Most of us had cause to celebrate when the Iowa Board of Regents approved a second tuition freeze for undergraduate students for the upcoming year. With student debt constantly climbing, a frozen tuition is one less thing to worry about.

It will be the second year in a row that Iowa’s state universities will enjoy the undergraduate tuition freeze, showing that state representatives are working to decrease (or at the very least, stabilize) the cost of higher education. The freeze hangs on lawmakers increasing state funding for these schools by 4 percent, which hopefully can be accomplished.

In Iowa, 24.2 percent of residents have bachelor degrees or higher, and in the nation it is 27.5 percent. Though only now hovering around a quarter of the population, that percentage will grow with each college generation.

Under the conditions of our modern economy and social pressures, more people than ever are entering college and vying for that higher degree. In terms of the tuition freeze, that means that more people than ever will be able to take advantage of the temporarily stabilized rates here in Iowa.

What it also means is that the value of a bachelor’s degree is ever so slightly decreasing. The more people get that their college degree, the harder it is to succeed in the post-collegiate job market.

As a result, many students are finding themselves pushed into graduate school, by necessity, desire, or ability. And certainly this is not a bad thing. Higher education averages can only mean good things for America, as the scholarly studies of graduate students and schools often return threefold the value of tuition.

However, it cannot be denied that an extra two, three, four or even five years of school gets to be a little bit pricey. Unfortunately, the recent tuition freeze enacted in Iowa is specifically for undergraduate students, with no allowance for those seeking even higher levels of knowledge.

In fact, graduate students can expect the opposite; resident grad students will see a 1.81 percent rise in tuition while out-of-state students will experience a rise as high as 3.2 percent. While these numbers are fairly small, when added on top of already-expensive tuition, it does not produce a happy outcome.

In order to stay competitive in a society that increasingly demands a college education, we should be at the very least trying to stabilize grad students costs as we have for resident undergraduate students.

Instead, more money than ever is being extracted from graduate students. The reasoning behind this increase is said to be heavier use of facility and faculty resources by graduate students. However, graduate schools have always been that way, and it makes no sense to punish students for it now (or at any point).

However much lawmakers and the Board of Regents try to make it sound like increased graduate tuition will improve their experience, it still rings false. If the increase is to accommodate specific expenses of different schools, then tuition increases should be specific to each school, accordingly.

This is already being done in part, as the architecture and veterinarian graduate programs at Iowa State are going to be more expensive to account for smaller classes, tools used, and other specifics of the programs. If this sort of customization were used across all graduate schools, then increased tuition would make sense.

However, it does not seem right to have sweeping tuition increases for all graduate programs for state universities in Iowa. This isn’t to say that graduate school shouldn’t be more expensive than undergraduate — more valuable degree, more value put in to get it. But if graduate schools are so substantially different that they have differing levels of tuition from undergraduate school, then each program’s tuition cost should be adjusted specifically to the cost of providing necessary resources.

As long as we are focusing on undergraduate affordability, we should push for graduate school to be attainable as well. The edge that grad school provides, though rarer than the bachelor’s degree, is becoming increasingly necessary in our educated society.