Yesterday, I wrote about the massive shift in personal income in Michigan. It’s no coincidence that our youngest, most educated workers are leaving. It’s also no coincidence that Michigan employers cannot fill the job openings they have, and that job growth in Michigan is expected to remain flat through 2030. That means Michigan’s economy is not expected to grow over the next decade.
Something’s not working here, so let’s keep doing the same thing, over and over.
You can chalk this up to Michigan’s “one-state recession” but the reality is that the only way to improve Michigan’s economy is to stop the exodus of our young adult workforce, and to attract new workers via industry growth in new, in-demand industries.
That’s not happening now, and it won’t happen until there is a coherent, coordinated plan to develop Michigan’s workforce and attract new employers and industries. It’s not impossible. Other states have done it successfully; there is no reason we can’t.
The plan has to involve our community colleges, municipalities, counties, and states. Attracting new industries is not just a matter of offering the right incentives. The plan has to include the ability to turn up a skilled workforce quickly and reliably. It also has to involve rebuilding our cities to make them attractive, vital, walkable, and sustainable. Young, educated professionals don’t want to live in the suburban communities that currently describe our population centers. They want to live and work in the same dense, urban areas. Those areas must contain reliable mass transit and sustainable transit options.
If, in Michigan, we do not incorporate these into our urban environments, we will not retain the workers in whom we have invested so much. We will also not attract the workers we need to expand our economy.
Improving Michigan’s economy means prioritizing education
The “Michigan tax” we currently impose on our workers amounts to $.13 per dollar, compared to the national earnings average. That means for every dollar the average US worker earns, a Michigan worker earns $0.87. Michigan’s lower cost of living doesn’t make up for the economic losses we all experience by remaining in Michigan’s economy.
We cannot ask our most educated workers to take a “hometown discount” and stay here when they could earn what they deserve elsewhere. We need to give these workers, and those who follow them, a tangible financial reason to stay.
The $35,000 that a community college education offers is simply and utterly inadequate. It is unfortunate that our elected Trustees not only tolerate this but also congratulate and reward the executives who push the narrative that this is somehow a worthy accomplishment on their part. Even worse, they accept the premise that somehow, less education – in the form of certificates – is better than more education. Unfortunately, this strategy has been in place long enough to reclassify WCC as a “certificate school” instead of a two-year college.
In WCC’s case, this is the result of lax, weak oversight by the Board of Trustees. Our elected officials see brilliant performance where there is none, and gladly redirect our resources away from meaningful education and toward side hustles that return very little – if anything at all.
It is time to demand better from our elected officials. Michigan’s economy depends on it.
Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk, via Flickr
