Wednesday, the Iowa Board of Regents created another episode in the saga of tuition set-asides.

For those of you unfamiliar with the issue, an open secret came into public view this spring. That secret is the practice among Iowa’s Regents universities to assign a certain percentage of tuition paid by students to financial aid received by other students. In essence, the practice amounts to charging everyone a higher rate to subsidize the education of other students.

In response to public outcry, the Regents developed a committee to eliminate the practice within five years; Wednesday, the board proposed one step toward doing away with set-asides.

That proposal is that the state of Iowa would, next year, appropriate $39.5 million to ease Iowa’s public universities out of the program (last year, about $144 million was reserved from tuition at the three public universities). Funding would increase yearly to fully get rid of the program and tuition would be reduced “by a rate commensurate with the amount of additional state” appropriations.

There is, however, a looming question.

What if the legislature refuses?

Complaints abound that the state should not subsidize private goods, even higher education. But now is an opportune time for the legislature to reassert its authority over higher education and guide it toward public ends. Education, after all, especially at public schools and especially at land-grant schools such as Iowa State, is about more than the private benefits of the student.

Strings are always attached to gifts of money; why can the state legislature not mandate that, with its additional appropriations, Iowa’s public universities develop a more public outlook? Such was Rep. Justin Morrill’s intention when he devised his plan for the land-grant colleges.

The genius of his idea was that, rather than giving something for nothing, the land-grant colleges act provided both the kind of education necessary to put large numbers of ordinary Americans to work as well as grow the economy and to serve the civic world. If the state is going to pay, the state should receive a benefit. The state should ensure that people are receiving both training for the world of work and are equipped with the knowledge and perspective necessary to make educated political decisions that will serve the public’s advantage, not their own.

The Regents’ aim of eliminating tuition set-asides and replacing them with state funding presents an opportunity to confront the simmering debate that we have danced around for years: What kinds of education should government support?

Either way, however, no real solution will materialize until there is a public debate — including a legislative debate, from subcommittee to the full House and Senate, among all legislators, regardless of party and experience — about what is the nature of public higher education. Until that time, every appropriation is a stop-gap measure that fails to build any kind of future.

Incidentally, it is through education that the future is secured.