Brain drain is decimating the business college. Unable to replace 21 lost faculty members and with his college the verge of losing its top 25 national ranking, dean Mark Zupan knows it's time for drastic measures.

Zupan's call for a $500 fee for in-state business students and a $1,000 fee for out-of-state business students is a reasonable step if the Eller College of Business and Public Administration has hopes of maintaining its top national ranking.

Zupan is the most vocal dean advocating differentiated tuition for individual colleges, and hopes in-state tuition at Eller will eventually be raised to $6,300, the average cost for the nation's top 20 public business colleges.

A few other college heads, including those from engineering and fine arts, have also voiced support for differentiated tuition, but are hesitant to see it coupled with a large, university-wide tuition hike.

Ideally, all in-state students who could afford to, not just those in the business college, would be paying $6,300. But too many Arizonans interpret a state Constitution clause that says higher education should be "as nearly free as possible" as meaning "Let's make higher education so cheap that we can only afford to pay our professors in popcorn shrimp." So a university-wide tuition rate that high isn't even worth wishing for yet.

Still, Zupan's plan is a step in the right direction. It recognizes that a university education, especially at one of the nation's top business colleges, is a commodity that necessarily carries a high price tag.

As President Pete Likins has insisted during every discussion of tuition or fee hikes, an increase in financial aid must be coupled with the new fee. Nobody who meets the entrance requirements should be excluded from getting an education because they can't afford it. Zupan agrees, and has said that 15 percent of the money from a fee increase would go toward financial aid.

Zupan should be lauded for his plan, and administrators and the Arizona Board of Regents should approve necessary rule changes that would allow differentiated tuition to become reality.