How best to use Tennessee’s share of federal stimulus money for higher education and unemployment assistance unfortunately has become a matter of debate. Gov. Phil Bredesen rightly wants nearly $500 million in stimulus funds earmarked for higher education to be used to spare pending cuts in programs and faculty and to stave off excessive tuition increases. He also wants to use $141 million, as intended by Washington, to extend state unemployment benefits.

His guidance is sound. Yet he’s getting opposition from some university board members who want to see double-digit tuition increases. And Republican legislators, fearing higher unemployment taxes in future years, are unreasonably opposing acceptance of extra unemployment aid for the increasing number of Tennesseans who are falling out of work.

There’s room on the tuition issue for a reasonable compromise. But Republicans’ stingy objection to using supplemental unemployment funding to help Tennessee’s rising jobless population is hard to fathom.

Even before Gov. Bredesen knew how much money the stimulus bill would contain for higher education, he was jawboning against excessive tuition hikes on Tennessee’s strapped college students. He had advised the state’s two main university boards — one oversees the University of Tennessee system, the other controls the universities and community and technical colleges administered by the Board of Regents — to minimize tuition increases during the recession as much as possible.

Given the trend lines for declining tax revenue, the governor had projected in February that cuts totaling $181 million would have to be made in higher education this year. UT’s board and the Regent’s board had by that time compiled lists of cuts that would have eliminated scores of programs and hundreds of classes and teaching positions.

Were those cuts to be imposed, officials and students alike recognized that the result would not just be reduced curriculum and fewer but larger classes. The also would mean decreased access to classes needed by students to complete their degrees. Receipt of the $500 million in stimulus funding for higher education would seem to have alleviated that dilemma over the next two years, and lessened the immediate need for higher tuition.

But it hasn’t. Some UT board trustees are still pitching for sharply higher tuition increases. UT board member Don Stansbury says he would consider a 10-to-11-percent tuition increase to fix the system with a source of funding that, he contends, would assure UT’s ability to maintain quality curriculum and adequate faculty.

He argues that UT’s tuition rate of $6,250 a year at the Knoxville campus can and should be raised because it is well below the average $6,907 charged at peer institutions in the South. Figures released by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission show UTK ranks 8th lowest among 13 peer institutions in the Southeast. Similarly, UTC, with a tuition of $5,310, is fifth lowest in its peer group of 13 colleges in the Southeast, while UT-Martin is the 10th lowest its peer group. Room and board, of course, can spike a student’s overall to around $20,000 a year.

Mr. Stansbury told this newspaper recently that the fact UTK, UTC and UT-Martin are each rated in various reports as among the nation’s best values in higher education because their tuitions are relatively low means they are “too cheap.” Pricing them upwards, he claims, would ensure their sustainability at a higher level of performance.

Regardless, socking strapped students with higher tuition rates in the middle of what will soon become the longest recession since 1929 would hurt families. Students already are graduating with an average of more than $18,000 in debt. There’s no sense piling on larger debt when the average Tennessee family is already vulnerable to recession and increasingly unable to foot college bills.

The squabble over use of supplemental unemployment funds is similarly heartless. Gov. Bredesen was initially apprehensive that acceptance of the supplement would spur an increase in Tennessee’s unemployment tax when the stimulus funds run out in two years. He has since decided that the state can afford a slight bump in two years, and that the tradeoff in extending aid to jobless families is too vital to be ignored.

Common sense on both issues is in the governor’s favor. Tennessee is already among the states with the lowest college graduation rates. It’s also among states whose families earn too little to bypass unemployment aid for families squeezed and shaken by unemployment. Rich college administrators and Republicans who don’t need unemployment help should be able to understand the larger problems.