Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is on to something when he complains about recent tuition increases at the University of Texas at Austin and other public universities, including the University of Houston. He and state Sen. Kel Seliger, the Amarillo Republican who chairs the Senate Higher Education Committee, sent a letter to public university presidents and chancellors last week decrying the increased financial burden students and their families will have to bear. Meanwhile, Gov. Greg Abbott has convened a tri-agency task force charged with studying how to make college more affordable and how to help students enter the workforce more quickly with marketable skills.

We applaud both efforts, and we look both to state government and to public higher education for solutions. One place to start is to return tuition rate-setting to the Legislature.

Lawmakers relinquished control in 2003. Since then, tuition at Texas colleges and universities has more than doubled and fees have continued to spiral upward, in part because those same lawmakers who handed over rate-setting powers also have consistently cut state funding. That way, they can complain about rising costs and the increasing burden of student debt without taking responsibility for resolving the problems.

“Thirteen years ago the governor and legislative leaders decided to abdicate their responsibility to adequately invest in educational opportunities for Texas families and passed the buck to our universities,” state Sen. Rodney Ellis told the Chronicle via e-mail last week. As a result, we’ve effectively priced the opportunity for higher education, and access to the American dream, out of reach for numerous working and middle-class families across the state.”

The Houston Democrat was one of several lawmakers from both parties who filed legislation last year that would either have capped tuition increases or put the Legislature back in control. The legislation went nowhere, although Ellis intends to keep pushing.

There was a time when lawmakers really meant it when they speechified about education being an investment in the nation’s future. In Texas, and elsewhere, that commitment has waned. For example, 25 years ago, for every dollar a student paid in tuition at a University of Texas System institution, the state provided more than $4 in funding. That figure is now down to less than 35 cents.

The Legislature reduced funding to UT by $92 million in the 2012-13 biennium. Although lawmakers have since restored $50 million, that’s still quite a gap. Patrick and friends can’t simply blame the universities.

“We’ve spent years blaming schools for doing what they had to do to keep their doors open,” Ellis said. “It is time to put the horse back in the barn and require the Legislature to do the job they were elected by the people to do - invest in our universities at a level necessary to ensure they provide the quality education that Texans deserve at a cost Texas families can afford.”

The universities aren’t blameless. State Sen. Charles Schwertner, R-Georgetown, noted recently that the average resident undergraduate at UT-Austin can now expect to pay $304 more than last year; at both Texas A&M and UH, it’s $208 more. Schwertner blames, in part, what he calls “academic one-upmanship.” “Each new program, building, administrator or faculty member comes with a price tag,” he wrote in the Texas Tribune recently. “Some costs are modest, others dramatic, but all end up on the bottom line of a student’s tuition statement.”

Whether it’s locking in tuition rates for students who finish in four years; curtailing excessive bonus enticements for all-star teachers and researchers; resisting the urge to build, build, build; empowering the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board as it looks for ways to eliminate unnecessary duplication, colleges and universities have a responsibility as public institutions. In Patrick’s words, they “must identify ways to make college education more affordable for students and families across Texas rather than identifying how much they can increase tuition.”