Expanding college

When a spending bill is co-sponsored by both Maine’s Senate president and House speaker, chances are strong it will pass, even if it comes in the second session of the Legislature. A particularly important proposal, sponsored by Sen. Mark Lawrence, D-Kittery, and Speaker Steven Rowe, D-Portland, would increase technical college spending by $2.5 million. It deserves bipartisan support from lawmakers.

The bill would increase technical college enrollment by 250 students statewide (to 6,000 students), increase the number of courses available over the Internet, and aim to increase technical college enrollment to 10,000 within six years. That’s an ambitious goal, but the need for ambition is evident from a glance at the weekend classifieds section.

Look at the job openings listed there: Computer technicians. Nursing care. Light manufacturing jobs. Hotel and restaurant management. All those careers providing good pay, benefits and stability.

Those jobs are going wanting not because Mainers don’t want to make $30,000 a year or more, and not because Mainers like working low-wage, dead-end jobs (and often, more than one of them at a time). Those vacancies exist because in order to do that kind of work, one needs training.

But the technical colleges can turn out a limited number of graduates each year. So not only does Maine continue to struggle with finding enough jobs to pay a living wage, those industries that could help create more jobs that can feed, house and clothe a family go unfilled for want of workers. Paying $2.5 million to help fix such a ruinous paradox barely rises to the standards for debate.

Maine’s leaders well know that additional investment in post-secondary education is needed. And while every dollar invested in research and development, better telecommunications infrastructure and business incubators has an eventual payoff, every dollar invested in putting another Mainer who wants to better his life into a technical college’s classroom has a payoff that comes today.