Unity Environmental University celebrates largest graduating class ever with Neil deGrasse Tyson
May 21—NEW GLOUCESTER — Once a small college struggling with declining enrollment, Unity Environmental University is bringing in astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson as its commencement speaker to help graduate its largest-ever class this Friday.
The president of Unity Environmental University, formerly Unity College, says the school has evolved in response to the challenges of higher education and its 10,000-person student body is now mostly online.
"Our purpose at Unity is to offer quality environmental science and sustainability-based degrees, for everything from traditional students to working adults, so they can make an impact where they are," President Melik Peter Khoury said in an interview Wednesday at the school's new campus at Pineland Farms in New Gloucester. "But anything else is basically a construct."
Unity is now the second-largest university in the state based on enrollment, behind only the flagship public University of Maine with 12,000 students as of this fall. On Friday, more than 1,000 students will graduate with bachelor's and master's degrees in environmental fields; about 200 are expected to walk in-person at Merrill Auditorium in Portland, joined by more than 1,000 guests.
Tyson, the famed astrophysicist and science communicator, is just the latest in a line of notable commencement speakers: Khoury said primatologist Jane Goodall and the zookeeper TV star Steve Irwin have both given the address in the past.
"With this invitation from Unity Environmental University, I am reminded that some institutions of higher learning have taken the shepherding of our precious Earth seriously enough to embed it into everything they preach and everything they teach," Tyson said in an announcement from the university.
TRANCENDING TRADITION
More than a decade ago, Khoury said, Unity's board of trustees took a look at the college's problem of declining enrollment, which was below 600 students in 2012. Their conclusion was that environmental science degrees were in demand, but often too expensive or exclusive for most of the students interested in them.
"I was brought in to try to figure out, how do we transform the institution to really become a little bit more accessible," Khoury said. "So our mission transcends tradition."
The school began experimenting in 2016 with institutional changes, like adding hybrid programs and graduate degrees. Then, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Khoury said, the university made the decision to close its residential undergraduate college in 2020.
The school relocated administrative operations to Pineland Farms, where it offers in-person classes to about 200 students, and put its 225-acre campus in Unity up for sale in 2023. The institution changed its name that same year.
Now, the vast majority of students, 800 graduate students and 9,200 undergrads, complete their degrees online. Rather than studying in semesters, the academic year is divided into eight terms, which Khoury said helps with retention and graduation rates, because students don't fall far behind when they need to take time off.
Angelica De Hoyos and Javier Montanez, a married couple from southern New Jersey, are both graduating with a master's of professional science in environmental geographic information science on Friday.
De Hoyos is a surveyor with the Army Corp of Engineers, and Montanez is a supervisor at the Atlantic City International Airport who got his bachelor's degree at Unity. They also have two kids, a 10-year-old and 6-year-old. When they decided to go to grad school, they said Unity's flexible and remote programs made sense.
"With two full time jobs, barely having time to actually spend with the kids in the afternoon and evening, we decided that distance learning was the best fit for us," De Hoyos said.
Montanez is hoping the degree will open the door to new professional opportunities that allow him to use his passion for the environment, and De Hoyos said she was motivated by her constant desire to learn and her industry's move toward using more GIS technology.
She also wanted to show her kids that at any point in life, they can chase a new goal. When they drive eight hours to Maine to walk across the stage at Merrill Auditorium Friday, it will be their second time ever visiting the state.
NON-TRADITIONAL CHANGES
Khoury said Unity's transition hasn't been without difficulty and has involved trial and error. Many alumni and former faculty criticized the decision to eliminate the traditional campus.
But while small residential environmental colleges like Green Mountain College in Vermont and Northland College in Wisconsin have shuttered in recent years, he said Unity has a graduating class this year that's larger than the school's entire population was when he first started in 2016.
He believes American higher education is still stuck on a vision of college as an experience that involves four years of full-time commitment and living on campus. But he said that just doesn't match the reality of who wants degrees: often it's adult students with full-time jobs, sometimes with children. The average age of a current Unity student is 29.
"Are we confounding an American coming-of-age experience with the need for for education?" Khoury said. "I think we need to uncouple those two, and we need to look at one for what it is, which is: How do we want to transition our young adults into adulthood? And then we need to look at the other one as: How do we get people educated, no matter where they are in life?"
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