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…
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…
A recent post making the urbanist rounds asks, “Is Detroit Really Making a Comeback?” The authors’ research, which was just published in the journal Cities, looks at employment, income, housing values, and other data to explore whether the resurgence evidenced…
It used to be that parents who wanted job security urged kids to get a degree with immediately practical applications—like Eboo Patel’s mother, who wanted him to major in business instead of sociology, as he recalls in this blog from…
I’ve posted before about why we should try to reduce the number of Michiganders who end up in jail when an appropriate alternative can be found. The costs of imprisonment for the state, the unequal application of our justice system…
Last week the New York Times published an article investigating the question of whether we’ve hit “peak Millennial”—whether the influx of young adults that has been so pivotal to population growth in cities around America is about to end. This is an…
Last week my colleague Kim Trent wrote about the rapidity at which automation is changing the job market and the skills that employers are looking for. Hundreds of thousands of Michigan workers have reason to be concerned about whether the…
One of the skills that the Becoming Brilliant authors Roberta Michnick and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek focus on as critical to future success is that of confidence. You may think of confidence as something innate—you’re born smart, or good-looking, or good at…
In my last post, I revisited some memories from my 8th grade art class with John Post, in the light of what we’ve been learning from Becoming Brilliant—a book about what skills our kids will need to be successful in…
Readers of MFI will know we have all recently read (or in some cases, re-read) Becoming Brilliant, which makes a strong case that the skills our children will need to be successful in the future are much broader than those…