Is there something uncommon happening at Unity Environmental University?

A small liberal arts college decided on a drastic response to decline

When I was writing a previous post about academic calendars, I noticed something. IPEDS lists different categories for calendars like semester, trimester, or quarter system. But they also have an “other academic year” category.

That’s how I discovered Unity Environmental University.

Most of the institutions listed as “other” calendars are familiar online colleges, but Unity was new to me. I wanted to see what was going on there.

Here’s what I found.

This is Unity’s very real campus in New Gloucester, Maine. Less than 5% of its students have ever been here.

Discord at Unity

The institution spent most of its life as Unity College. Founded in 1965, it wasn’t named after a collective virtue but after Unity, Maine, the site of its original campus. Its founding is reminiscent of how many private colleges began; a small town was looking for a way to put itself on the map.

This small beacon of civic pride shuffled along for decades, gradually gaining a reputation for its focus on environmental stewardship. And while those programs and practices were an area of strength, Unity was never a large institution. It managed to keep afloat, barely, with its hundreds of students.

But the writing was on the wall and things were not improving.

By 2016, they began experimenting with online graduate programs. They had about 600 undergraduate students at the time. They also began building online programs for undergraduates.

Then COVID happened.

This is Unity’s very former campus in Unity, Maine. They ditched the town and kept the name.

No turning back

Like many other campuses, Unity moved its classes online in 2020.

Unlike many other campuses, they stayed online.

Instead of returning to campus in the fall of 2020, they kept the institution online and sought to grow their footprint. Unlike many colleges who were focused on how quickly they could return to normal, Unity decided to take this time as an opportunity to reassess its entire model.

The reason I saw Unity listed as having an “other academic calendar” was because in this period, they revisited the idea of the semester. Instead, undergraduates now have eight 5-week terms per year. And instead of all students beginning in August, any undergraduate can enroll at the beginning of any of those eight terms.

This is emblematic of Unity’s “nothing is sacred” approach that brought lots of other changes. They eliminated their entire intercollegiate athletics program. They sold their campus in Unity, Maine and relocated their operation to a working farm in New Gloucester, Maine. And they changed the school’s name from Unity College to Unity Environmental University.

The name change points to something they didn’t change; their topical focus on environmental sustainability. Now, however, it was not just a core value, it was their entire academic mission. The new name wasn’t just good for SEO; it was perfectly descriptive.

Every major at Unity relates to the environment. From Wildlife Conservation to Sustainable Food Technology to Agroforestry, this is an institution where each academic program shares a common interest and common value.

Unity picked their lane. They offer 17 bachelor's degrees and 15 master's degrees online, now enrolling over 8,000 distance education students. In the last decade, their enrollment has grown by 1400%, entirely due to their online programming.

So… why do they still have a campus?

Sometimes it can be helpful to study the environment while in the environment you’re studying

The chosen remnant

95% of Unity’s students only take courses online. So who are the other 5%?

After taking a year off from in-person education in 2020-21, Unity began moving its program to a new campus and started afresh. The 400-odd in-person students at Unity represent the scale of the entire institution before its shift to online-first education. Unlike their distantly educated peers, though, in-person students are limited to five possible majors, each tightly focused on environmental issues.

In-person students are not required to live on campus. This is partly because, in a literal sense, they can’t. The New Gloucester campus which now hosts the institution does not have dorms. Instead, those who chose to live in a dorm share facilities at the University of Southern Maine’s campus in Gorham. They’ll use USM’s dining hall and their gym, but all their coursework will be done with Unity.

Now, some of that coursework will happen online. General education courses happen exclusively online, even for in-person students. It’s impossible to do a fully in-person program at Unity.

They will, however, take their major coursework in person. Though if they’re living in the dorms, they’ll need to travel 22 miles to get to class.

Gorham isn’t exactly next door.

This seems like a lot of trouble for the university to go through when their growth area is all online. So what’s the point?

I am speculating here, but I think there is a difference in perception between “online colleges” and “colleges which offer online programs.”

Online colleges, places like University of Phoenix, are generally perceived to be low-status institutions. They turn into punchlines and are, perhaps unfairly, equated with diploma mills. The fact that many online colleges are for-profit institutions does not help with the perception that they try to gouge people and deliver low-quality instruction.

I suspect that for Unity, it doesn’t matter if this perception is valid. It is worth it for them to maintain in-person programming and their beautifully wooded campus in rural Maine to avoid the haziness of temporal identity that comes with being an online-only program.

In short, it’s nice for students to be associated with a campus, even if they never visit it. It makes the entire enterprise feel more legitimate for everyone involved.

Uniting behind a common cause

So why do students go to Unity?

The simplest answer is that it’s surprisingly cheap. Annual tuition is only $11,000 per year. That’s low even for an in-state public institution and basically unheard of for a private, non-profit.

They can manage this, I think, because of their specificity. They educate their online students at scale and have far fewer fixed costs associated with them. They maintain a small physical footprint with very few student affairs costs since students don’t live on the campus. This means they have a small staff as well.

This extends to instructional staff. Looking at their federal reporting from 2022, they had 300 teaching staff, but only 10% of them were full-time employees. I would assume that they are deeply reliant on part-time instructors for their online coursework with a few supervisory staff. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had more full-time staff working with the 5% of their in-person students than with the 95% of their online students. That reliance on contingent faculty clearly keeps costs down.

And by the way, they do not offer institutional scholarships. So while their tuition is low, they collect all of it.

Unity is succeeding. It is raising its minimum wage for full-time employees (though there aren’t that many of them). It’s freezing tuition. It’s growing.

There’s more I could learn about how they resisted the plight of the small, rural liberal arts college. But what is immediately clear is that they picked a lane.

Colleges that fail often fail because they attempt to appeal to everyone. In so doing, they appeal to no one because they cannot sell themselves as having any distinction. They will continue to spend themselves into infamy by trying to satisfy every possible interest. Eventually, adding programming and offering discounts on tuition catches up to you.

In the past decade, Unity took a hard look at itself and decided it was good at two things: environmental programs and online education. They decided that those were the only two things they were going to do.

Students respond to this. If they are interested in an environmental major, they may be attracted to an institution that explicitly prioritizes those programs. Your environmental interests will never be an afterthought at Unity.

Some niches are more lucrative than others. I’m not sure how universally their experience could be applied, and Unity might just be lucky that it has all came together for the moment.

But if the choice is between taking a big risk on a new path like Unity and a slow decline while preserving tradition, I think the risky path is at least more interesting.

-Matt