A Message For Graduates

By Scott R. Cooper, Crook County Judge
This column originally appeared in the Central Oregonian, June 2005

Reasons Why New Graduates Should Make Oregon Home

Saturday is graduation day for Crook County High School.

Members of the Class of 2005 will walk across the stage in front of proud parents, stepparents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends and receive recognition for 12 years of academic effort and personal development. The high school’s beloved ag teacher, Mr. Papke, will deliver the commencement address. If all goes well, he will both inspire and educate the newly minted graduates

Unlike, Mr. Papke, I have never been asked to give a commencement address. I think I’m glad about that, because I think of all the addresses one could be asked to give, commencement speeches are the most frightening. To look these young people in the eye and tell them what awaits them in the Big Wide World without scaring them half to death is a delicate task.

The recently released Oregon Progress Board report for 2005 captured some of the improvements our state has made in the past two years. Among them: Oregon is creating jobs again--over 31,500 in 2004, alone. Those jobs are being distributed more evenly across the state and real wages (wages after taking inflation into account) are rising in both rural and urban areas. On the education front, third graders are becoming more proficient at math. More adults have high school and college degrees and more Oregonians are connected to the internet, giving them access to the outside world. Oregon advanced its standing among the states in terms of civic engagement. The Board pointed out that Oregonians can look with pride at the 2004 election, which produced near voter participation. Socially, the state also progressed, shedding its status as the “hungriest” state in the Union, moving from 50th to 43rd in terms of hunger status. Also one the decline were the state’s teen pregnancy rate and the use of tobacco by eighth graders.

Statistics like this are the sort of thing the Chamber of Commerce puts on its web site. What graduate wouldn’t want to start a life and raise a family in such a state?

But the report reveals a dark side as well. While wages were rising, per capita income fell—generally an indication that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. While third-grade math grade scores were trending up, third- and eighth-grade reading scores went the other direction. Rates of poverty and homelessness, while not declining, didn’t improve either, and home ownership and the affordability of housing worsened.

Viewed through that lens, maybe a new graduate might want to think about taking up residence just over the border in Washington.

But wait, the report addresses that too.

Evaluators compared the two states to each other. What they found was encouraging: With 81 total comparisons Oregon outshines Washington in 49 measures, or 60 percent of the time. Using 70 comparisons available for all 50 states, Oregon does better than the rest of the states about 65 percent of the time.

So, new graduates, the upshot of all of this data is this: you live in a state which is better than average and moving up in the ranks. You don’t—yet—live in the most livable state in the Union. And now that you’re 18, graduated and emancipated, you have some choices to make about how you will construct the rest of your life in response to that reality.

I hope you choose to stay in Oregon.

We’re a quirky little state. We love the great outdoors and we want to preserve large tracts of land for recreational purposes. But we also want natural-resource based industries to provide good jobs for our residents. Voters banned hunting cougars with dogs, and experienced a resulting explosion in cougar populations statewide, which we now want somebody to do something about. But we’ve also been clear that “something” isn’t going to include bringing back dogs. In survey after survey, large majorities of Oregonians have said they want both a continuation of the state’s land use planning system as well as governmental policies that favor private property-rights. The demand for expanded public services and a higher-quality education system is ever rising, but we definitely don’t want higher taxes, and we don’t like fees very much either.

Welcome to Oregon, the land of contradictions.

To my way of thinking, that’s just another part of what makes us interesting, and more importantly it speaks to the incredible idealistic streak which is at the core of our state’s heritage and the way we tackle problems.

See, in Oregon, we really do believe that we can have it all. We don’t much believe in trade-offs. We have plenty of trees. We should be able to have uninterrupted green space and sawmills! The amount of money collected by state and local governments increases by more than rate of inflation every biennium. Why can’t we maintain services and improve education? In an era of zero-down mortgages, why is home ownership a problem for any creditworthy Oregonian?

This is the state where the unthinkable used to be the common place. Oregon is the state that passed the first bottle bill. Oregon is the state that made 100 percent of its coastline publicly accessible. Oregon is the state that implemented a forest practices act that became the model for states everywhere, and Oregon has managed without a sales tax for nearly 150 years. We have always done the things the experts told us couldn’t be done.

So, graduates, when the experts say that we should wring our hands and worry about progress measures of various types, let’s stop and think where we are. This is Oregon. Things really do look different here, and we have a long history of solving the problems that the rest of the world deemed unsolvable.

I have every confidence we’re going to keep doing just that in the decades ahead. I hope you’ll stick around and help us.