With college tuition costs skyrocketing, it is good to know that the University of Minnesota’s Board of Regents is considering a plan to give greater scrutiny to the pay of the institution’s most highly paid administrators. Outlines of the plan, which a regents committee announced Friday, suggest that the university’s leaders are headed in the right direction — but that much more could be done.

Responding to an outcry over leave packages for senior administrators that were extraordinarily generous by anyone’s measure (they cost the university $2.8 million under a previous president), the regents will in June decide whether to adopt a plan that would put new limits on administrators’ leave pay and require the board to sign off on exceptions. That’s all to the good.

What Friday’s announcement leaves open to question is whether the regents will make a major attempt to look deeper into university spending practices. It is often the case that excessive spending at the upper ranks is inevitably emulated at other levels of an organization, so any responsible governing board should at this point assume there are more inappropriate expenditures to be found. Indeed, if the regents don’t look harder and deeper for unnecessary costs they will be shirking their responsibility.

Minnesotans — all of whom, at some level, have a stake in the University of Minnesota — have every right to expect that more expensive reviews will be forthcoming, along with more plans for improved oversight. The biggest issue facing higher education in our country today is increasing tuition; no university can take a step toward limiting tuition increases unless its leaders take a hard look at its entire cost structure.