The near guarantee of at least a 5.8 percent tuition increase for next year has university officials scrambling to make sure the state allocates all funding that Penn State has requested so the hike is not higher.

However, this feat has not been achieved in several years.

The administration has requested $344.5 million from the Pennsylvania legislature, an allocation that will be coupled with the tuition increase to cover university expenses for next year.

To ensure the state does not give less than this amount, President Graham Spanier unveiled a plan for a study to prove to Pennsylvania authorities that Penn State deserves funding. We thank Spanier and the Board of Trustees for asking the state for the 2000-01 level of funding. And the study is a good idea, in that anything that might keep our funding levels steady or increase them must be pursued. But the fact that a study is needed to prove the university is important to the Commonwealth is truly sad. No other university and few other entities do more for the general public at large than Penn State. Just a short list.

Farmers in Pennsylvania -- who up until a few years ago represented the largest portion of our economy -- receive significant technical support through the university's Cooperative Extension services, at low cost.

Not to mention the World Campus, a program that can allow anyone who lives anywhere to get a college degree. State authorities should fully realize how big the issue of worker retraining really is and could definitely become due to outsourcing.

The writing will quickly be on the wall that having a mechanism to give single mothers struggling with waitress jobs or blue-collar fathers who lost jobs at the factory will be a definite plus. Penn State also has at least 65,000 of the Commonwealth's students in classrooms during any given year. The state considers those minor details in the scheme of life. The administration says the state government needs this to be qualified, quantified and paper-pushed before it realizes the obvious.

Even sadder, it probably won't work. But the move by the administration is at least to be supported. Students, if you want increased funding to Penn State, we need to find who in the state legislature supports upping the dollars coming our way. We need to let our voice be heard in November, and make this an issue.

Until then, we can only hold our breath that the state legislature realizes the obvious: Increasing funding to Penn State will only help the quality of life in Pennsylvania.