Editorials / Opinion

ON the surface, we Washingtonians look like fairly educated people. Our wheat farmers in the Palouse pack more computers and satellite connections into their tractors than a spacecraft. College-trained experts tend orchards in Wenatchee and vineyards in Walla Walla. Legions of engineers invent and build new products for our cutting-edge employers like Microsoft, Boeing and hundreds of other enterprises.

But that's not the whole picture. Under that veneer we Washingtonians are among the less-educated Americans. We're strikingly less educated than our competitors in many countries. We live on imported talent. A Google executive tells me the company has more Russian engineers working in Seattle than in Moscow.

While Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, Costco and hundreds of other talent-hungry employers are hiring the world's most creative workforce, big swaths of our lower-income citizens are left behind, undereducated, and underemployed — economic anchors, not engines.

As a state, it is time to choose our future. Either we decide to get more educated or we'll soon find ourselves sliding into the second tier. If our strong businesses, skilled talent and high-paying jobs move to more educated climates, we'll be not much more than a nice place to visit.

How do we turn this around? Thankfully, we already have the best-performing university system in the country and a network of 34 community and technical colleges delivering high-quality, low-cost studies in every corner of the state.

To start, we legislators must change our budget strategy. For several years we've drained hundreds of millions in state support from our schools, transferring the education burden to student tuition. These are hard times; all budgets must be cut. But we must use the knife a little more evenly. Higher education should not take more than its fair share of cuts.

Let's be clear: The real problem here is deeper than our legislative budget troubles. It is an "us" problem. In the education department we've let ourselves slip. Education is our ladder out of this economic hole, the ladder to our future. We have to decide to use it.

How do we use that ladder? With a little bit of money and a whole lot of innovation we can make that ladder about a million students wider at the bottom and a million graduates higher at the top.

Yes, I said millions. There are easily a million working Washingtonians who could move up the career ladder by finishing a bachelor's degree or updating a couple of university classes. Our university innovators can take the university to them online and in their workplace.

Another million Washingtonians are hungry to climb that ladder but are not ready for prime time in a classroom. Here is where our community colleges can shine. Innovations in "dev-ed" — developmental or remedial education — can open up a college education to all those folks stuck in dead-end jobs.

Added together, these innovations could put many more students on the path to much less expensive degrees and our whole state on the path to long-term success.

We need a lot more educated people and we need them fast. Now is the time for all of us, legislators and citizens, Republicans and Democrats, to decide that investing in our colleges, universities and, most important, our students, is our ticket out of this economic slump and the best medicine for an ailing economy.