Austin Texas voters just voted to raise property taxes to pay for the operations and maintenance of Project Connect, a high-capacity $7.1 billion transit system expansion. Project Connect is highlighted by a new light rail system with 27 miles of…
A little more than a year ago the Grand Rapids Public Museum hosted Outsmarting the Robots: Redesigning education from the classroom to the halls of Lansing. The conference was organized around the question "how do we redesign our system for…
The preeminent path to good-paying careers looks more like rock climbing than climbing a career ladder. More ad hoc and non linear than predictable and linear. What makes successful careers for most of us are our second and third jobs,…
The oft-repeated case for you don't need to go to college is almost always anchored by the claim that there are plenty of six-figure jobs available to young workers who do not have a four-year degree. The story goes that…
Michigan Future's core work, since our founding nearly three decades ago, has been laying out how Michigan could once again be a high-prosperity state––a place with a broad middle class––in an economy being transformed by globalization and technology. The bottom…
In two recent posts (here and here) we have explored why the demise of big cities due to the pandemic is unlikely to happen. That American history is full of predictions of the death of the city which have always…
Google, with much fanfare, recently announced "three new Google Career Certificates in the high-paying, high-growth career fields of Data Analytics, Project Management, and User Experience (UX) Design. Like our IT Support and Automation in Python Certificates, these new career programs…
Michigan's Bureau of Labor Market Information and Strategic Initiatives recently released their 2018-2028 employment projections by occupation and industry. Also released was their Michigan's Hot 50 Job Outlook Through 2028. Which lists the 50 occupations over the next decade that…
As we explored in my last post from the beginning of our republic there has been predictions of the coming demise of high-density big cities. All of them have been wrong. The same is almost certain to be the case…
David Oshinsky in his book Bellevue quotes Thomas Jefferson's reaction to the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, then the nation's capitol: By November the streets were deserted, and more than 10 percent of the city's fifty thousand residents were…