Any good retailer knows what it has to do when demand is strong and when production costs go up: Jack up the prices. The ISU athletic department is a good retailer. Students bought 7,000 student season football tickets last fall, the largest number during the Dan McCarney era at Iowa State — a sellout figure, in fact. And, athletics is getting less and giving more to the university yet again, so the bargain-basement price for football is jumping from $65 to $75.

Iowa State will play one fewer home game in 2004 than it did in 2003, and the jump of about $3 in the per-game price for students probably seems a pretty substantial hit when it’s stacked with a myriad of other surging fees.

Fans often make the mistake of equating the quantity of the admission price with the quality of the product on the field. You pay for the reliables of your Jack Trice Stadium/Hilton Coliseum/elsewhere experiences: A place to sit or stand, a predetermined duration of athletic competition, newly reconstructed restrooms and concession stands — and ISU athletes, whose tuition costs (paid by the athletic department) go up at the same rate as yours.

Read: Your extra money doesn’t go to “support” more winless conference football seasons, any more than it assures that the next Curtis Stinson will decide to call Ames a temporary home.

People will buy the tickets. Cyclone fanatics will also purchase some of the other student packages the athletic department offers: a $95 men’s basketball ticket (up from $80 a year ago), $30 women’s basketball passes and the $10 Olympic sports pass (both rates unchanged).

That also leaves the all-sport pass, which sees this fall a 12 percent price increase (from $165 to $185). This creation has been suckering unassuming freshmen (and slow-learning upperclassmen) for some time now. You know the drill — “Every single ISU sporting event for this low, low price? How can I turn it down?”

Eight months, a healthy dose of academic reality and only a couple basketball games later, you realize you dropped more than $150 on just a few sporting events.

All that’s immaterial to our point, though — the higher prices should come as a surprise to nobody, just as this year’s tuition and fee hikes surprise nobody with even a tenuous grasp on reality. The athletic department with the Big 12’s smallest operating budget needs money too, just as badly as any other university department.

We hope there’s no uninformed talk about the supposed unholiness of paying more for the bad football of a year ago. The quality of the Cyclone team will be determined on the field — with students in the stands — this fall, just like always.