The program’s flexibility is a big draw for students, who can pay a flat tuition rate for as many courses as they can fit into eight-week sessions.
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Scrutiny is mounting at the University of Maine at Presque Isle for its online “YourPace” program, which has allowed some students to finish their degrees in less than a year.
Rapid growth over the past few years and critical media coverage of students speed-running their degree programs has raised questions about quality assurance for UMPI’s accreditor, the New England Commission of Higher Education. Last month, NECHE informed UMPI and University of Maine system officials that it will need commission approval to add new offerings or locations. That restriction applies only to competency-based education programs, such as YourPace.
“We were concerned about the practices and wanted to have clarity about exactly what was happening,” NECHE President Larry Schall told Inside Higher Ed. “And they’ve experienced rapid growth in those programs, so when we see institutions experience dramatic, rapid growth in anything, it does trigger a review to understand where that rapid growth is coming from.”
NECHE officials requested a report from UMPI on the program’s faculty-to-student ratios, the number and sources of transfer credits, how rapidly students are completing degree programs, and how the university verifies that students complete their coursework. NECHE is also planning site visits to UMPI and the Universities of Maine at Farmington and Fort Kent, which both partner with UMPI to offer degrees through the YourPace program.
The scrutiny comes as NECHE is reconsidering its own policies on competency-based education. The review raises broader questions about how accreditors can uphold academic quality while encouraging innovation.
But Maine officials are standing by the YourPace program.
System officials wrote last month that NECHE “affirmed the academic quality of a fast-growing degree completion program delivered online” at UMPI, which, it said, “has improved the earnings and employability of more than 12,500 adults since it launched less than a decade ago.”
UMPI President Raymond Rice also told Inside Higher Ed that he is confident about the review. Rice defended the program as a necessary innovation to accommodate the sizable “some college, no degree” population that higher education has long struggled to serve. Rice argued that in addition to meeting student needs, UMPI is also helping fill gaps in the state’s workforce. That effort, he said, was the impetus that led UMPI to launch the online YourPace program in 2017.
“We’re the oldest state in the nation. We realized that the [baby] boomers were about to retire, and we were going to have a credential cliff on top of the demographic cliff, because as those people retired, we didn’t have enough people with credentials to replace them,” Rice said.
Since then the program has grown rapidly, from about 100 students in 2017 to roughly 4,000. Rice attributes that growth to the need for flexible options for adult learners, many of whom bring significant transfer credits and industry experience with them and are looking to finish a degree that has stalled at some point due to work, family or other obligations.
Much of the growth in recent years has come from outside the state. (Only 12.5 percent of students in the program were Maine residents, according to a fall 2025 enrollment report released by the system.) Rice said he hears from online learners that flexibility is what drives them to enroll in the program, which allows students to pay a flat tuition rate for as many courses as they can fit into eight-week sessions. Courses are also delivered asynchronously, which enables students to control their own schedules.
As a competency-based program, YourPace allows students to advance by demonstrating mastery of specific skills rather than spending a prescribed amount of time in a course, which means those who understand the material can move ahead quickly, making it an attractive option for professionals who have logged years in an industry but don’t have the credentials to show for it.
“Most of them are people that have worked for at least 10 years and often have 60 to 90 transfer credits from multiple institutions or military education credit, et cetera,” Rice said.
Which credits UMPI accepts is also a point of controversy. Media coverage earlier this year noted concerns about the quality of courses being offered by entities such as Study.com and Sophia; UMPI accepts transfer credits from both platforms. But Rice noted that both are entities that offer courses recommended for college credit by the American Council on Education. (While ACE recommends colleges award credit for those courses, practices vary by institution.)
Still, Rice said, UMPI is evaluating its transfer credit policies as well as the other issues NECHE has ordered it to consider for a report due before it appears before the commission in April. However, the rules governing competency-based programs like YourPace may change by that time.
Schall noted that NECHE is also currently weighing policy changes.
“We’re in the process of reviewing our own practices and policies to ensure the integrity of the degree, and we hope to have those in place early in 2027. When Maine comes in front of us in April, they will need to be in compliance, not just with our current policies, but our new policies,” Schall said.
He added that it is too soon to preview potential changes, which the commission will still have to vote on and send to members for comment before finalizing. Part of the goal of the review is to consider the balance between innovation and quality assurance, he noted. While NECHE doesn’t want to “to thwart innovation,” he said, it aims “to make sure that any practice—whether it’s an old practice or an innovative practice—has integrity behind it and thoroughness behind it.”
Charla Long, president of the Competency-Based Education Network, told Inside Higher Ed that as colleges and accreditors grapple with the tension between innovation and quality assurance, the focus should be on proving what students learned. For her, how fast a student can move through a competency-based program doesn’t matter. Long believes the focus for CBE programs should be on clear, thoughtful assessment practices coupled with meaningful faculty engagement and an institutional commitment to the program.
In her view, mastery of skills matters far more than the time element.
“It all comes down to how do I validate that this student knows and can do the things we say they do,” she said. “What does my assessment look like? We would say that assessment needs to mirror as closely as possible what the application of that skill looks like postgraduation.”
