Here’s the bottom line right up top: Maine, awash in a $300 million revenue surplus, owes some big debts. It owes its high school graduates the opportunity to go to college. It owes its younger students and their communities better support for local education. It owes itself a future.

That’s why the Legislature, if it does nothing else this session, must enact Rep. Elizabeth Mitchell’s Maine First Scholars Program and it must increase state aid to schools by at least 7 percent. Only by clearing up the first two debts does Maine have a shot at the third.

It is terribly unfortunate that the debate on the House speaker’s college-aid proposal has degenerated into an argument on whether Maine is in the lower-low or the lower-middle tier of states sending their high school grads to college. In an economy that increasingly is driven by technology, that is downsizing and restructuring away the good-paying factory jobs for those with freshly printed high school diplomas, 50 percent simply isn’t good enough.

Mitchell’s proposal is not a giveaway, it does not lower the standards for college admission. The grants, up to $3,600 on a needs-based sliding scale, for the first year’s tuition at an in-state college or technical school, still require financial commitments by the students and their families. The students have to do well the first semester to go to the second. And if they do well the second, they are much more likely to do what it takes to finish.

Half of the Maine students who do go to college go out-of-state. Not because other schools are better, but because they offer better financial aid packages. Maine ranks dead last, that’s 50th, in the percentage of low-income Pell grant students who stay in state. Thus, Maine is sending away its most highly motivated students, those who overcame substantial obstacles to excell in high school, those most likely to be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow. And it probably won’t get them back. This brain drain is a guarantee of economic disaster and it must be stopped.

College graduates earn roughly $15,000 a year more than high school graduates, about $650,000 more during their working lives. That doubles to $1.3 million if you factor in those who go on to post-graduate degrees. All of which makes the $14 million Mitchell’s plan requires a pittance, a small outlay for a big return. The $3,600 investment per student would be repaid in just a couple of income-tax filings. Maine ranks last in New England in the percentage of population with college degrees. It ranks last in New England in household income. Do the math, connect the cause with the effect.

The local share

When Maine’s economy went into a major swoon in the early part of this decade, the Legislature responded, understandably, by cutting. While just about every function of government was touched, General Purpose Aid to local schools was hit hard. It was an easy target — lawmakers knew full well local property taxpayers would take up the slack. In the last eight years, some $500 million was sliced from GPA and dumped on the communities.

When the biennial budget was passed last spring with a meager 3 percent increase in GPA, lawmakers did not know the state was soon to be flooded with surplus. Now they know, and 3 percent is not enough.

Neither is the 5 percent Republican leadership favors, or the 6 percent backed by Democrat leaders. The 7 percent backed by the Education Committee, a $22 million increase over what was approved last spring, is affordable and is the bare minimum that should be considered.

The surplus, remember, was not created out of thin air. It was created by Maine taxpayers. It’s their money and they should get it back where it will do the most good.

Perhaps the most disastrous result of the cuts in GPA is what it has done to the relationship between local property owners and local education. Given that the property owner’s best hope for relief is a growing local economy and the best hope for that is a well-educated workforce, the two parties should be allies. Instead, the Legislature, through its policy of generous cuts in the bad times and stingy increases in the good, has turned them into enemies — tightwad taxpayers vs. spendthrift schools. Augusta created the sour mood prevalent at town meeting. Now it must add the sweetener.

If the glass-half-empty crowd is right and the roaring revenue stream dries up, if GPA has to be cut again, so what? At least local schools will have had a year or two to catch up on programs, repairs and maintenance that have fallen behind.

These two issues of K-12 support and access to college are inextricably linked — Maine’s economic fate depends upon its willingness to prepare its kids for college and then to get them there. Unfortunately, the message those kids are getting from the current debate is that local schools are a local burden and that college is only for those who can afford it. They deserve better. The Legislature owes it to them.