AT A RECENT State Budget and Control Board meeting, Gov. Mark Sanford hinted that he will push for dramatic changes in the state’s 33 colleges and universities. Such reform and restructuring are long overdue, and should be accomplished to the overall benefit of a better-educated populace in South Carolina.

Unfortunately at that same meeting, this movement toward positive change took a couple of steps back, one of them serious and one of them trifling.

The board signed off on the creation of a Pawleys Island campus for Coastal Carolina University, despite Gov. Sanford’s objection. It seems no one in higher education will be happy until every school is a college, every college is a university, every university has branch campuses and every town gets one of them.

The argument goes that we owe our people the access to higher learning that this sprawling system provides. However, it has yet to be proved that this growing hydra really solves that problem. It may be contributing to some of the ills in education by making our system more expensive. We don’t have any educational dollars to waste, particularly in the present budget.

The state is over-extended in its support for higher education, and the signs of stress are clear. Look at the unprecedented tuition spikes at state colleges. They came about because state lawmakers cannot adequately support college and university operations now.

Lawmakers take political cover from these tuition increases in the form of lottery-funded scholarships that help some families, sometime. Even if you support such a regressive revenue source as a lottery, which we don’t, you have to question whether supplementing tuition increases in a sprawling system is the best use of those funds.

We hope to see Gov. Sanford bring a more rational approach to higher education and that the Legislature will support him. He has called for the strong central governing authority of a board of regents. That would be a great step forward, particularly if accompanied by some true restructuring that maintains the values of access and excellence in our system.

Meanwhile, Gov. Sanford won another higher education vote at Budget and Control Board, although it was a dubious victory. The governor blocked $200,000 in repairs to the USC president’s mansion. He argued that the job — replacement of water and steam lines — should be performed by inmates at a lower cost.

That’s just silly. We’re all for inmates maintaining the grounds or performing routine upkeep at public facilities, when they are qualified and can be properly supervised. Work replacing utilities should be performed by skilled laborers under supervision of licensed contractors. That’s particularly true on the historic Horseshoe, where repairs must be done right.

No doubt, USC will figure out another way to have its work done and Gov. Sanford will have stirred up a hornet’s nest over something that doesn’t matter in the big picture. We would have preferred to see the governor use his political capital to win the bigger fight of the day.

Long-term, and most important, this needless expansion of our higher education system has got to stop, and be reined back. A state of 4 million people simply does not need the number of college and university campuses we are supporting now.