Deep within the Senate's higher ed funding bill is a provision that has bounced around the state Capitol for years.

Lawmakers want to make students who take too long to complete their bachelor's degrees pay for their inefficiencies:

The incentive? Students would have to pay a 50 percent surcharge on all credit hours beyond 120 percent of the hours they need to complete their degrees. It would begin with the students who enroll in the fall.

Independent Tallahassee reporter Gary Fineout (formerly of the Miami Herald) notes in his blog that state auditors have found students took nearly 900,000 credit hours beyond what they needed during 2006-07. "Auditors concluded that this had cost the state $76 million and that the trend of taking more and more time to graduate was actually growing," Fineout writes.

And that's before tuition goes up again.

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