Opinion | Michigan builds the talent for other states to keep

Sharice Johnson grew up in Michigan, earned her degree, and never came home. She wanted to stay, but Michigan never gave her a real reason to.

She moved to Ohio, built a career, and watched from across the state line as Michigan graduates made the same calculation she did: The ceiling arrives early here, the wages don’t compete and the opportunity she trained for had a scalable presence somewhere else.

Cassidy Conley is a Detroit-based civic strategist and former City of Detroit Mayor’s Office appointee dedicated to building Michigan’s economic future through talent retention and population growth. (Courtesy photo)

This is one story in the pattern that has cost us thousands of talented people.

Every year, Michigan talks about brain drain, and the conversation always lands in the same place: We need to make Michigan “cool.” We need to make it “fun.” We are asking the wrong question.

Michigan’s real problem is what happens after graduation. Our state has spent billions building public universities without building the system that connects early talent to career paths that keep them here. We are training our young people for other states. That is a choice we can stop making.

Talent retention: Funding outcomes after graduation

Michigan’s higher education funding model rewards universities for enrolling students and graduating them. What happens after commencement doesn’t affect the institution’s bottom line, even when graduates leave the state the day after they cross the stage.

That has to change to achieve results in our system. Michigan should allocate a portion of university funding to in-state job placement and graduate earnings. Universities prioritize what’s incentivized. Every university should be required to publish a job placement plan, with measurable targets for keeping graduates in Michigan. If you receive state dollars to educate Michigan students, you are accountable for what comes next.

This model has been tested in Texas at Texas State Technical College, the only US institution funded entirely on graduate earnings outcomes, and saw a 61% increase in first-year student earnings and a 45% increase in graduate wages over eight years after implementation. Tennessee’s community colleges added job placement as a funding metric in 2010 and watched placement rates climb from 95% to 99% by 2018.

Business attraction: Build the capital infrastructure Michigan is missing

Michigan ranks high in research spending, science and engineering doctorates, and invention patents. In 2024, Michigan attracted $1.08 billion in venture capital. Chicago drew $2.5 billion. Atlanta and Denver were not far behind.

We are producing talent then sending it to places that have the capital to deploy it. Ohio faced the same crisis and chose to act. In 2011, they created JobsOhio, an independent, privately funded economic development corporation with the flexibility to move fast and invest aggressively. Two years later, Drive Capital planted a flag in Columbus and began seeding the startup ecosystem that now generates over $1.7 billion in annual economic output. Ohio is now Michigan’s most direct Midwest competitor, and it’s winning because they acted intentionally and quickly.

Michigan needs its own independent capital vehicle that is built to attract the industries of the future while preserving important jobs of today.

Placemaking: Build cities worth staying in

States don’t become competitive just because of career opportunities. Talent moves for what economists call opportunity ecosystems: walkable neighborhoods, transit, density, peer networks, and momentum. Michigan’s cities, with some exceptions, are not yet built to compete on those terms.

Detroit ranks 26th out of 35 large metros for walkable neighborhood density. Walkable neighborhoods represent just 1.2% of metro land area nationally but account for nearly 20% of GDP. That gap is an opportunity.

Targeted density and transit investment in Detroit, Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor and Lansing corridors is an economic development strategy. If we want graduates to choose Michigan over Austin or Atlanta, we have to build the kind of places that make that choice feel obvious.

We need to build a system that bridges the education to the career path and gives graduates a reason to stay and build here. With Michigan’s natural resources and lower cost of living, our state will be a no-brainer when opportunities are planted here. We just have to decide to fix it.