Breaking Ranks

For those who attended Northeastern University in Boston round about the early aughts (like myself), it's no secret that the university's singular focus was cracking the top 100 of the U.S. News and World Report's vaunted rankings of the nation's best colleges. In an article timed to hit just before this year's rankings come out, Boston Magazine's Max Kutner looks at then-NU president Richard Freeland's obsession with the double digits. (Spoiler: NU garnered a #98 ranking in 2007). Turns out, there was a more intricate strategy involved than putting giant banners on campus. But like any good plan crafted in college, it still involved sitting around.

For those at Northeastern, breaking into the U.S. News top 100 was like landing a man on the moon, but Freeland was determined to try. Reverse-engineering the formulas took months; perfecting them took years. “We could say, ‘Well, if we could move our graduation rates by X, this is how it would affect our standing,’” Freeland says. “It was very mathematical and very conscious and every year we would sit around and say, ‘Okay, well here’s where we are, here’s where we think we might be able to do next year, where will that place us?’”

When I chose to attend Northeastern -- under the influence of the truckload of spiffy targeted mail that flooded my parents' mailbox during my latter years in high school -- the school was in the midst of a massive building campaign that extended its footprint into the Roxbury neighborhood, and frequently looking to up admissions standards. Not surprisingly, those were all a part of the rankings puzzle.

The more applications NU could drum up, the more students they could turn away, thus making the school appear more selective... Since studies showed that students who lived on campus were more likely to stay enrolled, the school oversaw the construction of dormitories like those in West Village—a $1 billion, seven-building complex—to improve retention and graduation rates. NU was lucky in this regard—not every urban school in the country had vast land, in the form of decrepit parking lots, on which to build a new, attractive campus.

Amid the push, skeptical students were often told that we should be thankful for these shiny new improvements and lofty rankings, since they would in turn increase the value of our shiny new degrees. Over the long run, they may turn out to be right (assuming, of course, that Bachelor's Degrees retain value). But that doesn't absolve the university for attempting to cheat the system in a manner that has little to do with education.

Along with the U.S. News and World Report's vulnerabilities, NU's tactics also serve as a gentle reminder that the college admissions process is a faceless machine that evaluates an accumulation of numbers (grades, SAT tests, activity loads), rather than the real-life tenacity, guile and heart that are required for anything remotely approaching success in the increasingly dismal and freelance-oriented job market. But don't worry. In the age of YouTube, a video could save us from this morass. From today's Baltimore Sun:

Starting with applicants for next year's class, Goucher announced Thursday that it will give students the option of submitting a video they record in lieu of transcripts or college admission exams.

The Sun reports that some of these admissions videos have already gone viral. Whether they make the infection worse remains to be seen. At the very least, the clips might gum up the works of the U.S. News and World Report rankings, making them less influential. As Kutner points out at the end of the NU article, improving one ranking is likely to come at the peril of another.

In Money magazine’s 2014 “Best Colleges for Your Money....Northeastern landed at the bottom of the third quartile, at number 433.

Dead Zones and Diets

Dead Zone isn't just the name of an Anthony Michael Hall vehicle. In the Chesapeake Bay, marine life face a scarier reality than anything Stephen King could conjure. As the Washington Post reports:

The phenomenon has been recurring in the Chesapeake whenever hot summer weather and pollution combine to trigger algae blooms that suck life-giving oxygen from the water. But this year’s dead zone was bigger than most, making 2014 the eighth-worst year since record-keeping began in the 1980s, according to monitoring data compiled by Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources.

That pollution is chemicals from fertilizer and wastewater that end up in the spring runoff that heads down rivers like the Susquehanna. Last week, the Baltimore Sun reported the Chesapeake's Dead Zone was at its 8th highest level. That was enough to spur declarations that the Dead Zone was "back with a vengeance" after a few relatively dormant years.

For the long term, however, there's at least one bright spot. Reporter Timothy B. Wheeler cites one example today near the point where the Susquehanna and Chesapeake meet that shows some life is starting to return.

But starting in the 1990s, the scientists say, there was a small decline in the amount of one nutrient, nitrogen, flowing from the Susquehanna. That alone was not enough to spur a rebound in underwater grasses, but a prolonged dry spell from 1997 to 2002 proved the tipping point, clearing up the water enough to allow more sunlight to reach the bottom and fuel new plant growth.

The Gulf of Mexico, which receives 40 percent of the country's runoff every year from the Mississippi River, has a Dead Zone problem the size of Connecticut.

The Dead Zone has become such a fact of life at the mouth of the Mississippi River that the research team now label their annual trip to measure its size as a cruise. On the 30th anniversary of the cruise, the Gulf's Dead Zone wasn't quite as big as it has been in record years, primarily due to lower rainfall totals than in those big years.

But it's not the rainfall that is producing the Dead Zone, it's the pollutants -- more specifically, the polluters. With the new levels in the Chesapeake making them feel fat once again, Maryland is going on a diet.

The pollution "diet" drawn up by the Maryland Department of the Environment calls for reductions in nutrients ranging from 20 percent to 40 percent in four of the five bays – Assawoman, Isle of Wight, Newport and Chincoteague. No pollution cutback is needed in Sinepuxent, the state determined, while reductions of up to 55 percent may be called for to improve water quality in the Bishopville Prong of Isle of Wight Bay, a particularly poorly flushed area, according to Tim Rule, who oversaw development of the state report.

Even though the pollution cutbacks won't completely stop the problem, they at least show that officials are willing to acknowledge Dead Zones and their crazy, choking algae. The Mississippi River could use the same kind of diet, with a formula that's tweaked for their state-sized problem. But the fish that inhabit the waters off the coast of Southeast Louisiana aren't holding their breath. There's no oxygen for them to breathe right now, anyway.

Horse Race

While America's rapidly growing heroin epidemic is getting plenty of attention at the federal level, perceptions of drug use continue to be limited by an unwillingness to confront the issue from the ground-level. After all, it's bad PR. 

Writing in today's Baltimore Sun, columnist Dan Rodricks takes stock of a Wednesday night episode of National Geographic TV's Drugs Inc. that focused on Baltimore. Rodrick looks back at the 70s, when a National Geographic writer was Charmed by Baltimore.

Kline found charm in things now gone (the aroma of McCormick spices along Light Street, Haussner's Restaurant, Hamburger's clothing store) or things that a travel writer probably would leave out today (Charles Center Plaza, the "new-town-in-town" called Coldspring.

The article was a love letter to the city, and Baltimore could not buy better publicity.

The 2014 National Geographic treatment focused more on a piece of societal fabric that is not gone. Heroin use remains high. And to quantify it, National Geographic relied on a stat that said 60,000 Baltimore residents. But, wait! Turns out, that number is wrong, and has been wrong for almost a decade.

In 2005, a Baltimore Sun reporter dug deep into data to determine if 60,000 addicts number had any validity, and the result was negative. "The number is almost certainly wrong," The Sun concluded. "It was, at best, a hit-or-miss guess to begin with."

Rodricks rightfully points out that relying on bad data only leads to sensationalism, which is likely what Drugs Inc. is guilty of here -- at least when it comes to statistics.

But when it comes to looking at the recent nationwide resurgence of heroin use, it doesn't matter whether the opiate "capital" is Baltimore or actual longtime heroin overdose death leader, Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. Now that Attorney General Eric Holder and other authorities have acknowledged that heroin use is an epidemic, any attempt to look into the deadly drug use is valuable. Reporting of the sort that Drugs Inc. engages in is tough to come by. A Drugs Inc. episode that focused on New Orleans equated the city's party culture to its drug use. That's a connection that's likely accurate, but rarely made -- even, in the HBO series Treme, by the likes of underbelly-scratcher David Simon.

The drug trafficking web that includes street-level dealers, law enforcement agents and the users in between takes a lot of time and human capital to weave, and our understanding is only better for the time the show spent -- even if TV news production temptations get in the way. As a woman who lost a friend to heroin in New Orleans told me earlier this year for an article that appeared in NOLA Defender, the new version of heroin use is all around us, but often hidden.

“They go to work, they pay their bills, a lot of them are moms and dads,” she said of heroin users. “They could be the people cooking your breakfast in the morning or your bartender, and you would never know.”

The act of reporting can even claim its own toll. In Rio Arriba County, where I started my reporting career, one of the reporters who worked at the small but mighty Rio Grande Sun following my tenure ended up in the throes of addiction himself. He did the important work of documenting overdoses and abuse.

One morning, early last year, I spied a nice-sized ball of black tar in the police department's evidence room. Police had seized it during the bust-up of a fencing operation the night before. I caught a whiff of its nasty, vinegary odor and couldn't stop thinking about how much I had enjoyed using the stuff years earlier.


By then we had been crushing painkillers on and off for several months. A couple Sarah met at work had turned us on to them and, before even realizing it, we would hurt for the candy, as it was called. It wasn't long before the pills no longer hit like they used to, with the first casualty being Sarah's grades.

Tragically, Sarah later died as a result of an overdose. If communities truly want to confront the realities that produce labels like "heroin capital," they are better off digging into stories like Sarah's than arguing about statistics.