It's only coincidence, but a telling one. With the approach of the 50th anniversary of the watershed Brown vs. Board of Education school segregation decision, probably the most important Supreme Court ruling of the past century, California this spring will pass a demographic landmark that again demonstrates how important Brown was, both for what it did and what it didn't do.

In Brown, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled (in May 1954) that where states provided schooling or other public services, the old segregationist doctrine of separate but equal violated the equal protection guarantees of the U.S. Constitution. Racially segregated facilities, the court ruled, were inherently unequal.

But because the court later held (in a 5-4 decision) that public schooling was not a federal responsibility, even where states provided schools serving black or Latino kids vastly inferior resources, there was no constitutional violation. In effect, Brown became a decision not about decent schools or equal funding, but only about de jure segregation.

That threw the issue back to the states, where it's been for the past 30 years, both as a legal and a political issue and, perhaps more important, as a moral one.

But this year's demographic landmark also makes clear that for California, and in the coming years for a growing number of other parts of the country, it's also a crucial economic issue.

For the first time this spring, according to a new report from WICHE, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, just as the nation marks the Brown anniversary, California will graduate as many Latinos and African Americans from its public high schools as it does non-Hispanic whites. Whites now constitute less than 42 percent of the class.

It's hardly an epochal event: Whites have been a minority of California high-school graduates for more than a decade, and their percentage will continue to decline indefinitely. Within a decade, blacks and Latinos will constitute an absolute majority of the state's projected 360,000 graduates.

What that means, most obviously, is that California's economy and its people, an increasing percentage of whom will be either too old or young for the work force, will be heavily dependent on today's immigrants and their children. That makes the quality of their education, both before and after graduation, a lot more than an issue of fairness.

Last year, a group headed by Steve Murdock, a professor at Texas A&M University and Texas' official state demographer, published "The New Texan Challenge: Population and the Future of Texas," in which it tried to project different scenarios for Texas' economy and society in 2040.

Among the conclusions: that if all ethnic minorities attained the same level of educational proficiency as whites do now, the state's aggregate income would be 50 percent higher than if their educational achievement continued at current rates; and that the prison population would be half, and that welfare rolls, the cost of Medicaid, food stamps and other assistance would be an even smaller fraction of what they otherwise would be.

All such futurist projections are iffy at best. They assume that high-skill, high-wage jobs will be available for anyone's who's qualified to take them - a dubious assumption given current job projections - and that wage differentials won't draw in yet more low-wage immigrants.

But for rational policy-making, there's hardly any other reasonable choice. The Texas Higher Education Board and the state's Joint Select Committee on Higher Education have been taking the Murdock studies seriously. And if Texas, which is now California's prime competitor and the state that's demographically most similar to California, is looking at such projections, California had better start looking as well.

What's certain is that the Schwarzenegger administration's budget cutting is driving the state in precisely the wrong direction.

Putting more of the load and more resources in the community colleges may make both economic and academic sense, but only if every successful student in those two-year college programs is guaranteed a place in a four-year college, which is hardly the case now.

And at a time when the state is supposedly trying to attract "highly qualified" teachers to its K-12 system, raising tuition 40 percent for prospective teachers, as the administration wants, is hardly an inducement. Even before the next round of budget cuts is approved, the state's colleges - and especially its two-year colleges - have lost an estimated 90,000 students who, for one reason or another, can't get the courses they need. This year's budget cuts may be necessary, but that makes rigorous planning for the "Texas challenge" even more urgent.

Professor Wayne Cornelius of the University of California at San Diego, a widely respected authority on immigration issues, says that for Americans the only real choice is to recognize the country's dependence on its immigrant workers and to abolish the official impediments to their full integration into American society.

Such proposals will be long debated, but there's not much question that there's a "California challenge" of even greater proportions than Texas'. We'd better meet it.