Low educations and low incomes

Ten years ago, as Michigan’s auto factories and suppliers were full of workers and prosperous suburban sprawl pushed further and further into the farm fields, it was almost inconceivable to see how far the state’s fate could fall in a single dark decade.

Yet even then some economists and education experts were whispering that Michigan’s last brawn-based boom was unsustainable. Of course, those whispers grown to a chorus in the past few years, starting with five years ago with the Cherry Commission’s unfunded and therefore empty calls to double the number of college graduates in Michigan and continuing through the growing prospect this week of zeroing out of the Promise Grant $4,000 state scholarships for talented in-state students. What kind of fruit do these trends bear? That’s an easy calculation… Since that end-of-century boom, the median income of Michigan workers has fallen from 16th to 30th in the nation. Check out the nationwide numbers here. Michigan now ranks below such Midwestern places as Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa and way behind the most prosperous Great Lakes states of Minnesota and Illinois. The Detroit News explained the phenomenon…

Before its eight-year recession, Michigan had long bucked an economic truism: A state’s income ranking was directly tied to its residents’ education level. The state’s auto factories allowed workers, despite their lack of college degrees, to make more money than the national average. But the Big Three are dealing with fiscal calamity, workers have lost their jobs or seen their paychecks shrink, and the state’s income ranking is dropping to a level in line with its blue-collar work force. Michigan’s education level ranks 35th in the nation, according to the census. “Where do I go from here?” asked Jeff Chalmers, 54, an unemployed Warren resident with only a high school education who lost his job as a General Motors assembly line worker. “What else can I do?” The reasons for Michigan’s tumbling income are known to anyone collecting or trying to collect a paycheck in the state. First is the imploding auto industry, fiscal experts said. Second is the pain being felt by all the industries that depend on the car companies. Also contributing is the national bust in construction and real estate, experts said.

Yet we talk every week in Community Conversations with community leaders and concerned citizens who remain dedicated, and emotionally and financially invested in their local Michigan communities. There is an unshakable collective wisdom out there that Michigan will survive all this and come out the other side a healthier place. But it’s a shakeout of epic proportions. And when we come out the other side, we’re going to be a smaller state.