WASHINGTON — Hawai'i has seen a rise in tuition costs and a decline in educational attainment at the college level, a new report found.

"Hawai'i's fairly low performance in educating its young population could limit the state's access to a competitive workforce and weaken its economy," said the report, "Measuring Up 2008," from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

The University of Hawai'i is working to reverse the negative trends highlighted in the report, said Linda Johnsrud, UH vice president for academic planning and policy.

"It underscores an issue that we've really been trying to deal with, which is that our educational attainment is going down," she said. "Our 24- to 34-year-old adults are not as well educated as our 35- to 44-year-olds."

The report found that overall, most states are doing a little better preparing students for college, but the modest progress is blunted by rising tuition costs, enduring enrollment gaps between rich and poor and a decrease in global competitiveness.

The situation could worsen if states don't better prepare high school students and do more to make college more affordable and accessible to Americans of all backgrounds, the report said.

"Family wealth and income, race and ethnicity, and geography play too great a role in determining which Americans receive a high school education that prepares them for college, which ones enroll in college, and which ones complete certificate or degree programs," said James B. Hunt Jr., former North Carolina governor and chairman of the center's board.

The center graded states from A to F in five areas: college enrollment, affordability, completion rates, how well the states prepare high school students for college, and percentage of residents who are college-educated.

The report gave Hawai'i a C-minus in preparing high school students for college.

Hawai'i eighth-graders perform very poorly in math, science, reading and writing, indicating they are not well prepared to succeed in challenging high school courses, the report said. Also, only small proportions of 11th- and 12th-grade students scored well on college entrance exams and advanced placement tests.

But the state was among the top performers for high school completion, with 95 percent of its 18- to 24-year-olds receiving a high school credential, the report found.

AFFORDABILITY FAILURE

Johnsrud said the state Board of Education has recognized the fact that college readiness is an issue and has approved new programs to address it.

The report gave an F to Hawai'i and all other states — except California, which received a C-minus — for affordability. The rising cost of college has been especially hard on poor and middle-class Americans, with tuition and fees consuming a greater share of family income than it did in 1999.

Families in Hawai'i pay 21 percent of their income to attend a community college, compared with an average of 13 percent among top states in previous years. A public four-year university costs Hawai'i families 27 percent of their income compared with 10 percent in top states.

"What that suggests is that other than California, no state is able to fund higher education in the way it needs to be funded so that we don't have to increase tuition, which is a burden on families," Johnsrud said. "What this says to me is that this is a national public-policy issue, and probably we need more federal financial aid."

CONCLUSIONS ATTACKED

Terry Hartle of the American Council on Education, which represents higher education institutions, said some of the report's conclusions are misleading.

Giving just one state a passing grade for affordability is absurd when Maryland has frozen tuition for the past four years and Nevada charges less for four-year institutions ($2,743) than California ($4,600), he said.

"If every state gets an F, the scale is so inaccurate as to render it largely meaningless," Hartle said. "It's shock value."