Michigan Senate Democrats are swinging for the fences. The Dems want to offer tuition-free higher education to qualified young people who graduate from the state’s K-12 system – and they want to pay for that by repealing corporate tax breaks.
At first blush, that might sound like a hippy-dippy fantasy dreamed up in the tents of the Occupy Detroit movement. It also could be the best thing that ever happened to free enterprise and entrepreneurship in this state since Henry Ford learned to use a wrench.
Under the proposal, called Michigan 2020, Michigan high school graduates would be eligible to receive a grant for tuition and other costs at one of Michigan’s public community colleges or universities. The price tag for the plan, which is based loosely on the Kalamazoo Promise program, is estimated to be about $1.8 billion per year. That money, the backers say, could come from closing “the loopholes that allow companies to avoid paying taxes.”
In an announcing of the plan, Senate Democratic Leader Gretchen Whitmer said in a statement, “It’s time for us to be bold and there’s no better place for us to start than by giving each and every child in Michigan the chance to compete in the 21st Century job market.”
Well it is bold – and that is one reason why Michigan 2020 probably has no chance of being passed as-is in the current state Legislature. It probably should not be passed unless taxpayers can be sure the tuition grants would go only to students prepared to succeed in college. However, the instinct behind the proposal – that Michigan needs to invest in its young people if it wants to avoid the status of economic backwater – is absolutely correct.
Michigan is not attracting or creating enough of the high-growth companies that one finds in places like Boston or Silicon Valley. As things are now, there is no level of tax reduction or deregulation that will help. It’s not a “low-tax, low-regulation environment” that keeps Apple in Cupertino, Google in Mountain View, or Facebook in Menlo Park. It’s the workforces those places (all in tax-heavy, highly regulated California) can provide.
Now, sure, there is something of a chicken-and-egg dynamic at work. Many of Cupertino’s college grads are there because of Apple and its high salaries. But that does not change a basic fact: Michigan competes for investment and talent with a lot of places where “brain drain” is not a problem on the lips of policy makers.
A real bright for spot Michigan is Ann Arbor, which ranks as one ofAmerica’s smartest cities. An amazing 72 percent of Ann Arbor residents above the age of 25 hold bachelor’s degrees and 43 percent have advanced degrees. That’s even smarter than Cupertino, and by a good margin. But, statistically, Ann Arbor is an outlier. In Michigan overall, only about 25 percent of adults held a college degree in 2009. That puts us at No. 31 among the 50 states and four percentage points below the average of the top 10 states.
Those numbers are not bad for a state that has relied heavily on jobs that do not require high educational attainment. For a state that wants to diversify itself into newer, knowledge-intensive industries that require a dynamic mix of technical skill and creativity, they’re not good enough. We need to do a lot better if Michigan wants to play in the technological big leagues.
If we want to do that, we need the whole state to be a lot more like Ann Arbor. And, by “a lot more like Ann Arbor,” I mean a place in which people get good educations of all kinds and not just technical training, though we certainly need a lot of that.
Nobody doubts the need for more graduates with degrees in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, but the dynamic American economy was built on more than that. Just ask Kim Korth, president at IRN Inc., a Grand Rapids-based consulting firm that serves the transportation and equipment markets. Korth holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Western Michigan University. She spent her junior years taking courses in medieval studies at the University of Wales.
What’s important over the long run is not providing training for the jobs we have now. As any former Wang word processor expert can tell you, a lot of specific skills become useless in just a few years. To really compete, Michigan needs people who can think, imagine and adapt – the people writer Richard Florida calls the “creative class.”
The creative types Florida refers to aren’t just writers, actors and painters. They also include innovators in fields like engineering, biotech, education, architecture and small businesses of all kinds. Put them together and really good things can happen to a community and its economy. And that brings us back to Michigan 2020.
Unlike other kinds of “workforce development” ideas, Michigan 2020 is not aimed at simply shoveling unemployed people into specific kinds of positions that need to be filled now. The goal is to raise the overall level of educational attainment in this state and thus, provide the building blocks for a better, more creative, dynamic economy for years to come.
I have some reservations about Michigan 2020. I want to know, for example, how the program would ensure that students receiving the grants are set up to succeed. Four-year colleges are not for everyone, so it is good that the plan also would pay for community colleges. But what about students for whom apprenticeships might be more appropriate?
Also: What incentives will there be to encourage colleges and universities to keep tuition affordable? As it stands now, the grants to students would equal the median tuition level of all of Michigan’s public universities — currently $9,575 per year. The program might not be sustainable unless tuition increases can be kept at or below the rate of inflation. Doing that could be a challenge.
If it works, Michigan 2020 could set up the Great Lakes State for success in a world that puts a premium on brainpower and creativity. It could start to reverse years of job losses and give our best and brightest a reason to stay here. As the backers put it, sometimes it makes sense to be bold. This could be one of those times. Could the results really be worse than what we have gotten from Lansing’s history of timidity?
