If the state gives NIU more financial support, tuition might not soar next fall.

But if state universities would increase its graduation rates, they might get more money.

So goes Wednesday’s dismally attended meeting against rising tuition.

At the meeting, NIU President John La Tourette said tuition is directly related to how Illinois legislators dish out education money throughout the state.

“The reasonableness of tuition charges is directly related to the reasonableness of the levels of funding provided to public higher education by the General Assembly,” La Tourette said.

But the Illinois Board of Higher Education needs to justify how some schools get twice as much funding as others, said State Rep. Gordon Ropp, R-Bloomington.

Ropp suggested that NIU should boost its graduation rate higher than 56 percent to justify additional state funds.

NIU receives less state support per student than any other university in Illinois, La Tourette said.

“If NIU had received the $4,922 of state support per student at Chicago State University, we could have eliminated all tuition payments at the undergraduate level and paid a $1,217 premium annually to each student to enroll,” La Tourette said.

Underfunding is the reason “universities like NIU and Illinois State University take a beating in the public or the legislature for exceeding the IBHE guideline,” he said

IBHE guidelines state tuition should be about one-third the cost of instruction.

“We may come to the conclusion the one-third, two-third policy is simply unrealistic and we should abandon it,” said committee chairman Sen. Jeremiah Joyce, D-Chicago.

Although Joyce asked La Tourette for other sources of revenue besides students’ tuition and state funding, La Tourette replied “not many third parties are willing to spend $100,000 per student.”

From 1980-1989, there was only one or two years where the General Revenue Fund met the inflation rate, said NIU’s William Monat, Regency Professor of Public Administration.

“One deplores that the increasing cost of goods by universities are never matched (by state funding),” he said. “Tuition levels need some kind of containment.”

Monat said higher education is in jeopardy and “without changes, there will be devastating effects.”

The next hearing is scheduled at the State of Illinois Building in Chicago on Sept. 25.