Who wrote this headline…. in 2008?

Title of an Oregonian Editorial today:

It’s about former City Commissioner Jim Francesconi’s assignment to find a new President for Portland State University.

Seriously, they are only looking for a statesMAN? This from the newspaper that edited a letter I wrote with the word “Councilmen”, changing it to “Commissioners” even though I was referring to Erik Sten and Mayor Tom Potter, because “we prefer gender-neutral words”.

Sigh.

OK, well, they made me look. From the Editorial:

“Currently, fewer than 35 percent of Oregon children end up with a college degree. That’s the harvest of years of underinvestment in higher education in Oregon. By relying far too much on tuition revenue, we have simply priced young people out of the market. Oregon should be ashamed, too, that fully 75 percent of its disturbingly few college graduates come from families in the top 25 percent of income. This is a textbook case of how public education is not supposed to work.”

Good points.

“Most alarming, all this is unfolding against a backdrop in which Portland expects 700,000 new residents in the next 17 years, one quarter of whom will be Hispanic. Though 34 percent of white students currently graduate from college, that figure plummets to 11 percent for Latino students. Unless this changes soon, and significantly, Portland will need a new motto: The City that Works for Minimum Wage.”

I am troubled by the way this paragraph is written. I wonder why the disparity between demographic groups is called out (disturbing though it is), rather than the fact (pdf) that Portland State has the lowest six year graduation rate of any of the state institutions in the Oregon University System.