Let me take you through a few of my highs and lows.

1

Governor Snyder writes:

Although this transformation will be very challenging, it is our opportunity to create a more engaging educational system that leads to well-paying careers in high-demand jobs.

Yes, great, let’s do that! Good-paying careers for all Michiganders is the right goal, and reforming our education system is a critical strategy for meeting that goal.

He follows that up with this:

For example, there is very high demand for many professional trades and yet we live in a society that does not encourage young people to enter career technical education programs to gain the necessary and important skills to meet these needs.

There will never be enough good-paying jobs in the professional trades in Michigan for this to be the right strategy to meet his stated goal. According to the state’s own Pathfinder site, the median wage for carpenters is $43,070. Only 10 percent of carpenters make more than $66,880. Fifty percent of welders make less than $36,410. And only 10 percent make more than $55,290. According to the United Way’s ALICE report, a family of four needs to make more than $56,000 just to afford basic necessities. That income level doesn’t even allow a family to save for retirement, let alone buy a little cottage up north. And if we do indeed have a shortage of skilled work for these professions, the wages aren’t likely to rise if the labor market is awash with new carpenters.

Plumbers do slightly better, with a median wage of $63,610. The state’s website predicts an 11 percent growth rate in the number plumbers needed over the next ten years. Not bad! But not close to the wages and growth rate of mechanical engineers.

On top of that, the numbers of job openings in each professional trade just don’t support the governor’s enthusiasm. According to Pathfinder, there will be 393 annual openings for carpenters through 2024. There are 279 openings for plumbers, and 489 openings for welders. These might seem like big numbers. But not when you look at the total number of job openings. Through 2024–again, according to the state–there are projected to be about 140,000 job openings annually. With a certificate for any one of the professional trades (e.g., carpenter), you are prepared for fewer than one percent of those jobs because if you become a carpenter, you aren’t simultaneously prepared to be a welder.

Don’t get me wrong: we need carpenters, and for some kids it might be the perfect career. But we only need a few hundred more each year. I added up the number of annual job openings expected in the state’s list of “hot 25” professional trades, and it is almost 7,000. In other words, if we have 102,000 high school seniors graduating every year, we need 7,000, or just 6.8 percent, of them to pursue a professional trade. And only nine of those 25 occupations have a median wage higher than the ALICE rate. This just is not the mass solution to “well-paying careers” that the governor suggests.

Not to mention—for an economy to provide jobs to people in the trades, there needs to be a customer base: a population who are working in truly high-wage jobs, which tend to require a college degree. According to the 2012-2016 ACS, the median wage for all Michiganders who have some post-secondary education but not a college degree is $31,801. The median wage for those with a B.A. is $49,711.

2

Governor Snyder notes:

Our current system does a poor job of providing students useful information regarding the connection between fields of study and well-paying careers.

Too true! Kids have no idea what different jobs pay, or what income level equals a comfortable living, or how to prepare for a good-paying career. For instance, many people push kids to consider carpentry based not on the young person’s interest, but on the fact that carpenters are legitimately really busy these days. And also a guy they went to high school with is a carpenter and he makes $100,000. Yet the actual median wage of carpenters is well under the United Way’s ALICE rate for supporting a family with two kids. The carpenter who makes $100,000 is an outlier. Being a carpenter is the right choice for some kids, but it doesn’t come with a guarantee of strong lifelong earnings.

He follows up with this:

A positive exception that does better than most is career technical education. It often provides the appropriate competency for a well-paying job at either the high school or college level. But as a society, we push college degrees and tend to diminish the value of CTE.

If we are pushing college degrees, we are pretty bad at it. Only 27.4 percent of Michiganders 25 and up have a college degree or higher. By the way, their lifetime earnings are expected to be between half a million and almost three million dollars more than those without a degree (studies vary). This gap is largely thought to be widening over time—not shrinking.

3

One of the enormous challenges of post-secondary education today is the issue of cost. It is expensive to solely go to school for two, four or more years of education. Staggering student debt is something that causes many not to finish or significantly burdens those who complete their programs.

Yes! I would love to hear his ideas about reducing the costs of college and helping kids persist to achieve their degree, since having a well-educated population is so fundamental to our economic success. Not to mention it promotes equity and fosters an educated citizenry. Of course, incurring debt to get a college degree pays off over time in significantly higher lifetime earnings.

With a competency-based certificate model, students can move into well-paying jobs within a year or two in many cases, and with much less financial burden.

It may be true that some skilled trades pay relatively well within two years of the certificate being awarded. But what matters in the economy that the governor correctly understands is going to be full of increasingly rapid change isn’t whether that first job pays well—it’s whether that individual is set up for a career of good-paying jobs. There is simply no comparison between the lifetime earnings of most people with a college degree and most people without one.

Employers are already struggling to find people with the necessary competency in fields as diverse as information technology, manufacturing, healthcare and the professional trades. Job providers are hiring people who have the skills but not a degree.

While some employers may feel this way, this just isn’t true from the perspective of a citizen. The unemployment rate for Michiganders with a post-secondary credential that isn’t a college degree is 6.8 percent. The unemployment rate for those with a college degree is 3.3 percent. People with degrees are having a much easier time getting jobs. (Not to mention, they have a higher rate of labor force participation: 85.6 percent vs. 77.1 percent).

While the governor doesn’t mention the failed Amazon HQ2 bids of Detroit and Grand Rapids in his commentary for Bridge, the entire Marshall Plan is seemingly a response to the loss—neither city even made the list of finalists. Does anyone think that Amazon didn’t decide to locate here because we have a shortage of plumbers? Did the governor really miss the key message: Amazon—and other companies that offer good-paying careers—need a population that is high-skilled. And by high-skilled, they mostly mean college degree-holding.

I understand the desire among many to emphasize CTE and skilled trades for young people. Our talent gap—especially in college degree attainment—is daunting. It’s a lot easier, and cheaper, to get a young person to complete a certificate course than to graduate from college, and we know that high school graduates who don’t pursue any post-secondary education are most likely going to live a life of financial hardship. On top of that, the trades offer honorable and reliable work, and some do pay well. But overall, discouraging college and promoting a lower educational credential is the wrong solution, for our young people, and for Michigan. Governor Snyder seems to think it’s silly that our society values a college degree over a recognized set of earned competencies. I disagree, but it’s not my opinion that matters—it’s the market’s. And there is simply no evidence that the market is suddenly going to stop valuing college degrees and start valuing a set of earned competencies.

Governor Snyder closes:

We are in a fast-changing world that may soon look like a place some of us may not yet even be able to imagine. But as we travel this path, we must lead the way for the sake of our children and grandchildren.

He’s absolutely right about how urgently this transformation requires a new approach to education. Unfortunately, in his prescribed response to this transformation, many of his ideas are absolutely wrong. And more than anything else, I fear they lead to a state where, instead of figuring out the difficult work of how to make sure college is an opportunity every child is prepared for and, if they want to pursue it, supported through, we throw up our hands. We decide to accept that college and the choices it affords are reserved for the affluent, and hope that everyone else can make a good living pursuing their passion for pipe-fitting.

For an alternative approach, check out our recommendations on policy changes that would actually improve outcomes for kids.

The post The Governor is right that talent is a big issue. He’s wrong about how to solve it. appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

There is ample evidence of the correlation between a state’s college attainment and per capita income. Of the top 15 American states for per capita income, 12 are also among the top 15 for college attainment. The remaining three top states for per capita income hold vast energy resources that boost the state’s economy.

While higher education has long been recognized as the most important driver of upward mobility, modern researchers have noted there is a widening class-based degree attainment gap. Stanford professor Raj Chetty’s research shows that while sixty percent of 25-year-olds from the top fifth of income distribution hold bachelor’s degree, only one-third of 25-year-olds from the next 40 percent are four-year college graduates and only 10 percent of that age cohort from the bottom 40 percent hold bachelor’s degrees.

The head start that upper income students receive includes more and better access to early admissions and other admission preferences like legacy status; merit-based scholarships that reward them for access to quality K-12 educational opportunity and a culture that helps them easily navigate the byzantine application and financial aid processes that can be a real barrier for first-generation college attendees.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Richard V. Reeves’ 2017 book Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It outlines the many ways that class separation is an existential threat to the American Dream. Reeves posits that the gulf between upper middle class and every economic class below them threatens America’s long-standing reputation as a meritocracy, an idea he presented in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He writes:

Although many Americans pride themselves on living in a classless society, there is a growing class separation, especially between the upper middle class and the majority. The divide can be seen in income trends, wealth gaps, neighborhood quality, health, life expectancy and so on. But the most potent symbol of upper-middle class separation is the elite university.

Reeves describes elite universities with voracious appetites for wealthy students whose parents can comfortably pay full tuition. In the push to attract well-heeled students, efforts to expand the economic diversity of student bodies have often been tossed aside.

Reeves suggests three strategies to close the income college attainment gap:

1. Simplifying the application process. Upper income students have access to college-educated parents, better college. Non-affluent students are much less likely to navigate the complexities of the college application process as easily as their wealthier peers. Reeves also suggests that schools re-think programs such as early admissions, which give affluent students who aren’t reliant on financial aid decisions the upper hand.
2. Re-think merit scholarships: Colleges started offering modest merit-based scholarships to wealthy students in the 1990s, hoping to attract parents who could afford to pay most of tuition costs. Now the scholarships have become so common that they limit resources available for students with greater financial needs. (Michigan is uniquely awful on this front, using federal Temporary Aid to Needy Families dollars that are intended to support families who need financial support to meet basic needs to fund state merit scholarships to families who could easily afford tuition.)
3. Widening admissions criteria: Reeves argues that colleges must use innovative strategies to find talented potential applicants from disadvantaged economic groups. He urges colleges to look at how British universities consider “contextual data” to give a leg up to low income students from struggling schools or by giving preferences to applicants from low income zip codes, even those with lower standardized test scores or GPAs.

The ideas that Reeves has promoted are provocative and will likely face significant backlash from the wealthy and well-connected families who benefit from the status quo. But it’s an important debate to have. We need to decide whether we are comfortable with higher education that instead of being an engine of upward mobility is a solidifier of economic castes. For the sake of our state and our country, I hope we are not.

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I wanted to look at the new BLS occupational data and apply it to Michigan specifically to make a few more guesses about how our state’s job opportunities will change over the next decade. (Because this is a blog post and not a term paper, I’ve made a few methodologically questionable choices in my analysis, but I’m just trying to get a general picture, so I hope the data nerds out there will please forgive me.)

The ALICE report for 2015 data listed the top 20 most common occupations in Michigan. I used this list as my way into this data. I pulled the expected national growth rates from the BLS data for each of these occupations and applied them to the number of jobs in 2015 in Michigan (essentially pretending that 2015 and 2016 numbers are the same). Then I organized the spreadsheet in different ways—by the usual education requirement, by median income, and by the growth rate. What I found is stark confirmation that we need to stop planning Michigan’s future as though it’s going to look like our past. Here are a few of the things that jumped out at me.

Four of Michigan’s top occupations have negative growth. Three of these occupations are actually listed on the BLS list of “fastest declining occupations.” These are all occupations that don’t require more than a high school degree. In 2015, we had 104,210 team assemblers. In 2026, if you apply the national growth rate, we will only have 91,080.

Only four of Michigan’s top occupations pay a median wage that is close to or above the ALICE “household supporting wage.” I really like this figure because we should be aiming for prosperity—not just for families to live slightly above poverty. Surprise, surprise: all four of these occupations require a bachelor’s degree. Also, all four of these occupations are growing at or above the national occupational growth rate issued by BLS (7.4 percent over the decade).

When I added up the job growth—just out of the top 20 occupations in Michigan—in each educational category, I found that jobs requiring a college degree will grow by 11.0 percent, jobs requiring a high school degree or less will grow by 9.0 percent, and jobs “in-between” will grow by only 4.4 percent. Again, this is only looking at those top 20 occupations—but it mirrors the national figures. The job growth for these occupations, overall, is concentrated in high-skill, high-wage and low-skill, low-wage occupations. Not in the middle-skill and middle-income. (Though let’s be honest: the middle-skill jobs in Michigan aren’t paying a household supporting wage, and one can imagine they will pay even less, relatively, if there are more applicants vying for them.)

This data paints the picture that our policy agenda is trying to respond to. We need to make college education a possibility for far more of our kids; we need to support the vast numbers of people who are going to be working low-wage jobs so that they aren’t living in poverty; and we need to support the creation of communities that can attract talented workers to drive the economy.

If we want Michigan households to grow in prosperity, there are so many things we need to do differently. And we need to start by realizing that the future won’t look like the past—or even the present.

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There is ample evidence that there is no greater engine of economic mobility than a four-year degree. Sadly, however, 217 of the 381 public institutions that were studied for the Equality of Opportunity Project’s Mobility Score Card, admitted 4.6 percent fewer students from the lower 40 percent of income rankings between 1999 and 2013. That should come as no surprise given the growing financial burden for tuition that states are placing on students and their families. In Michigan, state disinvestment has led to two-thirds of tuition costs being covered by students and less than a third of tuition costs being covered by state funding, the exact opposite of the funding formula that was the norm until the early 1990s, back when state leaders recognized and funded higher education as a public good.

Between 2008 and 2016, per student funding in higher education declined 18 percent nationally, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities . The decline is even more stark in Michigan, where per-student funding declined 21 percent.

It matters because people who have degrees have lower unemployment rates and higher salaries than those with a high school diploma or less. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, students who graduated in Great Recession-plagued 2008 were earning an average of $52,000 four years later. Six years after graduation, their unemployment rate was 3.4 percent, a fraction of the 10 percent unemployment rate for workers with a high school diploma or less in 2014.

While some have questioned the value proposition of paying for a college degree, it’s telling that wealthy Americans overwhelmingly send their kids to college. In fact, while the number of students admitted from the bottom 40 percent has lagged, nearly two-thirds of the schools that were studied in the Mobility Score Card admitted 5.4 percent more students from the top 20 percent in family income.

As a board member at Wayne State University, a school that prides itself on accessibility, I understand the difficult choices that university leaders are forced to make when building a student body. State disinvestment has forced schools to vigorously compete for students whose families can afford to pay full tuition costs and sometimes in that competition, the need to recruit and retain low income students can be lost.

But if we want a nation where the American Dream is something more than a hollow slogan, we need to make access to higher education real for the low-income students who need it most.

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The period after World War II, up until the early 70s, is often pointed to as the golden era of economic growth in the United States, with average family income growing at an inflation-adjusted rate of 2.6% annually. And growth was not only high but evenly spread, with bottom quintile incomes increasing 3% annually, and the top quintile averaging 2.5% annual growth.

As you might guess, this meant a high rate of absolute mobility. 92% of Children born in 1940 did better than their parents. And those that didn’t were generally individuals who’d grown up rich, giving them a smaller chance of earning more than their parents.

As economic growth slowed, absolute mobility rates started to decline. And then as the mega-forces of globalization and automation took hold in the 80s, decreasing the number of well-paying jobs available to less-skilled workers and increasing inequality, the absolute mobility rate dropped precipitously. For the 1980 birth cohort – who are now in their prime working years – just 50% are doing better than their parents did at the same age.

So to recap, if you were born in 1940, you were almost certain to do better than your parents. If you were born 40 years later, you had just a 50/50 shot.

The question, of course, is what to do about this? One obvious place to look is educational attainment. And sure enough, the story of educational attainment in America mirrors, almost exactly, the story of economic mobility in America.

Educational attainment

In a 2014 article in the New York Times, Eduardo Porter lays out the numbers. Today, just 30% of American adults have achieved a higher level of education than their parents did. And this number is going down, not up. Among 25 to 34 year olds, just 20% of men and 27% of women have achieved a higher level of education than their parents.

This is a profound shift from that high-mobility 1940 birth cohort. When they were born, America was near completing the transition to universal high school enrollment. And between 1915 and 1960, the relative supply of college educated workers (compared to high school educated workers) increased at a rate of 3% per year. Americans were getting more education than their parents had, and earning more than their parents did.

Somewhere along the line, however, this stopped happening. Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, authors of the book The Race Between Education and Technology, report that the relative supply of college-educated workers continued to increase at a rate of 3.8% annually between 1960 and 1980, before declining to just a 2% annual increase between 1980 and 2005. Fewer Americans are now getting more education than their parents had, and mobility has stalled.

It should be noted that higher educational-attainment is not a panacea for reducing inequality. An increase in the number of college graduates will not have much of an effect on the exorbitant earnings currently flowing to the top of the income distribution. But for those in the middle and bottom of the income distribution, increasing educational attainment is the answer to declining rates of mobility. Today, roughly a third of working-age Americans have a bachelor’s degree or more, with another 9% with an associate’s degree. This leaves a lot of room to grow, a lot of room for children to gain more education than their parents.

But this won’t just happen on its own. As Porter points out, in the first half of the 20^th century, increasing access to education was seen as a national project, a national priority. We understood that universal access to a high school education would provide both greater equity and greater productivity, and we brought the needed resources to bear.

It seems we’ve lost this broader sense of purpose, both as a nation and here in Michigan. From anti-poverty policy to k-12 education policy there’s a lot we can do to attack the problem of slowing educational attainment. But a place to start is with properly funding higher education so that all Michigan students who want a college education have equal access to it.

The funding of higher education in Michigan is currently placed squarely on the backs of students and families, with 70% of state university funding coming from tuition, and roughly 20% coming from state appropriations.

What this means is that for non-affluent students, the math on paying for college simply doesn’t add up. Even after maxing out federal loans and family contributions, they’re often still left with a large gap that they can’t pay for without saddling their parents with long-term debt. So despite the fact that the investment in a four-year college degree is clearly worth it, college becomes a far riskier proposition than it should be, and mere sticker shock can distort students’ decisions.

We need state policy that ensures all students can pay for college, anxiety-free. This can be in the form of higher funding for institutions, or far more state aid to non-affluent students, to fill the gaps in a student’s full cost of attendance. But until we publicly commit to doing this, and turn higher education into the public good it should be, the American dream has little chance of becoming a reality in Michigan.

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The results were fairly disappointing because the Michigan institutions that had the greatest impact on the mobility of their poorest students were selective institutions that enrolled very few low-income students. At U of M and MSU, over 60% of the poorest students who enroll make it to the top 40%, but less than 5% of each cohort at those schools come from the bottom income quintile.

A better metric to evaluate which colleges are true engines of economic mobility, therefore, might be what the New York Times called a college’s mobility rate. This metric takes the percent of students enrolled in a college cohort from the bottom two quintiles, and then multiplies that number by the percent of these students that end up in the top 40% as adults. This measure therefore takes into account both an institution’s commitment to access and success for non-affluent students. You can’t get a high number on this metric unless you both enroll a high number of students from the bottom two quintiles, and then get a high proportion of those students into the top 40% of wage earners as adults.

On this metric, it’s clear Michigan’s higher education system has some room for improvement. The Times reported out on the institutions with the best mobility rates in the country. At The City College of New York, for example, 60% of each cohort was drawn from the bottom 40%, and 63% of those students end up in the top 40% as adults, for a mobility rate of 38%. Other colleges with the best mobility rates in the country are in the mid 30s.

No higher education institution in Michigan is even close to hitting that metric. While 70% of students in the bottom two income quintiles that enroll at the University of Michigan make it to the top 40% by their early 30s, only 8% of each class at U of M is drawn from the bottom two quintiles, leaving U of M with a mobility rate of just 6%. Michigan State’s mobility rate is at just 7%, with 11% of each class coming from the bottom two income quintiles, and 60% of those students making it to the top 40% as adults. At Wayne State University, 27% of each class is drawn from the bottom 40%, but just 41% make it to the top two quintiles as adults, for a mobility rate of 11%.

Below I’ve listed all of the institutions that move at least 100 bottom 40% kids from each cohort into the top 40% as adults. As you can see, however, all of these schools have low mobility rates. Schools like Michigan State and the University of Michigan have a low mobility rate because they don’t enroll enough non-affluent students (though these numbers reflect students who enrolled in college in the late 90s, and both schools have made recent efforts to increase the number of low-income students they enroll). Community colleges and Wayne State University enroll higher proportions of non-affluent students, but have low rates of moving those students to the top 40% of earners as adults. As I mentioned in my last post, my guess is that this is because these institutions have low completion rates, so many students that attend don’t receive the economic benefits that come with earning a college degree.

As the data from the national leaders demonstrates, to truly serve as an engine of economic mobility colleges need to enroll a high proportion of non-affluent students, and then ensure a high proportion of those students leave with a degree. At the moment, we don’t have any colleges in Michigan that are doing both of these things well. Yet in an economy in which the returns to a college degree continue to increase, and too many students are left out, doing both of these things well may be our central challenge.

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That said, a set of data on earnings by college released last month from economist Raj Chetty and others – who’ve published a series of recent studies documenting mobility and opportunity in America – is worth paying attention to. Their data is interesting because using anonymous tax records they were able to track a college’s impact not just on earnings, but on mobility. They’re able to measure whether or not a student who grew up in the bottom income quintile and attended a particular college was able to move up to the middle-class as adults.

In a summary of the research for the New York Times, David Leonhardt charted the colleges across the country that best achieve this goal of upward mobility, documenting the percentage of students who enter each college from families in the bottom income quintile (a household income of below $25,000), but ended up in the top three-fifths of earners by the their early thirties. For a school to be considered, at least 10% of each class needed to be from the lowest income quintile (a sign of commitment to broad access), and they needed to enroll at least 500 students in each cohort (to show they were doing this work at scale). It should be noted that the data sets include students who went to a particular college for the bulk of their college career, even if they did not graduate from that school.

This is a wonderful analysis because it measures a college’s ability to deliver on what should be one of its core missions – to serve as an engine of mobility for low-income students. So using the publicly posted datasets for every college in the country, I ran a similar analysis for Michigan colleges, to see how our institutions are doing in providing economic opportunity for all Michiganders.

The first thing to note is that Leonhardt’s analysis is impossible in Michigan because our four-year colleges don’t enroll enough students from the bottom income quintile. Only three four-year colleges in Michigan drew more than 10% of their students from the bottom income quintile: Wayne State, U of D Mercy, and Olivet College (the data looks at students that entered college in the late 90s).

My analysis also differs from Leonhardt’s in that I analyzed the percentage of students at a college who were able to move from the bottom income quintile to the top two, rather than top three income quintiles. The reason for this is that those in the third quintile actually aren’t making very much money. An individual in the third income quintile could be making as low as $18,500 a year – not what any college would consider a success. The minimum income for someone in the fourth quintile, on the other hand, is closer to $35,000, a better measure of economic security.

With these caveats in mind, below is a chart that shows the percentage of bottom quintile students that end up in the top 40% of earners by their early thirties for colleges in Michigan. I’ve listed the top 20, but be sure to note that those most successful on this metric enroll relatively few bottom quintile students: 4% at Kettering, 3% at U of M, 4% at Michigan State. The column on the far right shows the average number of students in each cohort at the college that make the jump from the bottom quintile to making a decent salary as adults.

Seen through this lens, a couple things become clear. The first is that there are a fair number of schools in Michigan in which students from the bottom quintile who attend are more likely than not to be in the top 40% of earners by their early 30s. Many students in Michigan are indeed using postsecondary education as an engine of economic mobility.

On the other hand, we’re not doing nearly as well as we should be. At almost every college, including prestigious schools like U of M and MSU, a significant chunk of students that enroll don’t make it to the top 40%. For these students, college did not provide them a ticket to economic security. The key thing to remember here is that this data encompasses all students that attended the university, both those that graduated and those that didn’t. I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of students that failed to earn an annual salary of at least $35,000 by their early 30s were those that did not end up with a degree. The median salary for BA holders in 2015 was $51,000.

This finding argues for more transparency from colleges on the performance of their low-income students. We already have publicly available data on the graduation rates for minority groups, but we don’t have the same data by income. It’s entirely possible that while U of M’s graduation rate is 90% for the entire student body, the graduation rate for bottom quintile kids is far lower, with the kids that graduate earning solid footing in the middle class, and the kids that don’t left to struggle without a degree.

The other clear finding is that we need to continue to broaden access to our most selective colleges and universities for our poorest families. The problem of access is multifaceted, and encapsulates the need for quality k-12 preparation and college counseling, which will enable more low-income students to qualify for top tier schools, and then apply and matriculate to them, rather than undermatching. But our state’s highly selective colleges also have a role to play, perhaps by actively recruiting low-income students, relaxing SAT/ACT requirements in favor of good high school grades (which are shown to be predictive of college success), and ensuring low-income students are afforded the financial resources needed for them to be successful. Both U of M and MSU have made efforts in these directions over the past few years, but we need to broaden and accelerate these efforts.

In my next post I’ll analyze another metric the Times used in their analysis, which they call the “mobility rate.” Once again, we’ll see that Michigan’s postsecondary institutions have a lot of room for improvement.

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My friend’s anxiety over her daughter’s decision to pursue a liberal arts degree should come as no surprise. It has become conventional wisdom among many politicians and pundits that a liberal arts degree is a costly folly. Leaders like President Barack Obama and Florida Governor Rick Scott have disparaged liberal arts degrees as useless – despite the fact that they have provided pricey liberal educations for their own children.

THE SECOND MACHINE AGE

In fact, while opinion leaders pitch the idea that only STEM degrees are a certain path to career stability, futurists have noted that digital technologies will likely make even high-paying STEM careers like computer programming and anesthesiology obsolete. American workers who are best trained for 21^st century career success will be those who know how to adapt to an evolving career landscape by possessing broad, transferable skills.

I’m not arguing that STEM careers are a bad choice. But the skills that make all workers  – even those who choose STEM careers – valuable are boosted, not diminished, by a liberal education. In fact, in their groundbreaking book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that in order to outpace the machines that will replace workers in the future, workers need to gain skills that are uniquely human.  While it has become sport to denigrate a liberal education, futurists and employers have signaled that the skills 21^st job creators cherish most in workers are the very ones that a liberal education provides:  The ability to communicate, think critically, be creative and collaborate.

LESSONS FROM SILICON VALLEY

One need only look to Silicon Valley, where employers are increasingly recruiting liberal arts majors for top jobs. A 2015 Forbes magazine article recounts the career trajectories of the CEO and editorial director for tech juggernaut Slack Technologies, holders of bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and theater, respectively. Far from anomalies, these tech leaders represent the sector’s increasing reliance on leaders who possess the ability to add a human touch to their data-based world.

Knowing this, I gave my friend a 21^st century career pep talk that she could share with friends and family members who disapprove of her daughter’s college ambitions.

“Your daughter is learning how to do a job that can’t be replaced by robots and computers,” I told her.  “You should be proud! Do you think Lin-Manuel Miranda’s parents are embarrassed by his college and career choices?”

My friend felt better after our conversation, and I felt better knowing that I had helped to bolster the support network for a young woman who is using her college experiences to pursue her passion and learn skills that will help her thrive no matter where her career takes her.

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