Imagine going to Panda Express for lunch and, at the register, the cashier says, “We’ve added 25 percent to your total to help pay for the food for the next person in line.” Would you be upset?

What if we told you that the Board of Regents and Iowa State University do the same thing with your tuition?

Student criticism of tuition and educational policy has been directed at the Iowa Legislature for cutting our funding. That legislature is only one part of a larger picture. The Board of Regents requires close scrutiny, too. Ultimately, it is them who raise tuition and set the policies for the administration of the universities.

Section 8.02(C)(5)(i) of the Board of Regents’ policy “requires that a minimum of 15 percent of gross tuition proceeds be set aside annually by each Regent university for student financial aid.” In other words, the Board of Regents requires that Iowa State take 15 percent of your tuition and give it to someone else.

The Regents report that “each university has exceeded [this] minimum requirement during the last several years.” To be specific, this year Iowa State took 23.5 percent of your tuition dollars and gave it to some other student.

The Regents call this “tuition set-aside,” and it’s been one of the best kept non-secrets in Iowa. They’ve been at it since 1989, too, taking 13 percent of student tuition at the time — a full 15 years before Regents policy actually began to require tuition set-asides in 2004.

According to the ISU Office of the Registrar, full-time, in-state, undergraduate tuition for this academic year is $3,204 per semester. At the current rate of set-aside, Iowa State kept $753 for someone else. That’s 1,506 of your dollars every year. Since 2004, when the tuition set-aside requirement began, Iowa’s college students have been over-charged out of approximately $1 billion.

It’s good to help others when we’re able. Helping fund the scholarship pool is fine but, with tuition costs rising annually, 23.5 percent seems like extortion.

Expect this to become a bigger issue. In an effort to become more transparent, the Regents is mandating that all of Iowa’s public universities start publishing the amount of tuition set-aside “in a prominently printed statement that appears … with the student’s tuition bill or billing statement,” according to an amendment to the Regents policy manual approved March 21.

As frustrating as tuition set-asides and tuition increases may be though, we must bear in mind that the Regents aren’t our enemies, and right or wrong, they are doing what they think is best. Their justification for set-asides is that Iowa doesn’t have a scholarship or grant fund the same way other states do, and so the universities essentially created such a fund to meet the unmet needs of some students.

The questions arising from the Regents’ desire to help others are important though, and we ought to ask them: Should Iowa have a better scholarship program? If Iowa did, could the Regents lower tuition by nearly a quarter? Or perhaps, is it right for one person to pay the tuition of another regardless of the latter’s need? Does everyone need to go to college in the first place? Should primary education be improved and restore college to a finishing institution, thus reducing college demand, slow tuition inflation and lessen the amount of student debt?

Even with the Regents’ good intentions, we’re talking about your money, and whoever is caretaker of that money is ultimately accountable to you and deserves your scrutiny, whether it be the Legislature, the Regents, or the folks in Beardshear.