The tourism industry is leading Florida into a deep state budget hole. It’s time to change the way Florida makes a living.

Florida finally has a concrete forecast for the state’s general revenue collections during the next few years. Collections during the fiscal year that started last month will be $3.4 billion lower than previously expected, and during the following fiscal year $2.0 billion lower than previously forecast.

The state’s budget is about $90 billion, but the more important number is that only about $34 billion is general revenue. So Florida’s general revenue collections in the present fiscal year will be about one-tenth lower than previously expected and will continue to be very low in the following fiscal year.

That will impact K-12 schools, public colleges and universities and everything else. How much? That will be up to the Florida Legislature and Governor DeSantis. But nothing will be completely spared.

Much of the sales tax shortfall – about half according to the Miami Herald – is the result of the collapse of the tourism industry. Whether or not the tourism industry will ever fully recover is not clear. And even if it does, the industry is notorious for its low-paying jobs. Do we even really want tourism to play as big a role in Florida’s economy as it has in the past?

Perhaps this is the moment during which Florida should reengineer its economy to focus less on tourism and more on technology and manufacturing industries that provide high-paying jobs.

What would Florida have to do to attract more of these industries? Start with this: Technology and manufacturing industries require a highly educated workforce – a workforce with lots of engineers and scientists. Florida doesn’t presently have such a workforce. The National Science Foundation says that in 2018 (the most recent year for which statistics are available) only 3.54% of Florida workers were in science and engineering occupations. That number is lower than the national rate (4.89%) and is ranked 33rd among the 45 states that reported data.

Nor is Florida educating scientists and engineers at a high rate. For every thousand individuals age 18-24 living in Florida in 2018, only 19.37 held bachelors’ degrees in science and engineering fields (once again, according to the National Science Foundation). Once again, that is well below the national rate of 22.99. Florida ranked 37th among the fifty states.

What would Florida have to do to prepare the kind of highly ranked science and engineering workforce that would be attractive to technology and manufacturing industries? That is self-evident: Bring more students from a wide range of backgrounds into the science and engineering pipeline – starting in middle school (or even earlier). At present, the Orange County Public Schools Calculus Project is the most important initiative in the state for doing this. Despite its name, the project focuses on getting students from disadvantaged backgrounds into Algebra 1, the first mile marker in the science and engineering pipeline.

Once students are in the pipeline, we must do whatever it takes to help those students stay in the pipeline until they earn a bachelor’s degree. That means giving students in the science and engineering pipeline more support at the high school and college levels than they are getting now.

All of this will be horribly difficult to accomplish while Florida is navigating brutal state budgets during the next several fiscal years.

What our state’s policy-makers will be tempted to do is fall back on the state’s nearly exclusive emphasis on delivering only a basic education focused on reading and civics to justify savage budget cuts to public K-12 schools. Public colleges and universities will be under the gun, too, but the K-12 schools are much more vulnerable. I have started to collect anecdotal evidence that upper level high school math and science classes are disappearing in some schools that had previously offered them. That is a distressing trend.

Unless Florida’s policy-makers find a way to maintain or even improve opportunities for the state’s students to achieve at the highest levels in science and engineering, the state will simply fall back onto its dangerous reliance on a tourism industry that has let us down again.

It’s time for Florida to change the way it makes a living. I hope our leaders have the resolve to make it happen in this difficult time.