Responding to the final report of the New York State Commission on Higher Education, which said the state is one of the few without a state-backed, low-interest student-loan program, Gov. David A. Paterson plans today to ask the state’s Legislature to create such a program, The New York Times reported this morning.

The report posits a “chronic problem” at the State University of New York and City University of New York systems caused by years of fiscal neglect — “too little revenue, too little investment, and too much regulation.” The commission’s recommendations include more articulation agreements for seamless transfers between the colleges by 2011, hiring 2,000 new faculty members, and establishing a $3-billion research fund.

The report is the result of more than a year of study by the commission, which was created by the previous governor, Eliot Spitzer, who made higher education one of his priorities before a sex scandal forced him to resign. The release of the report is widely seen as an occasion for Governor Paterson, a Democrat who took office in March, to define his stance on higher education in a year of strained state budgets. —Ingrid Norton