OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2016
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
OUR VIEW
Wrong solution
for housing pinch
Portland Democrat now wants
to control rents throughout state
N
ot content to legislate wages, a Portland Democrat now
wants state government to act as Oregon’s Chief Landlord.
It’s one more example of the wave of proprietary gover-
nance that began in our largest city and has swept south to our state
capital.
Housing already is one of the most regulated industries. And rent
controls exacerbate the problems supporters claim they ix: afford-
ability and supply.
No matter, political leaders like Tina Kotek are anxious to exert
more control over the private sector. The speaker of the House, fresh
off her victory to raise the minimum wage and salivating over the
$3 billion Measure 97 would generate in higher taxes, has made
rental housing her next crusade.
Kotek, who represents northeast Portland, says she will lead an
effort next year to repeal the state’s ban on rent-control laws. She
also pledges to restrict all but “reasonable” increases in rental fees
and further restrict the ability of landlords to evict tenants.
“We need to prevent property owners from making excessive
proit and protect tenants from economic eviction and displace-
ment,” Kotek said. Her solution is to cede more control to state gov-
ernment — the same folks who have wasted billions of dollars on
technology boondoggles and recently handed out $347 million in
improper or suspicious energy tax credits.
Oregonians should be encouraged to look at how rent controls
have worked in two other bastions of “progressive” politics: New
York City and San Francisco.
The Big Apple has imposed rent controls on and off since
World War I. Apartment vacancies have all but vanished as ten-
ants in rent-controlled units renew their leases in perpetuity. In San
Francisco, government limits the amount rents can increase each
year in an effort to preserve affordable housing. The policy has
backired. Instead of renting out units at below-market rates, owners
offer their apartments to well-heeled visitors as weekend getaways
and vacation rentals.
Government-imposed rent controls also discourage construction
of new apartments and the maintenance of existing units. There is
no incentive for builders to build if they cannot quickly recoup their
investment. The resulting housing shortages beneit existing home-
owners, but create signiicant disadvantages for the poor and those
seeking to rent.
There’s no doubt that Portland is experiencing steep increases in
the cost of housing. The booming tech economy and the city’s allure
for young professionals has created an imbalance between housing
supply and demand. Home price increases are among the highest in
the nation. Portland also has the 15th highest apartment rents in the
country.
But state and local governments can better address the situation
by encouraging the supply of new and refurbished dwellings. Let
the private sector respond with market-based solutions rather than
by government directives that overreach.
Unfortunately, that’s not The Portland Way.
Senate action great news for
local ports, coast environment
L
ast week included major wins in the U.S. Senate for issues
of pivotal importance for Columbia River and Paciic
Coast communities.
The Water Resources Development Act of 2016 passed the
Senate Sept. 15. It includes reforms of the Harbor Maintenance
Trust Fund and passage of the Columbia River Basin Restoration
Act. These will have big positive impacts.
Oregon and Washington senators have been key to crafting
WRDA the act’s provisions for the forthcoming two-year fund-
ing cycle and for many years ahead. It’s vital for the U.S. House to
follow suit and for the president to sign legislation that will main-
tain small ports and clean up toxins.
It can hardly be overstated how helpful this legislation will be
for small regional ports in our area — from Ilwaco and Chinook,
Washington, to Garibaldi. If it is inalized, they no longer have to
sweat every year whether there will federal funds to keep naviga-
tion channels open.
Funds will come from the $7 billion Harbor Maintenance
Trust Fund. Congress long diverted a large part of the trust fund
to non-port purposes. Starting with WRDA 2014, this began to
change. And now, WRDA 2016 aims to provide certainties for
port funding, including a permanent 10 percent slice of the Harbor
Maintenance Trust Fund for small ports.
Signiicantly, WRDA 2016 also permits the federal EPA to set
up a voluntary grant program to encourage toxin cleanups along
the Columbia.
All in all, the Water Resources Development Act of 2016 is a
win for our economy and our environment. It deserves the broad
bipartisan support it has received so far.
Why college rankings are a joke
By FRANK BRUNI
New York Times News Service
S
hortly before the newest U.S.
News & World Report college
rankings came out last week, I
got a fresh glimpse of how ridiculous
they can be — and of why pan-
icked high school seniors and their
status-conscious parents should not
spend the next months obsessing over
them.
I was reporting a column on how
few veterans are admitted to elite
colleges and stum-
bled across a U.S.
News subranking
of top schools for
veterans. Its irrele-
vance loored me. It
merely mirrored the
general rankings — same institutions,
same order — minus the minority
of prominent schools that don’t
participate in certain federal education
beneits for veterans.
It didn’t take into account whether
there were many — or, for that matter,
any — veterans on a given campus.
It didn’t relect what support for them
did or didn’t exist.
It was just another way to package
and peddle the overall U.S. News
rankings, illustrating the extent to
which they’re a marketing ploy. No
wonder so many college presidents,
provosts and deans of admissions
express disdain for them. How
sad that they participate in them
nonetheless.
The rankings nourish the myth that
the richest, most selective colleges
have some corner on superior educa-
tion; don’t adequately recognize pub-
lic institutions that prioritize access
and affordability; and do insuficient
justice to the particular virtues of
individual campuses.
On campus
Consider a school I visited this
month, in conjunction with its 50th
birthday: the University of Maryland,
Baltimore County.
At the Starbucks in the middle
of campus, I met a senior majoring
in ilm. He has the usual Hollywood
dreams but more than the usual opti-
mism about making them come true.
After all, a short movie that he wrote
and directed as a sophomore got a
showing at the Cannes Film Festival.
Later, I spoke with a renowned
mathematics professor, Manil Suri,
who is also the openly gay author
of an acclaimed sequence of novels
set in India, where he was born, and
who has contributed frequently to
The Times. His conversations with
undergraduates range far beyond
algorithms.
I slipped into the arts center,
completed just two years ago, where
there’s a stunning music hall with
sumptuous acoustics and a theater of
eye-popping technical sophistication.
Minorities
I dropped in on Michael Summers,
a biochemist who has done pioneering
research into retroviruses and HIV. He
said he’d never trade his faculty posi-
tion here for one elsewhere, though he
has been wooed, because of UMBC’s
almost unrivaled record for guiding
African-American undergraduates
toward doctorates and other postgrad-
uate degrees in STEM ields (science,
technology, engineering and math).
“We’re doing something that
nobody else is doing,” Summers told
me. In a conversation with another
journalist years ago, he put it this way:
“If you see a group of black students
walking together on a college campus,
your irst thought might be, ‘Oh, there
goes the basketball team.’ Here you
Ben Wiseman/The New York Times
Rankings like U.S. News and World Report nourish the myth that the
richest, most selective colleges have some corner on superior edu-
cation, but they can be blunt and too blind to certain gems.
think, ‘There goes the chemistry hon-
ors club, or the chess team.’ It’s just a
different attitude.”
The UMBC chess team has won
the national college chess cham-
pionship six times over the last 13
years. But Summers’ remarks also
relect something else: In 1988, the
school started the Meyerhoff Scholars
Program, designed to address the
paucity of minorities in STEM ields
by giving generous inancial aid and
extensive mentorship to talented
African-American students.
More than 1,100 men and women
of all races have been through the
program, typically going on to
extraordinary careers. Summers and
I chatted about one graduate we both
knew, Isaac Kinde, who said no to
Stanford in order to attend UMBC.
He recently completed a combined
medical degree and doctorate at Johns
Hopkins and is now at a biotech
startup.
“He has found a way to detect
ovarian cancer with a Pap smear,”
Summers said. “That guy is going to
revolutionize health care for women.”
Four former Meyerhoff
Scholars are on the faculty of Duke
University’s medical school, including
Damon Tweedy, who wrote the 2015
best seller “Black Man in a White
Coat: A Doctor’s Relections on Race
and Medicine.”
Duke is where Tweedy himself
went to medical school, and he told
me that although most of his class-
mates there were from colleges more
selective than UMBC and families
with more money than his, “I scored
in the top 20 percent of my class
during that irst year of basic science
classes, which are the toughest part
of med school.” UMBC had prepared
him well, not just academically but
also, he said, by making him feel that
he was “part of something more than
just your individual attainment.”
He recalled that before he decided
to go there, several Ivy League
colleges tried to recruit him — for
basketball. In contrast, he irst came
on to UMBC’s radar because of his
aptitude for science.
More than 1 in 4 UMBC
undergraduates qualiies for federal
Pell grants, meant to serve low-in-
come families. About 45 percent
are white, while 18 percent are
Asian-American and 16 percent are
African-American.
From the ceiling of the student
commons hang lags of countries
from which students have come.
There are more than 100. It’s a kind
of kaleidoscope, and as I walked
under it with Freeman Hrabowski,
UMBC’s dynamic president, he
stressed the school’s determination to
“connect students to people different
from themselves and lives different
from their own.” The young men and
women who ate, talked or studied at
almost every one of the tables around
us were a mix of colors, and I couldn’t
map the room in terms of any obvious
tribes or cliques.
Other factors
Diversity, socioeconomic or
otherwise, doesn’t factor much
into U.S. News rankings, though a
broadening of perspectives lies at the
heart of the best education. UMBC,
with its acceptance rate of nearly 60
percent, places 159th among national
universities.
One of the main factors in a
school’s rank is how highly oficials at
peer institutions and secondary-school
guidance counselors esteem it. But
they may not know it well. They’re
going by its reputation, established in
no small part by previous U.S. News
evaluations. A lofty rank perpetuates
itself.
Another main factor is the per-
centage of a school’s students who
graduate within six years. But this
says as much about a school’s selec-
tiveness — the proven achievement
and discipline of the students it admits
— as about its stewardship of them.
Schools try to game the system
and score better on additional criteria
that go into their rank, though Robert
Morse, the chief data strategist for
U.S. News, told me in an email that
the methodology had evolved so that
“you cannot make a meaningful rise
in the rankings by tweaking one or
two numbers.”
He also noted, rightly, that the
copious information that U.S. News
collects about the student bodies
and academic tracks at hundreds of
schools produces a mother lode of
useful facts and igures that go far
beyond the numerical rankings.
But those rankings are front and
center, fostering the idea that schools
are brands in competition with one
another. The rankings elevate clout
above learning, which isn’t as easily
measured.
Intentionally or not, they fuel a
frenzy to get into the most selective
schools. They can’t adjust for how
well certain colleges serve certain
ambitions.
And they err. For the newest
rankings, in what was obviously
meant as an improvement, the sublist
for veterans included only schools at
which 20 or more students were using
GI Bill beneits.
But those beneits low to
dependents of veterans — their
children, for example — as well as to
veterans themselves. They’re a fatally
lawed metric. So MIT is ranked
second, though it knows of only four
veterans among its undergraduates.
(I checked.) Duke is tied for third,
though it knows of only two.
These colleges’ best-for-veterans
triumphs still have no real relevance.
There’s a larger lesson in that.