The Senate Ways and Means Committee plan to arbitrarily redistribute funding recommended in the governor’s budget for Kansas University and Kansas State University got top billing in Friday’s Journal-World, but two other budget revisions endorsed in that same bill are equally astonishing.

One also is related to higher education and appears to reflect a general disregard among committee leaders for state universities in Kansas. Committee members took about $13.6 million from the general operating funds for the state’s two largest universities over the next two years but decided to add $2 million to the Kansas Comprehensive Grant program. That program provides financial aid to Kansas residents enrolled in private and public universities in the state, so adding to that fund might have been seen as a way to help students facing higher tuition costs at state universities that are resulting from state funding reductions.

However, a caveat the committee added to the funding appears to be another slap at public universities. The committee specifically said that 75 percent of the money in the grant fund must be reserved for students at independent private colleges in the state. That’s $13.3 million of the total $17.7 million currently available from the fund.

Currently, private colleges get about 50 percent of the grant money, so the shift would result in about $3.7 million less for students at public institutions next year. Kansas Board of Regents Chairman Kenny Wilk estimated that about 1,050 fewer students at public universities will receive need-based grants because of the change.

To justify this move Sen. Tom Arpke, R-Salina, pointed out that the state’s 18 private universities grant about 20 percent of the bachelor’s degrees and about 24 percent of the master’s degrees in Kansas. But they will get 75 percent of the aid from the tax-funded grant program. How does that math work?

The other facet of the budget revisions that should raise some real questions is a $236,000 budget cut over the next two years for the Kansas Geological Survey, which has recently undertaken an important project to monitor increased earthquake activity that may be related to oil and gas production in south-central Kansas.

It may be no coincidence that the budget cut likely will hamper the survey’s ability to continue that work — work that might lead to additional restrictions on oil and gas producers in the state. Never mind the residents who are reporting property damage from earthquakes.

Arpke and other legislators claim they are trying to do what is best for the state as a whole, but it’s hard to understand how this bill’s shifts in university and student aid funding and cuts to the Kansas Geological Survey are serving that goal.