- Creating a more prosperous Detroit region was the focus at this year's Detroit Policy Conference presented by the Detroit Regional Chamber.

The event brought together hundreds of business leaders, government officials, and community change makers to talk about solutions to the area's most urgent issues.

I had the opportunity to moderate a panel about education that was titled, "The House Is On Fire" solving Michigan's education crises.

Here is a portion of that conversation.

Is that where we are?

Is the house literally on fire?

And Sarah, I'll start with you.

Does it feel like we're acting like the house is on fire with regard to educational and income outcomes?

- Well first if I wanted to be petty I would say, the house might be on fire but the senate is not.

However, in the spirit of civility and collaboration... - [Stephen] Not that house but whatever.

- Trust me, I got 'em all day but in honest, I don't think that the house is necessarily on fire.

I think the house is unfocused.

You know, I've spent most of my professional life in the college access space and in the policy space and what I can tell you is I've dedicated my life to making sure that first generation college students like me actually had a seat at the table and when we look at our policy makers long before I was in the legislature, think the Grandhom years, the Snyder years, now in the Whitmore administration, the pendulum keeps swinging.

We go from everyone needs to go to a four year institution or no one needs a college or a skill trade, right?

We keep going back and forth without the amount of focus we really need.

I was there when we would compare ourselves to Massachusetts, then it was Tennessee, now it's Mississippi.

The reality is this stuff isn't that hard if we have policy makers, education leaders, community organizers, and yes even students at the table to create the policy initiatives that we know actually work.

Which is more accountability, persistence, alignment, as you mentioned, but ultimately we have to be focused around one big goal and I was excited when this governor did just that.

She declared that in order for us to meet our labor market demands, let's have a goal of 60% of our people getting additional piece of paper after high school by the year 2030.

That has focused our resources, our policy initiatives, and what I know we're gonna talk about today is, how do we take that big goal and focus us into the next generation and the next era of leadership?

So, we're not on fire, we're just lacking focus.

- Yeah, yeah.

So, Jeff, if we role with the metaphor that maybe it's on fire, I feel like BLM over the years has been maybe not the fire department but certainly the one ringing the bell, right?

Saying, there's smoke and there's some flame over there, we oughta respond to it.

I wanna have you talk over that time and I know you haven't been at BLM that whole time but I can think back to 2011 or 2012, reports from BLM about how bad things were with education, with incomes, and setting these really inspiring goals about how we could get to a better place.

The dawn of the Snyder administration I felt like was this moment of alignment about those things and here we are 15 years later and things are worse.

What could be different this time?

What could we do that we didn't do that last time?

I heard what you were saying when you were speaking but what are the specific things that make this not the same old alarm that we've been hearing?

- Yeah, and certainly, I've been at Business Leaders for Michigan now for 5 years and the data tells us that we did make progress after the Great Recession, right?

We were 50th in many categories in the Great Recession on a huge number of business fundamentals, of how you do growth, of how individuals are succeeding in the economy and we have come up from that but I think the challenge is that many of our fundamentals need to be addressed.

And so I'll give you another analogy that we talk about a lot, which is, it's maybe not the house is on fire, but it's been a slow boil, right?

And we've kind of seen ourselves slide backwards.

It's hard to look at and step back and part of the purpose of the data presentation I just made was to look at 25 years of the slide backwards, right?

On education.

In any one year you're not seeing that, right?

It's hard to tell you've had a huge difference.

In any one district it's hard to tell because I guarantee there are good teachers, there are good administrators, people are getting a lot of the supports they need in the schools but as we look back, as we compare with other districts we're falling behind.

So, the urgency that we need to have in this year, right, the bell and alarm ringing we have to have is, we are now a bottom 10 state for education.

Mississippi is a top 10 state in literacy.

So, the states that we always said, oh well, they're never gonna compete with us.

We're always gonna be better with them, they have said enough and they're changing trajectory.

We have not been able to get those clear goals as Senator Anthony said, that we align both parties with.

That can sustain a strategy for 10 years.

That's been our challenge.

- Yeah, yeah.

Greg, I know the chamber does a lot of work with your leadership really looking at education in Michigan and sounding the alarm when it's appropriate.

I'm really curious though for you, what stands out about this moment and the opportunity that we might have to go in a different direction?

What are you seeing in the work that you guys do in K12 especially?

- Well, I've been at this a long time and we haven't fixed it, so I guess it's my fault.

Interesting, so we just put out our state of education and talent report and we also documented this fall in per capita income and what was interesting is, so it's been falling as Jeff said, this didn't happen overnight and as we've said, hey, now we've gone from 34th to 38th in per capita income, people kinda shrugged.

When we hit 40, somehow round numbers seem to capture people's imagination and so when we released the report back in November, we did some interviews, people, that is resonating with people.

When people understand there's a problem I think it was a wake up call.

So, 40th in per capita income resonates in a way maybe 37th doesn't but we also know there's no path back to 18th or 16th or where we were in 2000 or 1999 without being highly educated.

If you stack up states or regions and rank them by their per capita income that's what their post secondary attainment rate is.

There is no such thing as a state that is not highly educated or a region that's not highly educated that is prosperous.

So, we have a challenge ahead of ourselves.

We hear a lot this debate about whether people should focus on CTE and skill trades or college.

One of the things we put out in our report is we track, we look back 10 years, what happened to students all over metro Detroit, not just the city of Detroit, metro wide, there were 100 9th graders 10 years ago, 10 years later, so 4 years of high school and 6 years after high school an opportunity to complete some kind of education, only 35 of those hundred have completed any kind of formal post secondary education.

So, we're already missing two thirds of the potential workforce, the talent pool.

So, rather than debate about more skill trades, more higher ed, it's more of everything.

- Yeah, yeah.

Don, you see this from the vantage point of a college campus.

A college campus right here in the city of Detroit.

Really curious what you see among the students that you have there at U of D and again, what the opportunity is.

What is it that we're missing in terms of what we could be doing that we haven't that turns us in a different direction?

- Um, sure, I think with us, I would say we're very different from most of my colleagues.

I like saying the University of Detroit Mercy is playing offense and many of my colleagues are playing defense.

Where most of my colleagues see challenge after challenge, I see a lot of opportunities and I think the only thing that stands in the way of that is your imagination and we're very entrepreneurial, very innovative.

We've had three consecutive years of record new student enrollments, the largest since U of D merged with Mercy in 1990.

Winter over last year, we're up another 360 or so students.

Our brand awareness has increased significantly, not only in southeast Michigan, throughout the state, throughout the region, throughout the country and we see that with outcomes based rankings with "The Wall Street Journal."

There's 5200 college campuses in the country and the last three years we went from number 52 in the country, number 43 this year, we're number 36 in the nation.

Number 2 Catholic University in the Midwest, number 3 Catholic University out of 200 in the nation.

We're also ranked number 22 on best value of all national universities on return on investment.

We're ranked in the top 220 or so research universities by Carnegie and Ace and we're also ranked one of the top 50 colleges or universities that educate the largest number of first generation students.

So, of the, Senator, of the 6000 students at my university, three, and we're urban university, three within the city, McNichols Law and Jefferson and then Dental in Court Town and we opened our first suburban campus for optometry school out in Novi but half of our students are first gen, half of the students are Pell eligible and I was telling Greg for this current year based on our Titan Edge program about 40% of the total number of undergrads are going tuition free.

As a combination of the federal and state aid that they bring plus the merit need based financial aid that U of D is actually providing to them and so again, I think you're only limited by your imagination and we've gotten very aggressive at creating partnerships and pathways for things that we wanna be involved in.

- [Stephen] Yeah, yeah.

- [Jeff] In large part... - [Stephen] Yeah go ahead... - Because of the work of people like Senator Anthony, because of the work of university leaders, tuition is not a barrier to higher education... - That's correct.

- At this point anywhere in Michigan.

- Correct.

- The Michigan Reconnect Program gives anybody over the age of 25 without a degree a free college tuition at any community college, a skill certificate, the Michigan Achievement Scholarship, Pell eligibility.

Tuition is not the barrier that I think many people believe.

- And just to build on it.

That's a recent development.

So, you know we sometimes kind of focus on everything that we get wrong in Michigan and our problems but thanks to Senator Anthony's leadership, the governor, and bipartisan support, we passed those financial supports for students.