Every person deserves a shot at the American Dream: a good education and a good job, so you can buy a house in a safe neighborhood with good schools.

Too many local families are denied their opportunity to live that dream because there’s no university in Snohomish County.

Sure, there’s UW down in Seattle and Western up in Bellingham, and it’s easy for a high-school kid to stuff everything they own into the back of a Kia and drive off to live in a dorm. But the college population is changing. The average student is just as likely to be a 32-year-old working mother or a 45-year-old man who just got laid off from the Boeing plant.

They can’t pack up their families and live in a dorm. They need a university right here.

This is going to matter more, and hurt more families, the longer our nation suffers through the worst recession since the Great Depression.

The barriers

Bringing a university here won’t be easy. For decades, people have pushed for one. They’ve always run into roadblocks.

The important thing is to never give up.

UW-Tacoma only happened because community leaders in Tacoma never gave up the fight. WSU-Vancouver would only exist on paper if the citizens there had decided the odds were against them.

We can do this.

Naysayers oppose a new university by digging up the same old arguments: that we can’t afford to build a university, that any money we spend will steal funds from existing universities, that times are simply too tough. The naysayers tell us to wait our turn.

We have waited for more than a hundred years.

If we stuck with this broken logic, we would have never built WSU in 1890 or Western in 1899, because that would have taken money away from the University of Washington.

Building those other universities was a fight back then, too. Some would say a gamble.

But every time we’ve built a university — or a branch campus, like UW-Tacoma or WSU-Vancouver — it’s paid off. Our state’s brainpower expanded and our economy grew.

It’s also false to say we can only pay for universities when times are good. It’s precisely when times are bad that workers go back to college to get the training and skills they need.

If we’re going to win the global race for the best jobs, our workers need access to a world-class education. You can’t close the doors and tell people sorry, we don’t have room.

New universities aren’t mistakes. They are magnets for opportunity and prosperity.

A barrier we created ourselves: location

This is a classic problem. Every large allocation of public money creates people who want that money near them. Freeways, universities and in some areas prisons all have competition for location.

The reality is that if the location works for the school and works for the students it bill spread benefit to all of our county. As I did in the beginning of the process, I ask legislator and communities to not just advocate for their particular location, but for a university, period. I got grief for this from my legislative district businesses and city councilmembers, but it is still the right thing to do.

So how to get through this barrier? We all can still work for the franchise and settle on the location later. We can start with a few students, as it certainly will regardless, at Everett Community College in leased rooms.

The community college has a library, a cafeteria, a gym, and all the other requirements to attract students who are the final decision maker in this process. Getting the franchise in this session will continue the planning and preparation for when we can afford to hire staff and enroll students.

If across the board cuts happen to balance the budget this year it will mean $600 million cuts to higher education and no school is going to want to take on a new project when they are losing staff and students. That is a real barrier for the short term.

We can do this. It will not be easy, but yes we can. If we stay smart and refuse to give up, we’ll succeed.

What our students and workers and businesses need is an opportunity to learn and succeed and prosper, to have a shot at the American Dream that we all share.

Rep. Hans Dunshee (D-Snohomish) has worked as a small business owner and volunteer firefighter. He is chair of the Capital Budget Committee, which controls state construction projects.