Penn State already receives some of the lowest levels of state funding of public universities, Penn State President Graham Spanier told state legislators Tuesday.

Spanier said proposed cuts in state appropriations for next year will make it even harder for the university to compete with peer schools. Gov. Mark Schweiker's budget plan allots Penn State $318 million for the next academic year, $17 million less than this year's amount.

"The governor's proposed decrease . . . will turn back the clock on educational progress in Pennsylvania," Spanier said.

On Tuesday, Spanier went before state legislators — who will decide on the budgeted amount later this year — in two hearings to argue the case for a larger appropriation. One of Spanier's main arguments was that the difference in funding will have to be made up through sharp tuition increases.

"We are now at the point where we should no longer expect the president, no matter how sound his case . . . to do the nearly impossible," said University Faculty Senate Chair John Nichols during Tuesday's Faculty Senate meeting, referring to Spanier's ability to gain sufficient funds from the legislature.

Although Penn State is in the top 50 national universities, according to U.S. News and World Report's annual rankings, it is 81st in financial resources, meaning the university is doing more with less.

It is 188th in faculty resources, a measurement that includes salaries for faculty. Spanier told legislators that Penn State must be able to raise faculty pay rates so it can be on par with private universities and other schools with which it competes for students. If more money for this does not come from the state, it will have to come from tuition, he said.

Penn State has the widest gap between academic quality and financial resources of any school in the Big Ten, Nichols said. He said the benefit is that the university operates efficiently, but the drawback is that funding cuts make it even tougher to keep quality levels high.

Nichols said under-funding of Penn State has been going on since its founding, citing how the land-grant Agricultural College of Pennsylvania went into debt soon after its creation.

"Penn State has never, does not now, and probably never will receive sufficient state funding," Nichols said.

In response to midyear budget freezes and the possibility of tuition increases, Spanier created a Tuition Task Force to report on the options the university has for using tuition, one of its two main income sources. The official report of the task force is expected at the end of this academic year, and it will be presented to the Faculty Senate and the Penn State Board of Trustees.

Members of the task force include a faculty and student representative, Penn State administrators and budget executives.

"We're considering all sorts of options," said Rodney Erickson, executive vice president and provost, who chairs the task force.

The group plans to have a report outlining tuition options and their pros and cons ready in April. The Board of Trustees will discuss the findings formally at its May meeting, and it will vote on tuition rates at the July meeting.

The task force is studying how some other schools are dealing with their budget cuts. Ohio State University has proposed a phase-in tuition plan. Incoming students would have to pay a higher tuition charge than current students, who would see a 9 percent increase from this year's rate. The incoming Ohio State students would pay a rate increased by 19 percent under the plan.

Erickson said there are many differences in how Penn State and other Big Ten schools deal with tuition mainly because other schools get so much more state funding.

For instance, Penn State's College of Medicine comes in last for state funding out of the 75 public medical schools nationwide. Funding for the Hershey Medical Center is well below the average for similar operations, and Erickson said that if Penn State's funding from the state came close to average, it would change budget conditions drastically.

"We don't need to be No. 1 in funding," he said. "If we could get up (to) the average . . . we'd be sitting pretty."