In his recent book, The World is Flat, columnist Thomas Friedman tells of a saying hanging on the wall of a Chinese factory:
“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.”
There could not be a better description of what we’re facing in Michigan as we confront a rapidly globalizing world economy. Up to now, we’ve been home to far too many lumbering lions and too few speedy gazelles.
Without a doubt, the best way to make our workforce lions more limber and our gazelles more agile is to provide our people with investments in their brain power, skills and capacity to add value. In general, it’s called “investing in human capital;” to many in Michigan it means a specific goal of doubling the percentage of our workforce with college degrees.
Michigan companies, now struggling with foreign competitors and their cheap labor, need high skilled, productive workers to compete. Workers benefit, too, from getting education after high school; the average difference in annual earnings for a full time worker with a BA and one with a high school diploma is $14,000.
More than 200 scholars, school folks, policy wonks and ordinary citizens gathered last Wednesday in Kalamazoo to explore the single most exciting human capital initiative in America. Funded by anonymous local donors, the “Kalamazoo Promise” Promise provides any graduate of the Kalamazoo Public Schools with fully paid tuition at any of the 44 public colleges or universities in Michigan. What a brilliant – and brilliantly simple – idea!
Although folks in Kalamazoo caution us about over interpreting early results, the first indications are remarkable:
* A 10 per cent increase (987) in kids enrolled in Kalamazoo public schools. * A 44 per cent increase in African-American seniors still in school. * A 12 per cent increase in white students in grades K-8, reversing a 35 year trend of white flight. * A total of 318 graduates received Kalamazoo Promise scholarships last fall, with a 17 per cent increase in graduates enrolling in community colleges and a whopping 55 per cent enrollment increase in four year universities. Eighty-three percent of Kalamazoo school graduates are attending college.
Much of the discussion at the conference revolved around the question of whether components of the Kalamazoo Promise could be upscaled into a Michigan Promise.
We’re part way there. The $1,500 just added to the old $2,500 Michigan Merit program provides just about enough funding so that every Michigan high school graduate can get their tuition paid for an associates degree at a community college.
Getting to full funding for four year universities is much tougher. A full tuition grant at public universities would cost around $900 million; if you add half board and room costs, the number rises to $1.65 billion. That’s a lot of money for a state facing a budget deficit of around $3 billion.
Some think that college tuition guarantees should be tweaked to encourage talented graduates to stay in state and reduce the brain drain from Michigan to places like Chicago and New York. Good idea, but still expensive. If we rebated tuition at public universities to graduates who stay in Michigan after graduation for, say, five years, the annual bill would come to around $700 million.
Surveyed for their views, conference participants overwhelmingly advocated scaling up the Kalamazoo Promise. Seventy per cent urged it be offered statewide, although opinions on how and who should pay for it were mixed, and some felt a big statewide program would chill local initiatives.
I came away from the conference persuaded that most of the discussion so far was quantitative in nature. How much would it cost? Who would pay? How would it be administered?
But I also felt a qualitative dimension was missing. So far, the Kalamazoo Promise appears to be changing the culture in many local families from one that regards lifelong learning as rather pointless to one that recognizes getting a college degree is essential for future success. Jack Hopkins, head of the Kalamazoo Community Foundation, put this thought most eloquently in a closing comment: “The real point of the Promise is to that it transforms our vision of ourselves.”
In considering Michigan’s current economic doldrums and lumbering lions, we all might want seriously to consider how best to transform our vision of ourselves … and the competitive promise that cultural change might offer.
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Phil Power is a longtime observer of politics, economics and education issues in Michigan. He would be pleased to hear from readers at ppower@hcnnet.com. Phil Power is president of the Center for Michigan. However, these opinions and others expressed in Phil Power’s columns are individual opinions and do not in any way represent official policy positions of the Center for Michigan.
