A college diploma has long been the required ticket into America’s middle class. No wonder that, as the price of that ticket continues to climb, so many people are increasingly concerned with keeping it affordable.

Those concerns are playing out in an interesting way this spring at the University of Hawaii, where system President David Lassner last week proposed lowering this fall’s tuition increase by 2 percent to 3 percent, even though many returning students have already registered for classes at the higher rate.

His proposal got a chilly response from UH Manoa Chancellor Robert Bley-Vroman, who has been struggling to keep body and soul together at the system’s down-at-the-heels main campus.

The University of Hawaii held its 2015 spring commencement on Saturday. UH President David Lassner wants to reduce a tuition increase for next year’s students.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

Already responsible for making $18.6 million in cuts for next budget year, Manoa and Bley-Vroma were projecting a $500,000 deficit at the rate being charged. The tuition reductions would only deepen an already formidable financial hole, without any assurance that they would appreciably increase access at Manoa or the other campuses, where increases would similarly shrink.

Lassner’s idea, in fact, would reduce tuition revenue by an estimated $16 million. Added to the $28 million that the Legislature recently whacked from the university system’s budget request, the tuition adjustment would leave UH scrambling to cover a $44 million shortfall for the coming fiscal year.

While well-intended, Lassner’s tuition proposal must be rejected, and the Board of Regents, Legislature and Gov. David Ige must get serious about the “state” part of our state university system.

Hawaii is part of a sad national trend of disinvestment that over the past 30 years has seen states essentially transfer the majority of public higher education costs to students and families. Only a decade ago, states still paid two-thirds of that price tag, with students/families covering the remaining third; today, that ratio has flipped, according to the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities. In 2011-12 alone, state support dropped by 7.6 percent nationally, the largest single-year cut of the past three decades.

At UH Manoa, state appropriations comprised 35 percent of the budget as recently as 2009, with tuition covering 19 percent. Four years later, state support was down to 25 percent, while the student share had mushroomed to 28 percent.

In covering the core facilities and instructional costs that comprise the bulk of college budgets, public campuses are largely limited to either state appropriations or tuition. Simply put, cuts in state funding typically result in corresponding increases in tuition. To pretend otherwise, as some legislators and regents seem inclined to do, is intellectually dishonest.

It’s become fashionable in some circles to be critically condescending toward Hawaii’s public university system, offering glib admonitions that UH needs to tighten its belt even further than it already has. Or to speak of 2012’s Wonder Blunder fiasco or the fractious departures of system President M.R.C. Greenwood, Manoa Chancellor Tom Apple or Cancer Center Director Michel Carbone as though they define the university and justify depriving it of the resources it needs to function at the level Hawaii deserves.

But we follow a path charted by such shortsightedness at our collective peril. The state relies heavily on the university’s campuses and community colleges to supply critical replacement parts for our economy and to answer questions critical to the future of Hawaii. Adequately funding UH is a fire-sale bargain compared to the costs of a public higher education sector unprepared to fulfill its mission.

It’s become fashionable in some circles to be critically condescending toward Hawaii’s public university system.

Even taking into account all of the above, we might be more sympathetic toward efforts to revisit UH’s 2015-16 tuition rates were it not for two additional, decisive factors:

1. So much of the increasing expenses to operate the university system are beyond its control. Energy costs alone account for more than tw0-thirds of the system’s $74.4-million biennial operating budget request. Containing them in one of the most energy-expensive environments in the country and with what is in many places an aging physical plant riddled with deferred maintenance issues is a challenge that most Hawaii households, struggling to cover their own energy costs, should be able to relate to.

2.  Even at the tuition increase of 7 percent previously set for UH Manoa and 5 percent hikes elsewhere, the cost to attend UH remains a tremendous bargain. In-state undergraduate tuition and fees for four-year universities nationally averaged $9,139 for the recently concluded academic year, according to CollegeData.com. For UH Manoa, operating in pricey Honolulu, it was only slightly higher at $9,840. For comparison, the average cost of tuition and fees for private universities nationwide was $31,231.

There’s no doubt that America is facing a crisis when it comes to the cost of higher education. About 56 percent of undergraduates at public campuses borrow to finance their educations, resulting in an average debt at graduation of $28,400, according to the Project on Student Debt. We all ought to be concerned about pricing public higher education beyond the reach of the very students it was created to serve.

The long-agreed to tuition increase represents the fourth year of a five-year plan intended to meet out necessary tuition growth responsibly over time. Abruptly revising it downward would create a revenue shortfall that would have to be addressed by increased class sizes, reduced course offerings, postponing academic hiring, etc. These types of cuts diminish institutional quality and create new realities from which it is costly and difficult to return.

Lassner’s tuition proposal will be the main event on the regents May 21 agenda, and we strongly encourage them to re-affirm the tuition structure already in place. Access and affordability are real issues for students in the UH system, but a more thoughtful approach to meeting those needs is required going forward than the $16-million problem this proposal would create.