Legislators this week are scheduled to consider a higher-education bill that is important to everyone in Maine, even if their school years are decades behind them. The bill sets out to change how the state treats scholarship funding for its public universities and would establish a more meaningful way for alumni to help their schools.

LD 2061 lets alumni decide whether the educations they received from the University of Maine System, technical-college system and Maine Maritime Academy were worth something. The bill authorizes the state to match up to $14 million annually donations made by alumni and other contributors. The money will be spent if members of the public believe in the institutions — alumni vote with their checkbooks.

The cost of this bill is a one-time expense but, through the miracle of matching money and prudent investment, could fund 1,000 scholarships annually forever. It’s a permanent legacy to higher education in Maine, a state that sends only half of its high-school students on to further education. Proposed by the University of Maine Foundation, the bill is one of a few essential steps the Legislature can take this session to start rebuilding and keeping an educated workforce in the state.

Maine should begin a far more aggressive scholarship fund not only because it will help local students and improve the state’s climate for well-paid work but because other states have invested in similar programs. Maine already loses a higher percentage of scholarship students to schools beyond its borders than any other state. The public-private matching funds have been popular in the South since the mid-1980s, and came to New England a few years ago. Connecticut was the first to try, and now raises more than $10 million annually through this source. Massachusetts received more than $23 million after it began a matching program last year.

Maine has both the one-time money to make a committment to its future and, for a little while longer, unfortunately, the option of continuing to fall behind other states, continuing to let its best leave and not come back, continuing to pretend that its children can get by without competitive educations. It can take the role of the sad cousin who never seems to get ahead. Or it can invest now and change the course of the state’s history.

It can make private donations grow in a way that before was not possible, then take good students who have the brains but not the bucks to succeed in college and begin shaping the leaders of Maine for the next century.

A single scholarship program by itself won’t rescue an underfunded higher-education system, but it will help and it will do so while relying on the people who were helped directly by the public university system to give even more. That’s a great deal for higher education and for Maine.