Urbana, Ill. — THIS spring my friend’s daughter received exciting news: She had been accepted to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It’s our hometown campus, but also the state’s flagship public university and one of the best research institutions in the country.

My friend is a single mom with a few part-time jobs; finances are tight in her house. But the university offered them a decent financial aid package, one that would have made it possible for her daughter to attend. If, that is, it was an offer they could count on. But they couldn’t. The financial aid letter clearly stated that their award was “contingent upon continued funding” from the state, and might need to be “reduced or rescinded,” depending on what happened in Springfield, the state capital.

Ah, Springfield.

Our lawmakers have spent the last year locked in a staggering budget impasse, with no end in sight. The state is deep in debt, with mountains of unpaid bills, while the Democratic-led Legislature and the Republican governor fight a war of attrition. Another deadline just blew by this week: May 31 was the last official day of the legislative session. Still no budget. Any proposal now needs a three-fifths majority to pass, an even higher bar. Meanwhile, the collateral damage is swirling like sand in a windstorm.

Take state-funded Monetary Award Program grants. Normally awarded by both public and private schools throughout the state, these need-based grants went unfunded for nine straight months, from July to April. Most schools temporarily floated funds to cover the gap, but the money was running dry, causing some schools to either renege on grants they had offered, or even, in the case of Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology, to ask students to pay back the aid they had already received.