Harvesting opportunity

CHENEY — As a child of 7 or 8, Rodolfo Arévalo worked the orchards in the Walla Walla and Yakima valleys with his parents, who were migrant workers.

"I remember eating more fruit than I picked," Arévalo says. These days, the president of Eastern Washington University toils in his airy, regally wood-paneled office in historic Showalter Hall.

He is engaged in a different harvest now, the kind of opportunity for EWU students that education afforded him.

Arévalo is a first-generation college graduate, like the majority of Eastern's students aspire to be. About 55 percent of its graduates are the first in their families to get a college degree.

"It is very easy to help someone whose parents are doctors," said Arévalo. "But if we take a student whose parents are on welfare and turn them into an engineer, you've changed the family 360 degrees."

A college degree can shift whole families' fortunes and senses of the possible. A Washington resident with a high-school diploma earns an annual income of $20,000. Get a bachelor's degree and you add about $15,000 to your W-2, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Washington state has a mismatch of opportunity with a high-tech economy and a disturbingly undertapped reservoir of potential in its own young people. Per capita, Washington ranks 11th among all states for adults ages 25-64 with college degrees, according to the Higher Education Coordinating Board (Puget Sound ranks third among metropolitan areas.) But on the other side, the state ranks only 37th for production of bachelor's degrees.

It doesn't take a WASL math test writer to figure out the discrepancy: Washington's high-tech and industrious opportunities are attracting people from elsewhere to come to take our highest-paying jobs because we don't have enough homegrown graduates to take them.

"If we don't prepare students and have strategies for bringing them through the system, our kids are going to be in the service jobs," said Karen Morse, president of Western Washington University in Bellingham. "They're not going to be in the quality-of-life jobs or the leadership jobs."

That concern is embedded in Gov. Christine Gregoire's Washington Learns report: "To be competitive in the global economy, we must educate more people to achieve at higher levels. Put simply, we must educate all our students to a level that makes them competitive worldwide."

Wisely, that means finding ways to keep college affordable, getting more people to take advantage, while maintaining the quality of the state's higher-education system.

One of the governor's proposals is to promise disadvantaged seventh- and eighth-graders a paid-for education at a state college if they graduate high school with at least a C average and no felony convictions. Many of those students already would qualify for the state's needs-grant program anyway, so the Washington Learns Scholarship would fill in the rest.

This is the power of a promise — suddenly, a 12-year-old has the chance at a different future, an incentive to study and stay in school. See how many will take it.

The governor also wants to freeze community-college tuition for two years — that's the eye of the higher-education needle for many financially strapped people — and expand programs for worker training at vocations that fit industry's needs.

These efforts will require money that other interests want. But this is not a give-away, it is an investment in Washington's people — one that will pay dividends in a more-competitive state and a more-competitive, better-paid work force.

The governor should know the power of this. The daughter of a single mother, she received financial aid to go to college. So did Arévalo and Sen. Patty Murray.

On Congress' opening day, the senator made a floor speech urging her colleagues to reverse a trend and reinvest in Pell grants and student loans to help make college more affordable. That's how Murray stayed in school, after her father was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and her homemaker mother had to get a job to support her family, including seven children.

"I wouldn't be standing here today as a United States senator if I hadn't had access to student loans and grants myself," Murray said.

That's the power of an investment.

Kate Riley's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is kriley@seattletimes.com