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BATON ROUGE (AP) -- LSU leaders want to raise the fees and tuition they can charge students to help pay for professor pay raises, student aid and improvements to programs that face accreditation troubles, university officials said Wednesday.

LSU System President John Lombardi said the colleges' tuition and fees are low compared to the average of comparable schools in the South. He said if the colleges raise what they charge students, they would also provide more financial aid to help poorer students attend.

"A low tuition state ... often does not develop a powerful program of financial aid because it imagines that because its fees are low, everybody has access. But the fact is everyone doesn't have access even when fees are low because the cost of attendance includes both fees and residential living and transportation and books and all kinds of other costs," Lombardi said.

The discussion was raised at a meeting of an education panel of the House Appropriations Committee, which is combing through Gov. Bobby Jindal's budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year that begins July 1.

The governor's budget recommendations would increase LSU's funding by about $43 million — but nearly half of that is a one-time payment for an electronic health record system for the university's public hospital system.

LSU officials said much of the rest of the money will help them cover mandated increases in civil service pay, insurance costs and retirement payments, and they're pushing to charge students more for attending — or to get new state dollars.

Lawmakers must give the state's public university systems approval for a tuition or fee hike before they can pass it along to students. Several college tuition and fee increase bills are proposed for the regular legislative session that begins Monday. Such measures require a two-thirds vote.

One bill specific to LSU, sponsored by Rep. Patricia Smith, D-Baton Rouge, would allow a $250 per semester increase in fees charged to full-time students, starting in the fall. It would generate an estimated $13 million a year for the university's main campus in Baton Rouge, plus money for the other individual LSU campuses around the state.

Another proposal, by Rep. Don Trahan, R-Lafayette, would allow tuition increase for all public universities, up to 5 percent per year for two years.

Smith's bill wouldn't be covered by the state's free college tuition program, known as TOPS, meaning students or their parents would have to pay the fee hike, rather than the state. Tuition increases like in Trahan's bill would cost the TOPS program.

Lawmakers on the education subcommittee were sympathetic to finding more money for LSU, though they were less willing to commit to whether they would back a tuition or fee hike for the university system.

Lombardi said LSU needs more money to maintain competitive faculty salaries, to pay for a backlog of deferred maintenance problems at campus buildings and to invest dollars in program improvements.

The university's veterinary training school needs to correct $2 million in deficiencies at its large animal hospital to maintain its accreditation, for example, Lombardi said.

Also, LSU's Paul M. Hebert Law Center needs more than $700,000 to comply with an accreditation requirement that the school offer a legal clinic that lets students represent real clients, said law school Chancellor Jack Weiss.