The University of Hawaii at West Oahu officially convenes for the first time Monday after two years of the new campus construction in Kapolei, but many have been awaiting this day for far longer.

That makes the grand opening an even sweeter celebration. This is an important milestone in a decades-long journey to provide the wider range of higher education options Hawaii residents need. And it’s happening in a dynamic part of the island primed for such an institution.

The planning for what was then called West Oahu College goes back 45 years. In 1966, following a UH proposal for a second four-year campus on the island, lawmakers set aside the first cache of planning funds, $307,000.

It actually began operations in 1976, using space at high schools and at Leeward Community College, but that kind of parasitic existence meant it wasn’t taken seriously as a separate entity.

Seeing the notion of a freestanding baccalaureate university rise and fall in favor over the years was a frustration to its supporters. They insisted it would fill a niche — not only because it would geographically serve a growing Leeward Oahu population, but because it could fill in some of the blanks in the training of a viable workforce for the future economy.

These areas include digital arts — meshing nicely with the digital media program at Waianae High School — and the allied health fields, including long-term care, occupational therapy and some areas of nursing, said Gene Awakuni, the campus chancellor.

"Our mission is to provide highly skilled, highly trained professionals in those critical-need areas that the state requires in the next decade and beyond," Awakuni told the Star-Advertiser at the start of construction. "We also started our teacher education program because there is still that continuing gap between the number of teachers that the state needs every year and the number of teachers they can recruit."

In particular, the field of early education is an underserved need in teacher training, he added.

The degree programs, rightly, were designed to complement rather than duplicate what’s offered at the Manoa flagship campus. Where Manoa emphasizes research, West Oahu’s focus will be more on the applied sciences.

Given the aging population’s need for long-term care, as an example, training caregivers is an apt direction for the state’s investment here; part of that is the $175 million spent to construct the new facilities.

What’s needed most at this stage is continued dialogue with the community and the leaders they elect to fine-tune the buildout and the development of the campus.

Some wrinkles, predictably, already have appeared, including insuffi- cient parking for the first day of classes and various computers and other gear not yet in place. How the campus leadership adapts and adjusts to glitches is a process that bears watching.

There will be time to dissect such problems in the months ahead, however. Saturday’s inaugural festivities on campus and today’s start of school more appropriately represents a starting line. It’s the top of a new academic year for all UH students, but it’s especially a red-letter day for those at West Oahu who now can see a four-year college degree as a more attainable goal.

More important than its proximity to their homes or its function as a magnet for economic opportunity, is the practical advantage of its lower tuition — $2,796 per semester for a full-time student, compared to $4,332 at Manoa. In a global economy that increasingly will reward those with post-secon- dary degrees, that is a meaningful difference.

More students who once disqualified themselves as college material in the past will see that they have a chance, after all. Their journey can begin close to home — and take flight from there.