Last year, I was lucky enough to hear a speech from our distinguished Lt. Governor Sally Pederson. The theme was simple and obvious – stay in Iowa. She pleaded for all the future engineers, teachers, farmers and doctors to stay and help make Iowa an even greater place to live. She didn’t mention lawyers or political scientists but rather than take offense, I simply accepted that as an issue of brevity.

The overall effect of the speech certainly stuck with me. Ever since I heard it, I’ve gotten a nice chuckle every time I see the front page of the local papers announcing budget cuts left and right to the universities.

For a long time, I wondered how the two ideas could coexist. Certainly it could be blamed on a partisan difference, since Gov. Vilsack favors dipping into Iowa’s emergency “rainy day” fund to overcome budget shortfalls while Brent Siegrist and others reject the idea. It could be blamed on that, but it’s ridiculously short-sighted and would accomplish nothing. The real truth is so obvious it’s brilliant. Pederson was right. Here are the basic facts of the situation.

People are leaving Iowa. Whether it’s the general population dying or trusty college students finding jobs in exotic locales that have exhibited population growth, Iowa has hemophilia. It’s bleeding out the only chances it has at population growth. Iowa is one of only a handful of states that hasn’t illustrated any population growth in 30 years.

While other states are practically bursting at the seams, the only people who seem to find their way to Iowa are so desperate for work and U.S. citizenship that they’d stop anywhere with a low-paying job. Much of Iowa’s problems have been attributed to “brain drain,” which is to say college students find themselves outside of Iowa after college.

This is why the legislature and the Board of Regents have been so clever. They are on their way to virtually eliminating brain drain once and for all. They’re simply pre-empting it. By making it expensive to go to college in Iowa, courtesy of tuition increases, and simultaneously slashing the budget for education, that dynamic duo has essentially made it worth no one’s effort to come here. With this brilliant plan for the future, not only will students not want to come here, professors worth their salt won’t either.

Students can look forward to huge class sizes and virtually no class selection, while seeing all classes outside of their major closed to them. Professors can anticipate low salaries and minimal job security. Both will be able to look back upon the day they arrived and got that lovely course catalog and laugh maniacally as half of the classes are simply scratched off the list.

If only the Board of Regents could increase tuition more, this problem would be eliminated entirely. If only they could raise tuition 800 percent next fall, then only National Merit Scholars on full rides could afford to go here. Good job, you sneaky Regents. You’ll attract only the best, and with only 400 students left at Iowa State, class sizes won’t ever be a problem.

Plus, with no students, professors can bring in a lot more of those juicy research dollars, although you might be better off just shutting down the liberal arts college. Plutonium research is worth a lot more than some book on Plato, at least in dollar figures.

Then, once those people graduate, they’ll be grateful to the state of Iowa for giving them such an exclusive education and leave. But the three or four who stay will start nice technology companies that lead to big grants and donations to the university. Really, it’s a far more brilliant “Master Plan” than anything we see from the Department of Residence, whose housing shortage would also be solved with the tuition increase.

College has become a way of life for the middle class. It seems that no one with any wealth will ever stop their education at high school any more. Thanks to the state of Iowa ,though, we don’t have to worry about who will pump our gas and flip our burgers, because a good number of those people can’t justify spending money on a college education that will leave them stuck doing those jobs anyway.

Iowa is going to find that its brain drain problem may end very soon. In fact, they’re taking huge steps in the right direction. Rather than finding more good jobs to keep us in Iowa, they’re simply going to keep us from coming here in the first place.

Good job, Legislature. Excellent work, Board of Regents. If you’d like help with the metaphorical barbed wire fences, I may have some pliers in the back of my car. The turrets with the machine guns will have to wait, though. You see, my budget’s been cut, too.

Tim Kearns is a senior in political science from Bellevue, Neb.