Ever wonder why your life seems to be a ceaseless series of crises? Now, we’re not speaking to all of you — after all, they really ARE out to get a few people around here.

But for the rest, a little bit of paranoia, a few (or many) trips to student counseling, some angry and vaguely principled shouting and protesting about … something, a nervous breakdown — it’s to be forgiven.

What we love most about college — that it’s the first adventure into adulthood — also tends to make us get bent out of shape about every little thing, to blow out of proportion every campus happening, to write letters to the Daily about every unsolicited free handout of condoms or New Testaments.

The upshot of all this is that students’ annual (or more frequent) protestations about high tuition charges and fees and how nobody has ever had it worse than us are easy to dismiss as the cute but uninformed lamentations of young’uns untrained in the ways of things.

“You think your finances are tough now?” we’re told. “Wait until you get into the real world!”

And we dig deep and shell out the cash for the next year of schooling, unless that’s impossible and we’re forced to quit. And so on, ad infinitum.

This semester, though, things are looking different. And they’re looking up.

We’re not (quite) self-important enough to think a plan approved last week to get Iowa State, Iowa and Northern Iowa an extra $40 million annually for the next four years had any link to student unrest over tuition. But the Board of Regents is taking the pathetic financial standing of its universities (and, indirectly, their students) very seriously.

Make no mistake — this money, if granted by the Legislature, won’t come close to creating a healthy higher education economy in Iowa. But neither will it be a meaningless Band-Aid. This is a substantial amount of cash the regents have found the nerve to ask for — nearly an 8 percent increase on state appropriations for the regents schools this year.

That “if granted by the Legislature” is a pretty key clause. There’s nothing to suggest the Statehouse will change its inclination against granting even marginally sufficient funds for higher education. Yet another reason to be involved in local politics this fall — $40 million could hang in the balance of each vote.

But that decision is months down the road. For now, we’d like to extend our gratefulness to the Board of Regents for taking a stand, for making a serious attempt at restoring some semblance of an operating budget and, it follows, at bettering the quality of its schools.

We would all like to have one fewer crisis.