Out-of-control costs are driving public universities toward adopting or weighing such measures as raising tuition closer to private-university levels, raising the number of students paying nonresident tuition and fees, and eliminating marginal programs.

Columnist Michael Hiltzik joins a host of others whose heads have long been buried in the sand in lamenting the consideration of such remedies, specifically, at the University of California. He decries them as so many steps toward dread “privatization” and subjugating public campuses to “market forces.”

In the course of this lamentation Hiltzik makes a belated admission rarely heard: “There’s no question,” he writes, “that some of UC’s problems are of its own making. It waited too long to cut administrative spending, try to get its retirement costs under control and reexamine its basic educational model.”

What’s more, even UC president Mark Yudof — better late than never – concurs, saying ”There’s some truth to the claim that we’d be able to weather this better had we started five or six years ago.”

As it happened, exactly six years ago, I (while a trustee of the State University of New York) publicly urged SUNY, the nation’s largest public university, to prepare for the gathering storm. Writing in the New York Post, I urged the university “to truly rethink — fundamentally restructure — the university’s financial operations and organization.”

Although my advocacy of such restructuring fell on deaf ears, its specific components remain relevant to today’s financial crisis in public universities. They include:

An increase in the teaching productivity of full-time faculty who are not engaged in service and/or serious and peer-reviewed research.

Consolidating academic programs, both within and among campuses, that serve few students and eliminating programs and courses of questionable value — all the while protecting and enhancing those programs essential to SUNY’s core undergraduate mission and to each campus’ individual missions;

Far greater use of interactive online learning. For example, SUNY’s Distinguished Teaching Professors could create excellent, cost-efficient general-education courses and courseware to serve students across the system. When supplemented by faculty instruction on-campus, this blended approach could achieve higher-quality instruction at lower cost.

Tightening time-to-degree requirements. In 1995, the SUNY Board observed that many students continue to get state support while earning credits that far exceed their degree requirements. . . . This represents an expensive delay that deficit-plagued states such as New York should try to shorten.

These reforms, even more necessary now, would significantly increase cost-effectiveness in the SUNY system as well as at other public universities. As I concluded in 2004, they would not just protect access to these campuses, but enhance it – while ensuring high-quality education. Moreover, better development and use of interactive on-line learning would provide even greater access than is available now.