Imagine a fully-accredited environmental studies program where as many as two hundred college students, faculty and graduate students would spend the academic year using the Island as a science laboratory and boosting the off-season economy with a meal plan supported by local restaurants.

A pilot project with those estimable objectives is now on the drawing board for next year. One important detail: it’s happening on Nantucket.

The University of Massachusetts at Boston, which already offers summer classes at a field station it operates off Polpis Road, has teamed up with the Nantucket Conservation Foundation and ReMain Nantucket to expand the program, which would also open up new opportunities for residents to enroll in classes. To test the concept, the plan is to do a pilot with twenty or so students during the winter semester in 2013. A full story about the pilot project appears in a recent edition of the Inquirer and Mirror, Nantucket’s excellent weekly newspaper.

We don’t underestimate the work involved in getting such a project underway. Since the decline of the Nathan Mayhew Seminars, once the center of Island intellectual life, the Vineyard has struggled to offer post-graduate opportunities off season. ACE MV, the Island’s adult and continuing education program, offers some excellent classes, but lacks a formal partnership with a major university that would enable students to earn college credit.

But it is ironic, after a summer of world-class lectures, films and arts events, that the Vineyard — larger in every way than its sister island — can’t find a creative way to team up with one or more academic institutions to develop a higher education plan that takes advantage of our many assets.

Perhaps we can learn something from Nantucket.