The 115,000 students attending Pennsylvania’s 14 state-owned universities — including Slippery Rock University — received an early holiday season gift with their faculty union’s decision not to call a strike during the remainder of the current semester.

Whether the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties and the State System of Higher Education can avoid disruption of the spring session remains open to speculation.

There’s evidence of compromise, but in the end the major sticking point could be employee contributions to health care coverage or details of the coverage itself.

It remains to be seen how much each side of the bargaining table will be willing to give on the health care issues. However, the university faculties, like teachers in the state’s public schools, must increasingly come to grips with the fact that they will have to contribute much more toward their health care benefits.

Workers in the private sector have been paying significantly more for that coverage for years, and no doubt many will face additional increases.

The commonwealth’s precarious fiscal situation makes it imperative that state employees, including the universities’ faculties, shoulder more of the financial burden associated with their health care.

It would seem that another key unresolved issue — a State System proposal to phase out incentive payments offered since 1999 to faculty for distance education course development — will be less of a roadblock to an agreement than the health care issue that has been dogging all levels of education.

Salary has been less of an issue in the current talks because increases probably will be in line with contracts covering other state workers.

Meanwhile, a proposed 35 percent pay cut for temporary faculty has gone away with the State System having removed that plan from the bargaining table. Instead of the big pay cut, temporary faculty members’ salaries would be frozen at current levels.

The system’s latest four-year proposal, which would be retroactive to 2011-12, calls for pay to be frozen for the first year, consistent with Gov. Tom Corbett’s pay-freeze request last year to public school teachers. Pay increases of about 4 percent are contained in the state’s proposal for the final three years of the proposed universities pact.

Those raises would exceed the current inflation rate but not be overly excessive, considering the first-year freeze.

The ongoing contract dispute is the longest in the State System’s three-decade history. The next bargaining session is scheduled for Dec. 11, at which both sides should come to the table with open minds and a willingness to compromise.

For the system’s students, a strike during the spring semester won’t be any better than a strike now. Students’ education would be disrupted, and that disruption, depending on its length, could be damaging to seniors’ plans for after graduation.

“We continue to believe that we can reach a settlement with APSCUF at the bargaining table,” said Kenn Marshall, a State System spokesman.

The statement about the strike delay released by Steve Hicks, APSCUF president, acknowledged students’ concerns about their education moving forward.

It’s clear more hard work needs to be done at the bargaining table, but it also seems clear that the two sides are at a point where a settlement should be within reach.

It’s laudable that the State System faculty has opted against disruption now, but the better holiday season gift to students — from both the state and union — would be for the dispute to be resolved.

The lack of a contract has dragged on much too long.