It is inevitable. Students attending Illinois’ public universities once again will have to chip in to make up for the state’s lack of proper higher education funding.

Since 1977 state funding appropriated to public universities has increased by 83.7 percent, as compared to tuition which has skyrocketed by 221.3 percent.

The Regents cannot continue to expect students to pay these huge, yearly increases in tuition and fees anymore. Stricter attention must be paid to developing methods of dealing with the rising costs of financing and maintaining universities and the inadequate higher education budgets. More importantly, plans to follow through with and enforce these methods must be upheld for students to truly receive their money’s worth of education.

To do this, the Regents must introduce a system other than the binding tuition increases which once raised cannot be brought back down again. Instead, tuition increases should have to be reviewed at the end of each semester to decide if re-implementation is necessary. Re-implementation should also require the vote of the Regents.

Before the Regents approve the tuition increase, they should consider a plan which does more for the students than merely ask them to dig deeper into their pockets. If the Regents don’t, soon all students will have left is lint.