The case for higher education as a priority
Great column in Dome Magazine by Glen Mroz, the terrific President of Michigan Tech. Mroz makes the case that cutting higher education funding is harmful to the Michigan economy. First the facts. State appropriations to higher education are down 35% over the last ten years. So much for the nonsense that the state went on […]
Cut and then what?
Insightful Rick Haglund column on AnnArbor.com. He makes the point that after the reset of Michigan state government this year the state faces a fundamental choice in where it goes from here. One path is to do more of what we did this year: less taxes, less spending. The other is to resume public investments […]
More education attainment data
The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released its preliminary estimates of per capita income for 2010. There will be all sorts of revisions before the final stats are in. But they are the first data in a decade that use actual state population (the denominator), rather than estimates. Because Michigan’s population in previous calculations was […]
Education attainment and employment
The Census Bureau using data from the 2010 Current Population Survey just released what they describe as “the most detailed information on years of school completed ever presented by the Census Bureau”. It is worth looking at. Lots of interesting data on education attainment by age, race, gender, etc. What I want to focus on […]
U of M’s value
A thought experiment: Assume the University of Michigan/Ann Arbor decides – as MSU did with its medical school – to take offers to relocate all or part of its operations. But not just someplace else in Michigan, any place on the planet. How much would the incentive packages put together by communities and countries be? […]
The higher education we need
This is the first of a series of posts on higher education. As many of you know, in our 2006 A New Agenda for a New Michigan, we argued to recreate a high prosperity Michigan, maintaing a quality and agile higher education system was the #1 priority for state policy makers . We have been […]
More educated women
The trend continues that women are adjusting better to the changing economy than men. Yahoo! News has an article using Census data that for the first time ever there are more women with advanced degrees than men. This makes it an across the board sweep for women: more high school grads, more with four year […]
“If the people are here, the companies will come”
I took the title from a Nathan Bomey article on annarbor.com. Bomey was writing about a conference about growing the clean energy industry in Michigan. Bomey writes: Ken Nisbet, executive director of U-M’s Technology Transfer Office, said investment capital is important, but companies gravitate toward regions that are populated with talented people. “I actually think […]
The case for raising taxes II
Terrific Larry Gabriel column in the Metro Times. It is about the causes of Detroit’s horrible population decline. Now the 18th largest city in the country, down from 4th. As Gabriel points out the problems may be worse in Detroit, but the whole state is facing the same challenges. Too many mobile individuals don’t want […]
The leaders and the best and world class
Recently Thom Linn sent me the QS World University Rankings. Why? Because the University of Michigan is ranked as the 15th best university in the world. Turns out the QS rankings are one of three global higher ed rankings that are considered the most reliable. The other two The Times Higher Education World University Rankings […]