On October 21, Michigan Future co-hosted a convening in downtown Grand Rapids for 60 community leaders called Outsmarting the Robots: Redesigning education from the classroom to the halls of Lansing. The goals of this half-day event were: To help catalyze…
In a previous post we explored the huge B.A. earnings premium for 25-34 year olds. In this post I want to explore how well 25-34 year old African Americans with a four-year degree or more do in the labor market…
Reading Richard Whitmire's worth reading The B.A. Breakthrough reminded me why Michigan Future has been supportive of charter schools from their inception in Michigan more than a quarter of century ago. Largely because they provide an alternative to chronically failing…
2018 work earnings data are now available from the Current Population Survey. What follows is an update of an earlier post now with 2018 data. The story we are told over and over again is for today’s students getting a…
We are constantly besieged with messaging that a liberal arts degree is useless. Maybe even worse than useless: a path to being a pauper or something close. Stuck in low-paying work that leaves you unable to pay off the loans…
More than a decade ago we identified four common characteristics of high-prosperity non-energy-driven states: Over concentrated in knowledge-based services which are the sectors of the economy both growing and high wageHigh proportion of adults with a four-year degree or moreEven…
Paul Tough's excellent new book The Years That Matter Most explores how college entrance exams––SAT and ACT––impact who gets admitted to college. He does it by comparing the impact of college entrance exams on both admissions and college success to…
We constantly hear that the value of a four-year degree is declining. Somehow conventional wisdom has it that since the end of the Great Recession college graduates are not enjoying the wage premium over those with less education than previous…
As readers of this bog know we believe Michigan needs to move away from standardized testing. Anytime we make that case, the first question we get is “what is the alternative?” In a column for Bloomberg entitled Testing Craze Is…
In 2004 Michigan Future published a report on knowledge-based states having higher per capita income than manufacturing-based states. The data showed that the most prosperous states––other than states with lots of oil and natural gas––had four common characteristics: Over concentration…