After seven years of the tuition guarantee, the state Legislature has forced university officials to consider hiking tuition as much as 10 percent for students. Today, the MSU Board of Trustees will decide whether to suspend the guarantee. Abandoning the guarantee - at least temporarily - is reasonable, but raises some very important questions.

The guarantee, which began in 1994, has maintained yearly tuition increases at or below the projected rate of inflation. At the same time, state government has continually provided larger amounts of funding to Michigan’s two other research universities: the University of Michigan and Wayne State University.

If the guarantee is dropped, the rise in tuition will affect all students. MSU Trustee Dee Cook told The State News the hike could be as much as 9 or 10 percent.

Losing the guarantee is unfortunate, but understandable. On the other hand, a 10 percent increase is a pretty sizable chunk of money. Students should stand behind the hike if it will benefit them. They deserve more classes taught by professors, as opposed to teaching assistants, and more research opportunities.

MSU professors are among the lowest paid in the Big Ten, with an average yearly salary of $82,500. They also fall behind both of the other state research universities, with U-M professors averaging a $105,200 salary and Wayne State averaging $87,200.

If MSU wants to maintain a good academic reputation, it needs not only to retain the good professors it has, but to attract more qualified professors. It can’t do this when other universities continue to pay their professors higher salaries.

But up to this point, the board has not been clear about where the money from a 10 percent tuition increase might go. If the university is going to drop a big bill on students returning to campus in the fall, it had better have a good reason.

Most students, spending the summer away from East Lansing, are probably unaware of the tuition guarantee debate that has been taking place at MSU. When they (or their parents) get that first tuition bill, many will probably be surprised.

Students should expect university officials to stand behind the hike with solid reasoning to ease their minds. If that money is put toward students’ best interests, they may be less upset about the new drain on their pocketbooks. After all, if students are paying the price for a quality education, they should be getting it. Even now, the university could gather support for the increase if it presented an outline of how a 10 percent increase would be spent.

A tuition increase of this magnitude virtually negates the past few years of the guarantee. It appears that after all this time the guarantee has been in place, the university has been losing money because of the widening funding gap, and now it’s making up for it in one big chunk.

That means the students currently attending MSU may be saddled with a bill to cover the costs of those who have already graduated - those who have enjoyed the tuition guarantee for the past seven years.

By most indications, the tuition guarantee is gone. Hopefully students won’t be so upset about it if they are made aware of where all that extra money is going.