It’s graduation season. And while for individual graduates and their families it is a moment of celebration, for the wider New York City community, it’s a moment of opportunity.

New York is so many things — the financial capital, the press capital, the fashion capital — that it’s sometimes easy to forget that this is a college town, every bit as much as Ann Arbor, Mich., or Athens, Ga. About 15,000 students graduated from New York University on May 13. Today,10,909 more will graduate from Columbia. Friday, New School University holds its graduation. Another 2,988 students will graduate from Brooklyn College on June 3. Fordham University’s graduation, on Saturday, adds more graduates to the mix. And that’s not even mentioning the other CUNY campuses, Pratt Institute, Cornell and Mount Sinai medical schools, the various religious seminaries.

We do our share of beating up on the city’s colleges and universities for their Bush-bashing, their anti-Israel tendencies, their proclivity to seek pork-barrel spending from Washington, the tax-exempt nature of their property. Some of those trends, unfortunately, spill over into commencement season — George Soros used a commencement address at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs this week to remind them pointedly, “If we don’t like the Bush administration’s policies, we can reject him at the next election.”

But graduation season is as good a time as any to remember that these institutions, for all their flaws, are part of what makes New York the great city that it is. Part of the service they provide is bringing out-of-towners here for school. These students and their parents and professors pump a lot of money into the city’s economy. And a lot of students here find they like the city so much that they stay after they graduate, becoming productive members of the workforce and our civic life.

A report out this week from the Regional Plan Association and the Citizens Housing and Planning Council worried that New York is losing workers to cities like Washington, D.C., Houston, Atlanta, where housing is cheaper. One solution to the so-called housing shortage in New York would be to urge the new graduates to go back to where they came from and ease the demand for housing.

But we’re in the camp that sees population growth — whether it is from high birth rates of the city’s native residents, immigration of foreigners from overseas, or out-of-towners coming here for college or graduate school and deciding to stay — as healthy for the city’s overall economy.

Maybe some of this year’s graduates will even become part of the solution to the city’s high housing costs, working to end the government price controls that keep empty-nesters living in huge, low-rent apartments, and campaigning to ease the regulations that make building new housing or renovating old housing so expensive here. So congratulations, graduates. We hope you stick around.