The Editorial Board, USA TODAY

College costs have risen so fast for so long — from about $1,600 a year at a four-year public college in 1973 to more than $18,000 in 2013 — that schools brag when tuition rises by less than the customary amount.

Last fall, a trade group for private colleges crowed about a hike of 3.6%, in a time of dormant inflation. Public colleges and universities boasted that tuition and fees rose at "the slowest rate in over 30 years."

You'd think that freezing tuition or — heaven forbid — cutting it was impossible.

In fact, it isn't. Just ask Mitch Daniels, a former federal budget director and Indiana governor who froze tuition at Purdue University after taking over as president in January 2013.

On Friday, Daniels will ask trustees to continue the freeze into a third year. In-state students will pay $10,000 through the 2015-16 school year and out-of-staters $28,794.

This, says Daniels, "turned out not to be terribly hard to do." He asked school leaders to shift their thinking. "Instead of asking our students' families to adjust their budgets to our desired spending, let's try to adjust our spending to their budgets," he told the USA TODAY Editorial Board.

There was no secret sauce, just a little sensible pruning that would be ordinary in the business world but seems alien in much of academia, where a steady flow of federal aid guarantees a steady flow of students at seemingly any price. Never mind that they're left mired in debt, much of which will never be repaid, burdening the students, their families, taxpayers and the economy all at the same time.

Among the cost-cutting measures Purdue has adopted:

It added higher-deductible health care plans that save the school money and make employees more cost-conscious.

It combined some administrative jobs and eliminated others.

Editorial Board excerpt: Purdue President Mitch Daniels on cost-saving measures

It cut food service costs by moving to volume purchasing and hiring part-time students to do some jobs held by full-time employees.

Too many colleges, Daniels says, have engaged in an arms race to attract students with expensive amenities such as gourmet meals. "If you haven't been on a college campus lately, you wouldn't recognize it," he says. "The food (is) supposed to be standard and bad. … I say to my students, 'Do you guys understand that higher ed has been around for a millennium and, until the last few years, every college student everywhere hated the food?'"

Purdue has some company in cost-containment, including public colleges in Minnesota, Iowa and Missouri that will freeze in-state tuition at this year's level next fall, according to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. But the field is not exactly crowded.

Public colleges blame rising tuition on drastic drops in state government funding over the past decade, particularly since the recession in 2009, but they are not the whole story. And they are no excuse for private colleges that jack up costs year after year.

Purdue is showing it doesn't have to be that way. Perhaps Daniels should teach an online course for college administrators. Call it Belt Tightening 101.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff.