Benjamin Franklin once quipped that nothing in this world is certain except death and taxes. In the realm of public education, there’s another certainty: An annual battle over budgets usually results in fee hikes and stalled labor negotiations.

Such a battle is afoot at the California State University, where the CSU trustees recently approved a 4-percent pay raise for the university’s top executives — even as CSU students face a 10-percent fee hike for the coming academic year.

The trustees’ rationale for the salary increases is about as new as the sun. To attract and retain the most talented administrators, the reasoning goes, executive salaries must remain competitive with private industry. This is a worthy goal: Attracting (and keeping) the most capable and dynamic administrators should be a priority of any university that strives to stay on the cutting edge of education.

But for all the analogies that can be drawn between California universities and the private sector, the primary mission of public universities remains the same: to educate a broad swath of the public. This is particularly true of the CSU system, which is meant to educate the top third of California students under the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education. With very little new aid coming from Washington next year, many potential students may find themselves in the lurch come fall. What good are the brightest faculty and the most competent administrators if students can’t afford tuition?

The CSU trustees would save themselves a lot of grief if executive salary increases were matched with commensurate contributions to student financial aid. As Clark Kerr, a former president of the University of California, noted when the Master Plan was drafted, public educators must balance a quality curriculum with broad accessibility. Let’s make sure accessibility doesn’t stay on the back burner.