Tuition costs keep going up for University of Illinois students.

Last year, University of Illinois trustees raised yearly tuition by 9.5 percent. This year, they raised it for students enrolling in the fall by 6.9 percent.

If those numbers don't get your attention, consider that in real dollars they mean UI freshman will pay $11,104 at the local campus. Their counterparts in Springfield ($8,760) and Chicago ($9,764) will be paying less but still a goodly sum for a year's tuition.

The alleged good news for this year's freshman is that state law requires they pay the same amount for four years, giving them price certainty.

But the bad news is that as tuition costs continue to soar some students are being priced out of the market at least at the UI and probably at other public institutions as well.

Indeed, education costs are becoming so high that people have started to speculate about when the education bubble like the tech bubble and the real estate bubble will burst and what that will mean for institutions of higher education.

This, of course, has become an old story. UI tuition has been going up for years, just as state support has declined for years. UI officials have stated repeatedly that they have to get the money to run the institution from somewhere and if the state cannot meet its obligations students must, of necessity, be asked to pay more for their education.

There is no doubt that the UI has tried to mitigate the pain for students. Fundraising has become a top priority, and UI alumni have been more than gracious in supporting a wide variety of education programs, endowed professorships and building projects across the university. The UI also has aggressively sought and won grant support for research projects, and that has become a major source of revenue for university overhead.

But still there's not enough money to go around, particularly now that the state of Illinois has spent itself into a tremendous hole and has no choice but to cut spending to bring its budget deficit and crushing debt under control.

Unfortunately, the future does not look bright as it relates to tuition cost. UI officials have tried to ease the pain by noting they offer generous financial aid packages for needy students. But those packages are underwritten, at least in part, by the tuition paid by regular students, a sum increasingly difficult to bear.

The UI was created to provide a top-flight institution for the children of average Illinois citizens. Over the decades, it's become an elite educational institution. But it's increasingly in danger of becoming an institution only the financial elite can afford.