Maybe because there are more of them, undergraduates seem to grab most of the attention when it comes to budget cuts. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's drive to trim freshman enrollment at the University of California by 10 percent, along with increasing fees for all 145,000 undergraduate students by another 10 percent next fall, has been drawing controversy.

But equally worrisome is Schwarzenegger's push to raise fees by a painful 40 percent for UC's 32,000 graduate students who are California residents. It's a plan that threatens the quality and reputation of the entire university.

Beginning next year, graduate fees would rise to $7,307 per year, up from $5,219 this year. Student fees were just increased 40 percent last year.

Including campus and other fees, graduate students will pay nearly $9,000. Schwarzenegger wants professional-school students to pay even more. The rationale, apparently, is that it costs the state more to educate graduate students than undergraduates.

But this reasoning puts short-term savings ahead of California's long- term health. California already spends less on graduate education than two- thirds of the other states. It is only one of five states whose graduate- student enrollment has actually declined over the past decade.

Even so, the state has benefited many times over from the talents of its graduate students, many of whom have played leading roles in the state. Former Gov. Pete Wilson and Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy are just two examples.

Higher fees will make it far more difficult to attract the best students to world-class campuses such as UC Berkeley and UCSF. That in turn will make it harder to recruit top professors, who look at the quality of an institution's graduate students when considering whether to come to a campus, according to Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl. "Whether or not the character and quality of this university is sustained over the next several years turns on whether the university is able to recruit the kind of graduate students we have,'' Berdahl told us.

More immediately, UC will have to come up with the finances to support the graduate students it already has -- which will mean siphoning off aid that could be used to recruit new students. UC will fall even further behind private universities in the level of financial aid it can use to attract graduate students.

Schwarzenegger wants to put the greatest burden on some 11,000 out-of- state and foreign graduate students, who'll pay 20 percent more, or $16,474 in tuition next year.

This too is shortsighted. As Berdahl noted, ''California has been blessed with a positive brain drain throughout its history. It's not a bad idea to attract the best and the brightest because a larger number of them end up staying here, building companies, and contributing enormously to California's future.''

Schwarzenegger's financial advisers reckon the increased graduate-student fees will generate an extra $100 million for the state. But that is a minuscule amount compared to the $4 billion that Schwarzenegger chose to subtract from the state treasury when he rolled back vehicle-license fees.

Sticking it to graduate students with painful fees could inflict irreversible damage on our universities. If that happens, California -- and all its residents -- will be worse off because of it. Schwarzenegger's goal of restoring California's faded glory will become far more difficult to achieve.