57 Percent

This one is particularly for legislators.

In more settled times, I wouldn’t bother pointing this out. But with so much happening so quickly, it’s easy to lose sight of the obvious.

Pandemic response relies largely on people with medical training. Nurses are among the most crucial.

You need to remember where nurses come from.

Fifty-seven percent of the nurses in the U.S. got their initial degree at a community college. If you allow community colleges to collapse or fall into death spirals, good luck staffing your hospitals.

In cold numerical terms, what do you suppose would happen to the cost of nurses if the supply dropped by half? Basic supply and demand suggests that you can pay for community colleges and have a steady supply of nurses, or you can wind up paying much more for the remaining few nurses and endure much worse care. As a value proposition, this should be a no-brainer.

It’s not just nurses, of course. My own college, for instance, trains most of the respiratory therapists in the region. If there’s a more relevant skill right now, I’d be hard-pressed to name it. (The college even lent out the ventilators from its program to a local hospital for the next several months.) Respiratory therapists don’t fall from the sky, fully formed; they’re trained. Let the institution that trains them fall away, and your supply will dry up quickly. You do not want that to happen.

Seriously. You do not want that to happen.

In budgeting, it’s easy to look at numbers in boxes as discrete, as if they have nothing to do with each other except adding up to a total. But they’re connected. Community colleges are feeders to the health-care industry. Neglect those feeders, and you’re setting yourself up for much bigger staffing problems in health care than you already have, and quickly. And it’s much more difficult, time-consuming and expensive to start new feeder programs than to maintain existing ones.

Higher ed is not competing with health care for resources. Higher ed is a resource for health care. Neglect higher ed, and this year’s staffing issues will look like a walk in the park compared to what will come. Between an aging population and pandemics, this is not the time to let the industry feeder wither away. This is the time to secure it. As bad as this year’s budget numbers are, they’ll improve. But losing 57 percent of the next decade’s supply of nurses would be devastating. Don’t turn a right-now problem into a forever problem. The feeder is here. All you have to do is keep it going.