University of Maine Chancellor Dannel Malloy. Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald

After several years of unrelievedly negative news coverage, the University of Maine System finally has something to celebrate: a solid 5% increase in enrollment systemwide, with some of the seven campuses showing a real turnaround after years of slow decline.

It would be premature to say Maine’s public universities are on the mend, but not too soon to observe that overdue investments in buildings and maintenance are already paying dividends.

Case in point: Both the Portland and Augusta campuses now have the first residential housing in their 60-year histories. Portland, the second largest campus, has an 19% increase in undergraduate transfers, while Augusta logged an 18% increase in first-year students.

Both campuses began as junior or “commuter” colleges, and at first the lack of housing wasn’t a real problem. But as the cost of undergraduate education began its decades-long rise, USM and UMA weren’t competitive, especially for out-of-state students.

Also scoring notable gains were Farmington, where decaying building have been replaced, and the University of Maine School of Law, which separated from USM and has a new campus on the Portland waterfront.

While gratifying, the turnaround is just a start toward fulfilling the university system’s unrealized potential — and its vital role if Maine is to continue its recent economic gains, and not fall back at the first sign of a national recession.

UMS has been contested ground from the moment it was created in a legislative special session in 1968 — the joint work of a young Democratic governor, Ken Curtis, and two experienced Republican hands, Senate Majority Leader Bennett Katz and House Majority Leader Harrison Richardson.

Curtis called it a “merger” of the University of Maine with the five teacher’s colleges in Gorham, Farmington, Machias, Presque Isle and Fort Kent — Portland and Augusta were new — but it was far from that.

The uneven geographical dispersal led to numerous off-campus centers but only one other new campus, in Lewiston, now affiliated with USM. The early years were marked by attempts to consolidate or relocate some of the seven “universities,” all of which failed.

The bigger problem was funding. Independent Gov. Jim Longley, who succeeded Curtis in 1975, opposed the new system, imposing relentless budget cuts during a period of high inflation.

Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican who served from 2011-19, also tightened the screws, resulting in severe cutbacks at USM, including dismissal of nearly two dozen tenured professors in 2014. Admittedly USM was overextended, but the scale of the decimation of faculty and programs is still felt a decade later.

Democrat Janet Mills hasn’t attempted to shrink the system’s budget, but she hasn’t been generous. At a time when the state has pumped record funding into its K-12 programs and the seven community colleges, the university system has barely stayed abreast of inflation.

Mills made it clear from the outset that funding Maine’s public universities wasn’t a top priority.

The University of Maine and especially its graduate programs has been thriving, mostly due to a large influx of federal research funding — direct grants, rather than the open-ended pandemic aid that flowed so freely and boosted other public educational programs.

So Maine still faces a crossroads. The state’s persistent underdevelopment, which lags New England in income and many quality-of-life indicators despite abundant natural resources, could be reversed if government and the private sector would back its “quality of place” with university support amid burgeoning remote work, detached from physical offices.

There’s no guarantee it will do so, but it’s hard to see any other means of competing successfully with Maine’s peer states. Private investment can follow public investment — but only if the governor and Legislature are willing to think long-term.

Instead, university leaders have until recently been plugging budget gaps and shifting funding around, though given the lack of any real increase in state appropriations can hardly be faulted.

Under the leadership of Chancellor Dannel Malloy, that’s finally begun to change. In addition to new dorms and a child care center, Farmington is selling surplus buildings it wasn’t likely to use.

In Orono, while some historic buildings were given new life, others were so decrepit that renovation was beyond the campus’ budget capabilities. One will be renovated by private investment as an on-campus hotel — a big asset since parent tours are essential to attracting out-of-state students.

The system now has nearly 20,000 undergraduate and about 5,000 graduate students. It should be more, but that will take continued long-term thinking, and a new governor as committed to its mission as the founders were.

It’s not the most popular cause at the Legislature and may never be, yet there’s no other state program likely to yield a better return on investment.