Please tell me that our legislators aren’t this dumb.

Let’s take a look at the facts:

n Ohio has 513,000 fewer bachelors’ degree-holders than the national per-state average, ranking it below 38 other states.

n Ohio’s economy, like much of the U.S., is becoming more knowledge-based and demanding more degree-holding laborers.

n Ohio’s universities are falling apart, literally. Maintenance is deferred, no new faculty are hired, and the schools are forced to spend what money they do get from the state on efforts to increase enrollment, such as the construction of new buildings while the old ones crumble and fall.

n The cost of higher education in Ohio increases every year. There was a 6 percent increase this year, the maximum allowed by the state, and the trend will likely continue for years to come.

n Ohio has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs in recent years.

n There are three things you can do to improve your economy in the long run, improve your resources, your labor or your capital. Higher education improves your labor and your ability to mine resources with better technology. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. Do you know what higher education would do to per-capita income?

What do our glorious elected leaders do in response to a situation that threatens our national security more than fundamental Islamic extremist terrorists do? Cut higher education more than any other section of our state’s budget, that’s what!

Why do they do it? They do it because you, the student, do not care. You do not vote for your elected leaders. You do not call them. You do not write them, and you certainly do not protest them. Well, that, and you apparently fell asleep during their economics classes.

As a result, funding sent to other parts of the state budget-such as Medicaid and corrections-is substantially more, even when compared proportionally to the higher education budget.

I have always said that a school is only as good as its students. Well, a state is also only as good as its citizens; students, your fellow Ohioans have no idea about the problems with higher education.

It seems our schools are only featured in the press when they do something good. That is the way they want it. They want the story about the new building opening on campus, because it will increase enrollment.

I’ve got a great story for every news outlet in the nation: Ohio students hold statewide day of protest. That’s right.

We are fed up with our politicians’ decisions to drive this country in to the hole globalization is digging for it and we are not going to take it anymore.

Think of it, college students all across Ohio have one thing in common: a hatred of tuition and its yearly increases.

It’d be nothing to get people to write, speak, protest and travel to the statehouse. Corporations might even fund a television ad campaign.

Our student organizations have been planning events like this for years, and now they have an event for you Columbus. But will any students do it?

Will students take the opportunity to do a little work that will result in turning this state, this nation back on track? Will they? We should have already done it.

Before you know it, Ohioans will make more money and pay more taxes, which means higher education in this state becomes the best in the nation. And it should be nothing less.