It's a pretty reliable formula: When state support for higher education goes down, tuition goes up.

How families dealing with a poor economy and universities struggling with state budget cuts will be able to pay rising bills in the coming years was taken up Wednesday by the General Assembly House Appropriations Committee.

Part of an annual two-day retreat, the meeting was held at the Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center in preparation for January's legislative session.

Wednesday's hour-long session on higher education affordability didn't address many specifics but raised issues that could be revisited in January, such as changes to the state's Tuition Moderation Incentive Fund and ideas about making financial aid more effective.

Tony Maggio, a fiscal analyst with the committee, gave a presentation that included a brief history of the ups and downs of state general fund support for higher education -- from tuition freezes and rollbacks in the 1990s that coincided with more state spending to the budget cuts of 2002 and 2003 that foreshadowed steep tuition increases.

If higher education continues to be hit with budget cuts, tuition bills may once again be on the rise in a state that already struggles to enroll low-income students into four-year programs.

Public universities have suffered midyear budget cuts, along with other state agencies, for the past two years. Next month, Gov. Tim Kaine is expected to announce another round of cuts for the upcoming fiscal year to deal with an anticipated $1.5 billion revenue shortfall.

Cuts to higher education made up 51 percent of the $93.2 million in budget reductions to state agencies Kaine announced in October.

Ralph Byers, executive director of government relations at Virginia Tech, was encouraged that the delegates recognized this point during Wednesday's discussion.

"There is a general awareness that higher education has borne a disproportionate cut," he said. "I don't think anybody's going to be able to escape cuts, but I do think a sensitivity is needed. ... The best way to hold tuition down is with general fund support."

Maggio did not let universities off the hook in his presentation.

He pointed out that general fund support per student in Virginia has grown by about 60 percent since 1996 and warned against costly "mission drift" when universities implement new programs beyond their historical role to garner prestige. He also said that improvements to amenities in dining and residence halls as well as athletics facilities had resulted in escalating student fees.

But Virginia ranks 36th in the nation in percentage of taxable income spent on higher education, according to a report in Postsecondary Education Opportunity, a public policy research newsletter.

And state funding as a percentage of public university budgets has been dropping steadily for several years. Part of the percentage decrease is the result of growing university budgets, but state funding in real dollars at Virginia universities was just recovering to the 2002 level last year when another round of cuts set it back.

In an attempt to mitigate tuition increases, the state implemented the Tuition Moderation Incentive Fund in 2007, a pool of money designed to reward public universities that kept tuition increases low.

Every public university in the state qualified for the fund in 2007. But this year, with one budget cut behind them and more on the horizon, several large universities did not comply, including Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University and the state community college system. Tech raised tuition and fees for in-state undergraduates by 10.8 percent this year.

Maggio gave several reasons for the ineffectiveness of the program this year, including a lack of a guarantee that those funds would be available in future years and the simple fact that universities were able to generate more funds through tuition increases than by receiving the incentive.

He said there may be a need to rework the way funds are awarded to take into account circumstances at specific universities rather than the current one-size-fits-all approach.

Delegates also discussed the creation of a more centralized state financial aid program. Virginia distributes its financial aid to institutions, which then allocate it among students. Maggio brought up the option of awarding aid directly to students based on family income, size and type of institution.

Dan LaVista, executive director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, liked the idea of giving students and families a clearer picture of the real cost of attending college.

Virginia is among the worst states in the nation for enrolling low-income students in its four-year public universities, LaVista said. He said he is hopeful that getting the word out to low-income families that college is possible, despite the difficult economic situation, will go a long way toward changing that.

"The tuition and fees numbers need to be reliable," he said.