The more educated you are, the more likely you are to be employed and have a high income.

Conversely, if you don't have much education, you may be consigned to a low-wage job -- if you have a job at all.

If Maine's high-school graduates can get into, and pay for, a good secondary education, then they'll have a better chance to earn good wages, they'll pay taxes, they'll provide homes for their families. They'll attract good employers to the state who will want to hire them. They'll take their wages and buy things and keep the economy growing.

Maine -- and Mainers -- have for decades known that the old way of doing things, where a high-school education and a high-paying job at the mill could carry you through life, is barely viable now. The mills aren't there, at least as many of them as there used to be. And the service jobs you can get with a high-school diploma just don't pay the bills for a family. Thus, Maine's rates of hunger and poverty have been increasing.

Which is why we're so alarmed at statistics from the Maine Development Foundation's Laurie Lachance. Lachance, a former state economist, has been beating this drum for a while, but her message is no less powerful for its repetition: Maine's investment in higher education has dropped off during the past few decades. Lachance told the Augusta Kiwanis Club last week that in 1968, Maine spent 18 percent of the state's general fund on higher education. In 2007, she said, that percentage had been cut in half, to 9 percent.

That translates into millions of dollars lost and belt-tightening at community colleges and university system campuses across the state just this year. Programs have been axed, jobs cut and tuition hiked.

And university system Chancellor Richard Pattenaude has called a commission together to study ways to meet an estimated $43 million deficit over the next four years.

The state can't simply print money and hand it over to the folks in higher education. And with dramatically decreased revenues because of the recession, everyone who once got money from the state is hurting.

But without a bigger investment in higher education, it's likely that Maine's economy -- and Mainers -- will suffer even more.

Maine needs to hold a vigorous public discussion about whether there's a social or environmental or infrastructure sort of program that we can reduce or eliminate for a time so that the state can concentrate, instead, on rebuilding our higher education system and making it accessible to the maximum number of students.

Paying for investments in higher education -- investments, really, in Maine's future -- cannot be done without shorting something else that's worthy. That's the reality that we face, and it's time we tackled it and got on with preparing Maine for a more educated future.

Editorials represent the opinion of the Editorial Board of this newspaper: Publisher John Christie, Executive Editor Eric Conrad and Opinion Page Editor Naomi Schalit.