Public colleges often blame their tuition increases on state lawmakers who the colleges say have not given them enough extra money to keep up with rising costs. This year, many states' public colleges received sizable infusions of public money and still raised tuition. In nearly half of the states, both state appropriations for higher education and public-college tuitions rose by 5 percent or more, substantially faster than inflation. In more than a dozen of the states where tuition did not rise as much, public colleges had little say over the matter because lawmakers had passed legislation limiting how much such institutions could raise tuition or freezing tuition at current levels. Explanations for why public colleges continued to increase tuition despite getting more tax-dollar support vary from state to state. In some states, tuition has continued to rise because public colleges are still repairing the damage done to their budgets during the last economic downturn. In other states, public colleges are increasing tuition to pay for efforts, such as increasing faculty salaries, to become more competitive. Tuition spiked in some states as a result of policies intended to provide students with tuition relief, such as legislation that guarantees students entering public colleges as freshmen that their tuition bills will not grow over the next four years. Some public colleges are experimenting with ways to charge students varying amounts based on the actual cost of educating them in their field of study. Colleges do that by charging additional fees for certain courses where the cost of instruction is especially high. Critics worry, however, that such policies will price students out of particular programs and curtail minority enrollments in certain fields. As the price of attending public colleges continues to climb, university officials say they sense an alienation from their state legislators. "It's easy to understand why legislators feel like they're pouring more and more money into it, but campuses feel like they don't have more money," says a College Board senior policy analyst. "I don't think it's that campuses don't care about keeping tuition down. They are also intensely aware of how much it costs to carry on this operation in a reasonable way."