STATE LEADERS appear to be uniting around a plan to slow the rate of tuition increases that has nearly doubled the cost of going to college in South Carolina in the past six years.

That’s good news in a state where tuition at four-year colleges is 25 percent above the national average, and growing 50 percent faster than rates nationally.

The bad news is that their plan — simply to cap tuition increases — does nothing to address the main problems that are driving tuition up. It is likely to do at least as much harm as good, if not more.

The idea behind caps is that tuition is rising to support colleges’ profligate spending. We feel sure there are excesses, and they should be eliminated.

But the larger problem is the Legislature, which created a wasteful, duplicative system and then refused to fund it adequately.

When lawmakers slashed college funding early in this decade, the schools had two choices: Make cuts, or raise tuition. Tuition was a particularly obvious choice at Clemson and USC, which are serving our state well by trying to raise quality and their national standings.

Gov. Mark Sanford notes that the technical college system has done a much better job keeping higher education affordable, which he attributes to the fact that it is a system, governed by a strong centralized board, rather than being a collection of independent fiefdoms that do pretty much whatever they want.

But while he correctly argues that a similar oversight system for four-year colleges and universities would help control those costs, he has joined the chorus of leaders calling for the simplistic tuition cap “solution.”

A cap will indeed slow the growth of tuition. But it will also lead to a reduction in quality at some schools, because the colleges simply do not have the power to change the factors that cause the state to get less bang than it should for its higher ed buck.

Clemson can’t shut down two-year state colleges that duplicate nearby technical colleges. Short of closing its own doors, USC can’t do anything about the fact that our tiny state operates 33 colleges on 79 campuses. S.C. State can’t rein in the number of duplicative programs in those colleges. And MUSC can’t eliminate the state’s second medical school.

The General Assembly could do any or all of those things, and it should try some of them before punishing the colleges for its own bad decisions. But a better solution would be to create a board of regents — like the ones that operate in North Carolina and other states that do have world-class colleges — and give it the power to tackle the duplication itself.

A board of regents could provide that systemic vision that is so sorely lacking. The way things work now, each college (and sometimes each legislator) determines what’s best for a given college, or community. What we need is a body that can determine how many teachers and nurses and engineers and doctors our state needs, and how many programs we need to train those people, and where they should be located. We need a body that can determine how to balance the need for top-flight schools that can keep and attract the best and brightest against the need to make a college education available for every South Carolinian who seeks one. That’s where the big savings are. And those are the decisions that ultimately will make a college education affordable, while making it worth the cost.