Cautionary manufacturing tales from Alabama
The Ford Rouge plant my great-grandfather toiled in in the early 20th century was a tough, dangerous, dirty place. There’s a reason the Rouge was one of the founding sites of the American labor movement: Workers organized because they were desperate for safety protections as well as job security. Today, the Rouge looks and operates […]
Why are more men not at work?
Read this and let it sink in for a minute: A man with only a high school diploma is twice as likely to be out of work as a man who has a four-year college degree. And, of the 9.3 million men between the ages of 25 and 50 who weren’t working last year, 1.7 […]
The ongoing transformation of how we earn a living
We continue to work on Michigan Future’s first ever state policy agenda. The goal is to recommend state policies that will help all Michiganders do better economically in the context of today’s and tomorrow’s realities. Not to try to use policy to turn the clock back. What has become clear to us in doing the […]
What we miss when we focus only on test scores
At Michigan Future, we’ve been making the argument for some time now that our k-12 accountability systems need to measure schools based on the outcomes that matter most: what happens to students after they leave k-12. This is far different than what we do now. And therefore, our current system tells us very little about […]
More and better parks can help position Detroit to attract more millennials
When my husband and I moved to a high-rise building near the Renaissance Center in Detroit in 2000, calling our new neighborhood “downtown” would be an aspirational description at best. The city center we moved to lacked amenities so basic that even our apartment’s stunning views of the Detroit River and Belle Isle barely made […]
New report shares the impact of over-incarceration on kids
At MFI, we were already supportive of prison reform that helps nonviolent criminals stay out of jail when appropriate, not least because doing time severely limits one’s ability to participate meaningfully in the economy following release. When we look at what it will take for Michigan to be prosperous again, we need to be removing […]
Why do we want to be like those states?
In my last post we looked at evidence that the most prosperous non-energy states were those with the highest college attainment, not the lowest taxes. In this post I want to look at the states the tax cutters in Lansing are telling us we need to emulate. The argument of many advocating for an elimination […]
Educational attainment and the American dream
Late last year, Stanford economist Raj Chetty and colleagues published an important set of data that measured just how many Americans achieve the American dream. They define the American dream as the ideal that a child will earn more money, and enjoy a higher standard of living, than their parents did. Economists refer to this […]
How Michigan fails black college students
As a member of the Wayne State University Board of Governors, I have become very familiar with the various lists that organizations and publications compile to rank institutions of higher education. Many times when a new list is published, I tense up as I scan it looking for my school’s name. Recently, WSU was at […]
Low college attainment is hurting Michigan, and it’s worse for black students at Michigan colleges
The Education Trust just published a report that shows the sizable gap between African-American and white completion rates at America’s colleges. Overall, 63.2 percent of white students who enroll in a four-year college graduate in six years, while only 40.6 percent of black students do. The short story of the trends is this: high selectivity […]