Last week was marked by the abysmal failure of our elected leaders to do their jobs and agree on a plan to wipe out a projected $1.75 billion deficit in the state’s budget for the next fiscal year. With everybody involved preoccupied with blaming everybody else, what you hear all over Lansing the thin, high sound of fiddling while Rome burns. This is why the forthcoming public engagement campaign, Michigan’s Defining Moment, is so important. It’s a bottom-up effort to find common ground on a set of very far-reaching reforms that can get our state through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and lay the groundwork for our future prosperity. And it’s a way for ordinary citizens to get involved rather than leaving it to politicians more interested in their own careers than in saving our state. Beginning in October, more than 100 community conversations will take place all around Michigan – citizens gathering in small groups to vision what kind of Michigan they want and consider how best to get there. Very high on the agenda will be the goal of transforming Michigan by building a talented, globally competitive work force.

Whether it’s Google opening an office in Ann Arbor to tap into the bright kids graduating from the U of M or Volkswagen moving its headquarters from Auburn Hills to Virginia in search of talented employees, the message is the same: If you want a prosperous economy, you’ve got drastically to improve the skills of your work force.

Our political masters in Lansing haven’t been much help. Year after year, they’ve disinvested in the institutions that build human capital in Michigan – our schools and our colleges and universities. According to a new report out last week from the highly regarded Citizens Research Council, over the last seven years growth in appropriations to the state School Aid Fund has averaged a meager 1.4 per cent, far less than the rate of inflation. State spending on higher education has been worse: Down by $275 million – that’s 13 percent – over the past four years, without taking inflation into consideration.

The results are scary.

According to a recent report from the Michigan League for Human Services, only 26.1 percent of Michigan adults 25 or older have a college degree, putting Michigan 36th among the states. And of Michigan adults 25 to 54, 36.4 per cent have an associate’s degree or higher, putting Michigan 31st in the nation.

Worse, Michigan’s educational pipeline from school to college leaks like a sieve. According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, a whopping 82 percent of Michigan’s ninth graders fail to graduate and go on to earn a postsecondary degree.

I could go on and on with similar statistics but won’t. The conclusion is alarmingly clear: We must drastically improve overall learning and completion rates to jump start our economy.

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of good ideas about how to remedy the situation.

One of the best is the Kalamazoo Promise, financed by generous, anonymous local donors, that guarantees college tuition to graduates from the Kalamazoo public schools. Although it’s early, the results are mighty encouraging: Graduation rates are way up, as are enrollments in college. And families are moving into the school district to take advantage of the program. Other communities are exploring whether they could follow suit.

A variant is the so-called “Michigan Promise”, which provides high school graduates who enroll in college and keep their grades up a grant totaling $4,000. This is enough to pay for an associates degree at a Michigan community college. Students can register through their school district or through the Michigan Works site on the web.

Then there is the No Worker Left Behind program that pays for up to two years of tuition at any Michigan community college or job training program. Aimed at older workers who are laid off and need their skills updated, the program is scoped to include 100,000 people over the next four years. Information is available at the Department of Labor and Economic Growth web site.

An important development is the rise of something called regional skills alliances, an economic development tool that bundles together local firms with similar skills needs for their labor forces. The Flint Health Care Collaborative, for example, brings together around 20 health care firms who then identify emerging technologies in the field and arrange training for local workers. There are more than 30 regional skills alliances in Michigan today, including around 500 companies.

A big part of the problem is the long-held assumption that you really don’t need to go beyond high school to score a good job at the local auto assembly line. That simply flies in the face of the fact that the auto companies are laying off or outsourcing brawn-based jobs; those that are hiring are picking workers with advanced education and training. And the universities are helping out by linking together community college courses with their own programs; kids at Alpena Community College, for example, can transfer some credits to the U of M in Ann Arbor.

More important in the longer term, however, are expected changes in the population of our state. Sadly, people discouraged about the future are moving out of state. According to the recent Citizens Research Council report, by 2017 Michigan will lose 41,000 people. The slice of the population likely to go to college (age 18-24) will decline by 84,000 (that’s 9 percent), while the labor force of people 16-64 will shrink by 262,000 or 4 percent.

The simple fact is that to keep our economy humming, we need more people – especially skilled people – to come to Michigan. We have international offices in China, Japan and Europe trying to attract companies to come to Michigan. Why couldn’t we have “Welcome to Michigan” desks at these offices, urging skilled and ambitious folks to move here?

A fundamental common ground reform idea for Michigan – that our future depends on finding, attracting, nurturing and growing talented people in our work force – is being held hostage to a budget deal in Lansing. Nevertheless, it will be an important part of the Michigan’s Defining Moment conversations that start next month. To learn more, go to www.thecenterformichigan.net.

(Editors Note: Phil Power is a longtime observer of Michigan politics and economics. He was a newspaper publisher for more than 40 years, responsible for the Observer & Eccentric Newspapers among others, and served as a regent of the University of Michigan. He is also the founder and president of The Center for Michigan. He welcomes your comments at ppower@thecenterformichigan.net.)