The University of Hawaii at Manoa has been deficit spending, with expenditures outpacing regular tuition revenues this year by about $31 million.

While the controversial House Bill 555 proposed a wrongheaded approach for dealing with the situation — simply whacking programs that persistently graduate fewer than 10 students each year — it sparked a conversation that needs to continue.

State Rep. Isaac Choy (D, Manoa-Moiliili) chairs the House Higher Education Committee, and he decided Thursday to table the measure after a standing-room-only crowd of UH students and faculty slammed the proposal in emotional testimony.

That was a fortunate outcome to the hearing. Setting an arbitrary figure for how many graduates signify a worthy program amounts to using a blunt instrument for an operation that demands a lot more care. It’s also an example of legislative micromanaging. If the university’s semiautonomous status means anything at all, it ought to mean UH officials are the ones to direct the nuanced management of the budget.

However, the ultimate message that came from the bill — UH must get its spending under control — was the right one. The UH administration and Board of Regents, which are the parties accountable for the expenditures, have to come up with specific proposals to the Legislature, as the UH budget continues through the gauntlet of hearings, for drastically reducing the deficit.

UH President David Lassner said the university has a process in place to eliminate underperforming programs, adding that the number of student majors a program graduates is only part of the picture.

He’s right about that. A lot of students are funneled through some programs with small graduating classes — foreign languages, to name one example — because they fulfill part of the students’ general-studies requirements.

Many of these easily can defend their existence, based on tuition revenue they generate and other factors, if they also demonstrate that the faculty and staff alloted to them function efficiently.

And any formula that would dictate the elimination of nearly one in four bachelor’s degree programs is misguided.

But lawmakers, and taxpayers, need to hear more details in the coming weeks about how these programs are evaluated.

Choy pointed out that the regents last year approved 17 new degree programs. That sends up a red flag for an institution that is producing so much red ink. The regents must not assess new additions in isolation; they must keep the big picture forefront in mind.

The chairman correctly set the bill aside and instead asked UH to produce an annual report on degree programs producing fewer than 10 graduates annually.

Recognizing that a university needs a diverse offering for its students is fundamental to responsible management of higher education, and HB 555, as originally written, falls short of that ideal.

But it’s equally important to recognize that UH cannot be all things to all people. Efficiencies should be realized where they can be. At the end of the day, though, some hard decisions will need to be made by the UH administration and the regents, who are accountable to the people paying the bills.