we increased our out-of-state applicants by 1,200,” Jung said. “We’ll be over 9,000 applicants for the first time and that 1,000-applicant growth is rare for so early.”
To help focus where UMaine should recruit, Jung built statistical analysis programs to show where perspective UMaine students usually come from.
“[The characteristics of UMaine students are] they have taken some [Advanced Placement] level classes; their high school is usually in the suburbs; there’s some diversity, but not much; and the size of the school is medium to large [500 to 800 students],” Jung said.
In the first year, Jung said they focused on mainly three states — California, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
“You take a look at where they are coming from, in terms of enrollment, when we weren’t advertising to anyone,” Jung said. “So we looked at Pennsylvania and Maryland: two places where we have a high yield of students, but we’ve never marketed to that area.”
Jung said a large number of applicants come in from California, but the commitment from those students is slightly less than the rest of out of staters.
“If we admit 10 students from California, only about one shows up,” Jung said. “In-state enrollment is about four of every 10 students enroll, while out of state it’s a little under two of every 10 students. The yield is 17 percent.”
These few ideas of rebranding UMaine, marketing to alumni and surrounding businesses and expanding undergraduate recruitment are just three components the Blue Sky Project hopes to rectify.
“UMaine had never had a clear message,” Ferguson said. “We’ve seen a new aligning and new identity in terms of the university.”