HARRISBURG — A key state senator called Wednesday for a $145 million expansion of Pennsylvania's tuition aid program and limits on tuition increases at most colleges and universities that receive state subsidies.

Sen. Jeffrey Piccola, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, portrayed his proposal as a more realistic alternative to Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell's plan to increase tuition aid by as much as $550 million a year with revenue from the proposed legalization and taxation of video poker machines.

Piccola, R-Dauphin, said his proposal would qualify 25,000 additional students for the grants administered by the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency. It would be financed by cuts elsewhere in the budget, mostly by eliminating tax breaks for the film industry and reducing state aid for more than a dozen private schools and museums.

Annual increases in tuition would be capped at the same inflation rate as other tax-supported institutions, including Penn State University, the 14 state-owned universities that make up the State System of Higher Education and 14 community colleges.

At a news conference Wednesday, Piccola displayed charts showing that tuition and fees at the four-year schools more than tripled during the two-decade period that ended last year — a significantly steeper increase than the growth in the national Consumer Price Index.

"Now is the time to get a handle ... on the cost of higher education," he said. "It's not just the taxpayers' responsibility to subsidize whatever tuition increases these institutions decide they are going to impose."

Piccola's plan also would require students who accept the PHEAA grants to maintain a "C" average and graduate in four years — even if they are holding down a job or have other reasons for staying.

"Call me old-fashioned, but in the good old days, we all got through in four years," he said.

Meanwhile, Rendell says his proposal would help families who cannot otherwise afford a college education. His video-poker plan would not expand gambling, he said, but would merely cash in on an illegal form of gambling that is flourishing across the state.

Piccola questioned the accuracy of the administration's projected gambling revenue.

Rendell spokesman Chuck Ardo said his boss shares the view that college needs to be more affordable.

"We obviously differ on how to fund this, but we are at least in agreement that families in Pennsylvania need tuition relief and they need it now," Ardo said.

The SSHE universities have kept their tuition increases below the inflation rate for the past four years, but "we can't continue to do that indefinitely without an adequate level of support" from the state, said spokesman Kenn Marshall.

For the fiscal year that begins July 1, Rendell proposes holding the system's subsidy at this year's $499 million, which will make it "extremely difficult" to keep the tuition increase below the inflation rate, he said.

At Penn State, which receives more than $300 million a year in state subsidies, spokesman Bill Mahon said the state appropriation has declined slightly over the past decade while inflation has increased by 22 percent.