[media-credit name=’Kristen Petruzzi’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′][/media-credit]American colleges are flunking when it comes to affordability, according to a new higher-education report card by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

While American schools have improved in preparing students for college, they are failing to provide affordable college education. The report gave 36 states failing grades on affordability.

Jacob Stampen, a UW professor of educational administration, said college affordability is a problem because of the fierce competition among schools to attract the top students and faculty.

“What universities do is they compete with each other for students, for prestige, for status and for faculty,” Stampen said. “They want high rankings in the US News and World Report. It’s like a treadmill competition.”

David Breneman, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, helped prepare the new report. He said American universities provide many “fringe features” that colleges worldwide do not, but American students want.

“… Any one university would suffer from eliminating these. That’s kind of the dilemma that colleges are caught in,” he said, describing colleges as “country clubs.” “It’s hard for any one institution to cut these [features] and compete.”

Stampen believes there is room for improvement in the efficiency of university spending, adding he believes “there can be improvement on all fronts.”

“Colleges have a lot of divisions, a lot of administrative support functions that overlap,” he added. “Our system is very wasteful. We spend more than other countries.”

Breneman said universities’ standings are based on the money they spend instead of efficiency.

“Tuition is the price of college. We can lower the price of college by encouraging the government to provide more state support,” he said. “The cost of college is different. A really cheap, inexpensive college would probably rate poorly and have trouble getting students.”

The report grades states on six overall categories: preparation for college; “participation,” or opportunities to enroll in higher education programs; affordability of higher education; completion of coursework; state benefits of having an educated population; and “learning,” a look at what is known about student progress beyond high school.

The report gave Wisconsin a B+ in preparing students for college, a B in participation, an A- in completion, a C+ in benefits and a D in affordability.

In the learning category, all but five states received an “incomplete” mark because there were no common benchmarks available for comparisons. Wisconsin was one of the states to receive the “incomplete” mark.

Among Wisconsin’s strengths, the report lists large numbers of high-school students enrolled in upper-level math and science. It also praises Wisconsin’s highly qualified secondary school teachers. Compared to other states, a large proportion of Wisconsin freshmen return for their sophomore year at both community and four-year colleges.

Wisconsin also has a large percentage of students complete a bachelor’s degree within six years of enrolling in college. The report states: “large proportions of students earn certificates and degrees relative to the number enrolled. These proportions have increased over the past decade — more than the nationwide improvement on this measure.”

Among Wisconsin’s weaknesses, the report noted only a small proportion of high school upperclassmen score well on advanced placement exams.

The report also indicated young adults from minority ethnic groups are only two-thirds as likely as whites to earn a high-school credential by age 24. In addition, the percentage of working-age adults enrolled in higher education has dropped in the past decade, along with the percentage of enrolled students from low-income backgrounds.

Stampen said having a federal grant program and tuition tax credits undermines the goal of keeping college affordable.

“We spend an incredible amount of money on the [multiple] systems, and some people fall through the cracks of the systems,” he said.

He noted that bringing college costs down has become more difficult over time.

“Can a college education cost less? Sure it can,” he said. “[This report] is a signal that the whole system has gotten disoriented. It’s like a snake eating its tail.