At Michigan Future, we believe the key to Michigan’s long-term prosperity is attracting and retaining young talent. In today’s economy, a state’s economic prosperity is determined by the educational attainment of its residents. This is because where you have high concentrations of highly educated people, high-wage knowledge firms locate, expand, or are created. If a state wants to increase its concentration of highly educated people, it must ensure more of its young people go on to pursue and complete a bachelor’s degree, and it must attract highly educated people from anywhere in the world. And because young people are the most mobile, attracting young, highly-educated people is what’s most critical.
So, what kinds of places attract highly educated young people? And how is Michigan doing at attracting this demographic?
To help answer these questions I looked at data from the annual American Community Survey for Michigan, Illinois, and Colorado. From looking at this data, we can see how many young professionals (defined as 25-34 year olds with a BA) moved to a one of these states from outside the state, and what area of the state they migrated to. This helps us both understand what kinds of places are attractive to young professionals, and offers a sense for how well Michigan is doing at creating these kinds of places.
The headline figure is that both Illinois and Colorado are attracting many more young professionals from out of state every year than Michigan is. In an average year (survey data was pooled across years to get a large enough sample), Illinois attracts 48,144 young professionals from out of state, and Colorado attracts 47,437. Michigan attracts roughly half those amounts – 24,439.
A deeper look at where these young professionals moved to within these states provides a clue as to why such a large gap exists between Michigan and these other states: Michigan lacks a talent-magnet city.
In Illinois, 23,306 (48.4%) of the 48,144 young professional newcomers live in Chicago. In Colorado, 13,917 (29.3%) of the 47,437 newcomers live in Denver. In Michigan, just 1,230 (5%) of the 24,439 young professionals that arrive from out of state settle in Detroit.
Michigan’s other cities don’t pick up the slack. Ann Arbor attracts roughly 3,000 young professionals annually from out of state; Grand Rapids, 890; Lansing, 540. The full tables for each state with notable city and metro landing places are below.
The clear takeaway from this data is that, first, when young professionals move from one state to another, they move, overwhelmingly, to a central city or the metropolitan area of that central city. And, second, the reason Michigan does not attract talent at the scale of places like Illinois and Colorado is because Detroit is not yet a talent magnet. To be sure, progress has been made – Detroit added roughly 13,000 young professionals between 2013 and 2023. But this only brought the city’s total number of young professionals to roughly 25,000. As I wrote about in a previous post, this is nowhere near the scale required to drive economic growth.
What can we do to get to the right level of scale? Invest in the things that made Chicago and Denver talent magnets: rail transit; walkable urban design; amenities; high-density housing. Only then will the trickle of young talent moving to Michigan every year turn into something more like a flood.
