To ponder the figures is to shudder.

“Tuitions,” according to the Delta Project on Post Secondary Education Costs, “have rapidly increased, at almost double the rate of inflation, outpacing many families’ ability to pay.”

At the University of Texas (as we used to call it before the creation of UT-This and UT-That cut into the value of the Austin franchise) tuition rose 9.6 percent in the fall of 2006. It went up by a more modest 1.2 percent in 2007. Presently UT (UT-Austin, if you really must) more than $8,000 per year for in-state students. Not counting fees. Had you been blessed to enroll there in 1960, the year of John Kennedy’s election to the White House, you would have paid but $50 for a whole semester’s tuition — $447.30 in 2008 coin.

What about the Aggies? Tuition in College Station is $7844 there. It could be worse, of course. Southern Methodist University, for 18 hours, charges $14,715 plus $944 an hour. Rice charges $28,400 to those who started in 2007, a $500 bump-up from the previous year

Everywhere it’s the same. The Detroit News recently called for freezing tuition at all campuses in its top-drawer university system.

Enough. Let’s have some good news. The good news is that Texas Tech University’s regents have decided to follow, in a manner of speaking, Detroit News policy and keep tuition for the next year just where it was this past year: $7,083 with fees. As Chancellor Kent Hance explained, “Texas Tech is trying to give more deserving high school students the opportunity to attend a high-quality university. We are afraid that raising tuition year after year is slowly taking away that opportunity.”

An educated guess would be that Red Raiders should enjoy the proffered relief while they can, bracing themselves for the inevitable hike a year from now. The Tech gesture, welcome as it surely is, doesn’t directly engage the underlying problem, which is mega in nature, not micro. That is, the problem isn’t campus-level greed or pinched funding, it’s a shift in cultural assumptions about 1) the value of university education and 2) the duty of government at all levels of life.

The reason university tuition was so cheap in ye olden time is that state taxpayers gladly and affordably stood their young people to an education. Revenue was plentiful then, and not that many bubbas went to college: an average 5000 a year at UT throughout the ‘30s and just 17,000 as the ‘50s ended. These days everybody wants to go, and no wonder, given findings that a college degree adds an average $1 million to lifetime personal income.

Meanwhile, government commitments to non-education enterprises have multiplied often as not on account of federal mandates to spend thus and so on this and that. As the Delta Project notes, Medicaid, the federal health program, more than doubled its cost to state budgets between 1987 and 2006. How to handle such rapidly-growing costs? One obvious way is offload them — onto local property tax payers for support of public schools, onto college students and their families at the highest educational level.

One understands. And one regrets. Modern life is expensive in too many other departments for there to be much complacency over the steady rise of tuition costs for the leaders of the 21st century. Something needs doing. What? Start maybe with the Tech strategy —- because the university doesn’t intend just to sit there waiting for the tuition freeze to melt — of “new approaches to manage our costs and better utilize the revenue have to work with.” Do we really have to do thus-and-so? Is a question that should come up many times? Does thus-and-so have to cost what it does? How many people does it take to do thus-and-so, and what should they be paid? These are things to think about.

State government should simultaneously put to itself similar questions about its own operations, with a view to freeing up more revenue for truly worthy causes. Like seeing to it that the minds and gifts of the citizens don’t go neglected.

Nothing is easy here, for government or students or universities. That’s to say no more than if the job at hand is hard and important, and this one is, the time to get on with it is...yesterday.

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