Cassie Walker Burke is assistant managing editor of Crain’s Chicago Business. Follow her on Twitter @cassiechicago.

For weeks there were whispers. And then one night in November 2005, hundreds of parents, teachers, and students crammed into a boardroom at a drab administration building south of downtown. Janice Brown, the superintendent of the Kalamazoo schools, had an announcement to make, and it was even more surprising than the rumors that had been flying around town: Kalamazoo, small, struggling Kalamazoo, best known for its strange name and the industries it was no longer home to, was about to launch the most generous municipal college scholarship program in the country, an audacious experiment not only in education reform but in re-engineering a troubled town.

As Brown shared the news, there were gasps and screams. Some of those assembled began to sob. “It’s been said that Kalamazoo is a very special community. Tonight, we have proof of that more than ever, ever before,” she told the audience. Everyone gathered there that autumn evening nine years ago knew that the fortunes of their Southwest Michigan town were about to change forever—that, at least, was the hope.


Kalamazoo’s spirits—much like its population—had been in precipitous decline. From 1970 to 2007, the city’s population shrank 20 percent to just over 70,000. The sad, slow leak of manufacturing jobs had caused a sad, slow leak of the middle class. Poverty was nearly twice the national average. Within some pockets of city, the problems were startling: in Northside, a predominantly black neighborhood, the poverty rate was 37 percent—worse than even basket-case Detroit, two hours to the east.

As the city hollowed out, the neighborhoods near the charming downtown became zones of Rust Belt blight, and the once-proud Kalamazoo public schools suffered along with it; enrollment plummeted and money for the schools began to dry up under Michigan’s enrollment-based funding formula. Kalamazoo’s black students—more than 40 percent of the school system—performed so poorly on standardized tests that they were some of the lowest scorers in Michigan. And that was saying something given that Michigan’s scores were pretty terrible according to practically every measurement.

Can free college save a city? Meet the Austells, a family with two sons enrolled in the Promise, a $50 million program providing college tuition to Kalamazoo students.

Something had to change, and the plan that Brown announced that evening in 2005 figured to do just that. Quietly, a group of local philanthropists—who insisted on remaining anonymous, though most instantly suspected a group of homegrown billionaires whose fortunes had come from the locally based Stryker medical-devices firm—had come up with an idea to make a dramatic investment in the city’s schools and students. Over the giddy din that filled the auditorium that night, Brown explained that the donors had vowed to pay for college for any student who attended the Kalamazoo schools from kindergarten on and then attended a public college in Michigan. Students who entered before freshman year in high school would get a portion of their college education paid for depending on the years they spent in the Kalamazoo school district. The program, which was to be called the Kalamazoo Promise, would pay for college regardless of grade point average and financial situation—according to one estimate, it could be worth more than $100,000 per student for four years.

The idea was one part radical social engineering: How better to change the life trajectory of the city’s struggling urban poor than to send them to college? As economists have long known, the biggest single predictor of financial success in modern America is a college degree: those with bachelor’s degrees earn an average of $15,000 more each year than those who merely graduate high school; those with associate’s degrees make an average of $7,000 more each year. Increasingly, those with no higher education are the ones left behind. But the Kalamazoo Promise wasn’t just a big idea about the new economics of education; the hope wasn’t just to send more kids to college – but to turn around an entire town.

Several years earlier, Brown had been asked by several of the city’s wealthy residents to join a discussion they’d been having about the troubling economic trends in Kalamazoo, and that conversation soon came around to the connection between education and the local economy. What would happen if the city had a very different labor pool, much more college educated or headed that way? As Brown explained it in 2005, it would surely give the whole city a boost. “Study after study indicates that an investment in education adds to the quality of our community,” she said at the time. Families would arrive to take advantage of the program and thereby boost the tax base, educated students would return to town, luring employers offering new and better jobs.

Sure enough, as soon as the Promise was announced, the city embraced it as the ultimate urban revival plan. City leaders vowed that companies would flock to Kalamazoo, eager to scoop up its talented workforce. They predicted healthier schools, new subdivisions, and soaring property values. “When the Promise brings new families, we will have new homes for them!” Kalamazoo’s mayor, Hannah McKinney, declared. Unbridled optimism radiated from national broadcasts on Good Morning America and the Today Show and in newspapers near and far. “It’s only too bad,” editorialized the Detroit Free Press, “that the means cannot be found to replicate the Kalamazoo Promise” in every community in the state. Soon, in fact, the idea would be embraced by dozens of cities around the country; the irresistible lure of a big education reform that promises big economic rewards has led towns from El Dorado, Arkansas, to New Haven, Connecticut, to create their own versions of the Promise, and everyone from President Obama to New York Yankees star Derek Jeter, an alum of Kalamazoo Central High, has been eager to embrace the program.

Of course, there were big questions: Would the Promise really reverse Kalamazoo’s decline? Could this be a model for other struggling cities around the country? Or was college-for-all too much a fantasy given the entrenched realities of poverty, an unrealistic goal for a world where even getting two-thirds of the city’s kids to graduate from high school is a heavy lift? Nearly a decade—and some $50 million—later, the effects of this bold experiment in using education as a redevelopment engine are now coming into view. And though stubborn challenges remain, so too is a different Kalamazoo.

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One recent night, Kalamazoo is tucked in under yet another blanket of fresh snow. College students amble down the charming pedestrian mall, past cafes, watering holes, and shabby chic home goods stores. This doesn’t look like a town in trouble. At Rustic, an old-world European restaurant, well-dressed couples scarf down $25 lamb shanks with gusto.

A row of breweries and bars plays host to one of the Midwest’s most exciting craft brew scenes. At Bell’s Brewery, situated in the elbow of train tracks that crisscross downtown, the heavily tattooed bartenders seem more Brooklyn than mild-mannered middle of America, but that’s part of the city’s surprising appeal. “It’s a real place to me,” says Simon Kalil Borst, a 24-year-old artist who manages the local People’s Food Co-op, over a caramel-colored ale. “There is a broad range of different demographics—both economic and racial—living in a tight space.”

Yet, despite the urban charm it cultivates, the city still confronts a plethora of very real problems. The median household income, $31,200, is lower than that of the state of Michigan and the nation as a whole. Nearly one in 5 children lives in poverty and only a third of the residents over 25 have a bachelor’s degree. “Kalamazoo is a microcosm of many communities,” says Michelle Miller-Adams, a social scientist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute and author of a book about the Kalamazoo Promise. “Our downtown looks pretty nice, and you can see the reinvestment working there. But you go three blocks in three directions and find acute poverty and all of the social problems that go along with that. We have all of these trends that larger cities are experiencing, but in miniature.”

Bells Brewery in Kalamazoo. | Mark Peterson/Redux

The city also has an outsized sense of its identity. A place made unique by more than its name—bestowed by the Algonquin tribes who were the area’s long-ago inhabitants—Kalamazoo is one of the few American cities under 100,000 with its own symphony orchestra, art museum, and theme song (1942’s “I’ve Got a Girl In Kalamazoo,” by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra.) Kalamazoo was founded in the first half of the 19th century and, like many Midwestern towns, grew up as a critical juncture on the railway between Detroit and Chicago. The city has, at various times, been the American home of windmill craftsmanship (in the late 1800s), the world’s largest exporter of celery (a run that dried up after 70 years in 1950), a paper manufacturing center (until foreign competitors decimated the industry in the 1970s), the world headquarters of the Checker Motors Corporation, maker of the iconic yellow-and-black taxis, and the instrument manufacturer Gibson (both companies bid the city goodbye in the early 1980s). Kalamazoo was also a hub at various points for the makers of canoes, sleds, fly-fishing reels, self-ventilating motor oil funnels, playing cards, corsets, and safety razors. A massive General Motors stamping plant due south of downtown once employed 4,500; when the factory was decommissioned in 1999, the site became a gaping shell that developers tried to peddle as an industrial park.

Across the decades, no employer exerted as much influence over the town’s fate as the Upjohn Pill and Granule Company, started by a Kalamazoo physician, Dr. W. E. Upjohn. In 1884, Upjohn patented a machine that rolled crushable pills, an invention that allowed medicines to dissolve quickly in the bloodstream. Fortune followed, and the thriving company soon recruited scientists and researchers who resided in sherbert-colored Victorians. They filled the pews of churches, steered the town’s civic groups, and sent their children to Kalamazoo schools. By the 1940s, there was enough wealth in the town that a dozen residents enlisted Frank Lloyd Wright to design a few clusters of homes; today the Kalamazoo area is a stop on a traveling Frank Lloyd Wright national preservation tour.

But by 1995, a series of consolidations began chipping away at Upjohn and its talent pool, putting it into a decline from which it would not recover (in 2003, the pharmaceutical conglomerate Pfizer inked the final transaction that felled the remnants). “Kalamazoo was not a company town, but Upjohn had a benign influence on everything,” says Bartik, the Upjohn Institute economist. “When it was taken over, many of the headquarters and research jobs were relocated. It was a blow.”

Left: Jeffrey Boggan, assisstant principal of Loy Norrix High School; Right: Alex Lee, executive director of communications for the Kalamazoo public school system | Mark Peterson/Redux

Notably, though, Kalamazoo was still home to the Stryker Corporation, an international manufacturer of hospital beds, surgical instruments, and artificial knees and hips founded in 1941. The company, which generated $9 billion in sales last year and employs 25,000 worldwide, is responsible for producing the trio of billionaires who today live in Kalamazoo County. Ronda and Jon Stryker—grandchildren of the company’s founder, Homer Stryker—are said by Forbes magazine to be worth $3.4 billion and $1.3 billion respectively, and a former CEO of the company, John W. Brown, is worth an estimated $1.75 billion.

Not surprisingly, the three wealthy philanthropists were the first mentioned when residents kicked around guesses about the identity of the anonymous donors. Each had earned a reputation for pledging large sums to a long list of personal causes, from primate conservation and LGBT equality, to the $100 million given anonymously to Western Michigan University to establish a medical school in town. Recently, the university—which will name the new medical school after Homer Styker—acknowledged that the donation had come from Ronda and her husband.

At some point, though, most folks gave up the local parlor game of guessing where the money came from, insists Bob Jorth, the executive director of the non-profit that administers the Promise. Instead, the city grew nearly obsessed with how best to take advantage of its good fortune. “People realized that there is a give and a get,” Jorth told me.

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Whether the donors knew it or not, Kalamazoo had been a center for educational innovation for decades—and as such, a great place for an urban experiment that revolved around free college. In 1875, lawyers for the township successfully argued that high schools were necessary, a landmark case that set a precedent for taxpayer-funded high schools in Michigan and surrounding states. By that point the town was already home to Kalamazoo College, a liberal arts school founded in 1833. In the early 20th century, the city would successfully lobby the state to host Western Michigan University, beating out Muskegon, Grand Rapids and Three Oaks.

As soon as it was announced, the effects of the Promise were immediately felt on the schools. At kindergarten orientation in February 2006, months after news of the gift, ecstatic principals reported a record number of parents signing children up for classes. Later that fall, the school system welcomed 1,000 more students. According to the Upjohn Institute, a quarter of those students transferred from private or charter schools located within the district. The vast majority had moved to Kalamazoo from elsewhere. Suddenly a school district that had been closing buildings, trimming staff, and packing more kids into overcrowded classes was bracing for a different kind of future. The district soon broke ground on two new schools—its first new construction projects in 36 years.

In late 2005, word of what was happening in Kalamazoo reached Monique Austell, who was raising her two sons in Kentwood, a well-off suburb of Grand Rapids, 45 minutes north. She had lived in Kalamazoo in the 1990s, but left town after her mother had been murdered. Austell had packed up her family and tried to put the tragedy, and the city of Kalamazoo, behind her.

Lyndonn Austell and his girlfriend at the Austell home. | Mark Peterson/Redux

A decade later, however, she needed a miracle. Her husband, Neil, a carpenter, had injured his back and could no longer work full-time. Austell, who ran a home day care center, was intrigued by the Promise. She wanted a different path for her sons and decided to move the family to Kalamazoo, where they rented a three-bedroom apartment within walking distance of Western Michigan University.

The comparison to her home in Kentwood—where the family had a pool and a yard—was sobering. Initially the schools, too, seemed like a big step down. “Coming from the Kentwood school system, where they had new buildings and new computers and everything was new, to Kalamazoo, where everything was old—well, it was a shock to my kids,” she recalls.

Slowly things improved. Austell’s oldest son, Neil, entered eighth grade the year the Promise was announced and graduated from Kalamazoo Central in 2010, the same year that President Obama spoke to the high school’s graduating class. “We may never know those donors’ names, but we know how they helped bring this community together,” Obama told the crowd, “and how you’ve embraced [the] Promise not just as a gift to be appreciated, but a responsibility to be fulfilled.”

There is no wholly literate urban community in the United States. We aim to be the first.”

“I saw things change from the time I was a freshman and when I was as senior,” says Neil, who is now a senior studying biomedicine at Western Michigan on a Promise scholarship. “Early on, the expectations on students were low, and we weren’t pushed enough.”

His younger brother, Lyndonn, a high school senior, starred on the Kalamazoo Central High football team and plans to play ball for Western Michigan this fall. He says his friends often discuss going to college. “Kids are always going to compete with each other,” he says. “We used to talk about what shoes we had on, now it’s who has the highest GPA and who can get into what school. Now everybody has the same status.”

Loy Norrix High School, Kalamazoo. | Mark Peterson/Redux

The focus on college is purposeful in Kalamazoo. “There has definitely been a strengthening of our college-going culture,” says Miller-Adams, the Upjohn Institute social scientist. When Lyndonn mentions he is one of four black males in an AP classes, Neil is surprised. “Man, I was the only one,” he tells his brother. “Mine was all girls.” (A 2012 report from the Upjohn Institute puts the observation in context: In the 2007-2008 school year there were 53 black students enrolled in AP classes in the city’s two high schools. By 2011-2012, there were 221 taking AP classes.)

In Neil’s class of 2010, 87 percent of the city’s 550 high school graduates were eligible to have at least some of college paid for by the Promise. By November 2013, 80 percent of those kids had enrolled in college classes. Research that’s tracked the Promise beneficiaries so far shows that 60 percent of them enrolled at either Kalamazoo Valley Community College or Western Michigan University, which means that critical dollars and brains stayed in the area. All told, more than 3,000 students have made use of $50 million worth of Promise scholarships.

Many of the rippling effects of the Promise are only now becoming clear. For starters, Kalamazoo is creating better high school students. According to a 2012 study by Timothy Bartik of the Upjohn Institute and Marta Lachowska of Stockholm University, Kalamazoo’s black students have fared particularly well. Grade point averages for black students in the district—which averaged 2.0—inched up .2 percentage points one year after the Promise and .7 points by year three. AP enrollment surged 300 percent for minorities. Principals shortened in-school suspensions. Simply put, “it improved student behavior,” says Bartik. In 2013, six years after the Promise, test scores had gone up on every standardized test imaginable. Meanwhile, with enrollment up roughly 23 percent since the program began, the district’s operating budgets have increased, too—in the face of deep education cuts across the state. Last year Kalamazoo spent $131 million, up 28 percent from the $87 million spent the year the Promise program was announced.

But some entrenched issues display stubborn resistance to change. As recently as 2011, nearly 1 in 3 high schoolers districtwide were dropping out and a disproportionate number of them were black males. The district’s four-year graduation rate hardly budged until 2012, when it climbed five percentage points to 69 percent, outpacing districts such as Grand Rapids and Saginaw with comparable demographics. “The last indicator to move will be the graduation rate,” argues Michael Rice, the district's current superintendent. “It takes 18 years to grow a high school graduate.”

Another vexing issue is that many Promise students attend college sporadically, then quit. Of the 3,200 local students who have used some portion of their scholarship, 700 have graduated with either an associate’s or bachelor’s degree, says Jorth. As predicted, the completion rate is higher for those students who attend four-year colleges than community colleges. But since data crunchers tend to give students six years to obtain a secondary degree, it’s too early to tell if these numbers will soon rise.

Simon Borst. | Mark Peterson/Redux

Brian Lindhal, a 2012 graduate of Loy Norrix High School, had a rocky start at Kalamazoo Valley Community College last fall. After earning a B in English and a D in history his first semester, he didn’t sign up for the winter term. “It didn’t click,” says Lindhal, 20, who works full-time at a company that restores garments after fires and floods. He plans to go back next semester. “I know a lot of people in other places would kill to have what I have,” he says sheepishly.

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Open In New Window Simon Borst, who graduated from Loy Norrix High School in 2007, was part of the second class of students to receive scholarships from the Kalamazoo Promise. The program helped him earn a bachelor's degree in fine arts from the University of Michigan, and he's since returned to Kalamazoo, where he works at the People's Food Co-op and as a freelance graphic artist. Here he reflects on his experience with the Kalamazoo Promise. | Comics originally published by Southwest Michigan's Second Wave Media here. (Click image to view entire graphic novel.)

Nearly a decade ago, the spectacular gift to Kalamazoo’s kids was described as a miracle, a resource to be envied, a brilliant economic driver, and the work of “secret superheroes.” “Now we were known by something else other than that town with the funny name,” says Ron Kitchens, the executive director of Southwest Michigan First, a regional economic development agency.

But beyond positive PR, much of the economic transformation is still forthcoming. Within months of the announcement, Kalamazoo had been rumored to be on a shortlist for a Toyota engine and transmission plant. “Hey, Toyota, Look at Us!” the Kalamazoo Gazette crowed. “With a perk like The Kalamazoo Promise to offer to prospective employees, Toyota would have little difficulty attracting a stellar workforce.” The plant, however, never came through.

The projected real estate land grab hasn’t quite materialized either. According to Zillow, in March, the median home sale price in the Kalamazoo metro area was $131,000, which is nearly flat compared to the median sale price in October 2005, the month before the Promise was announced. “There is no strong evidence that Promise has raised housing prices,” says Bartik, the Upjohn Institute economist. Of course, the 2008 recession and lingering after-effects on Michigan’s dismal economy have long since tempered expectations of a housing boom. Today, hope springs eternal: Developers have broken ground on several large subdivisions west of downtown and produced marketing literature that advertises the scholarship program with glee. “Affordable, Kalamazoo Promise qualified neighborhood!”

Mark Peterson/Redux

There have been civic victories, for sure, but whether they are connected to the Promise is tough to discern. Downtown is more energetic than ever: In 2012, the retail vacancy rate downtown dropped below 10 percent for the first time in recent memory. The craft beer scene has blossomed into a full-blown economic engine, with eight Kalamazoo-area breweries employing some 500 people. And a recent Kalamazoo Gazette analysis points out that the juvenile arrest rate dropped 57 percent from 2008 to 2012; the article credits the Promise, in part, for giving kids a reason to stay out of trouble.

Kitchens, the economic development agency chief, and others say that the greatest civic boost has been something that just can’t be measured: a new enthusiasm for what is possible. “Kalamazoo really is a community that is reigniting a love affair with itself,” he says. Everyone I interviewed for this article expressed optimism for the town’s future and, at the same time, made incredibly frank comments about the intractable problems it still faces.

The Kalamazoo Valley Museum. | Mark Peterson/Redux

“The Promise’s greatest power comes from its role as a community catalyst,” says Michelle Miller-Adams, who describes a variety of local organizations augmenting and supporting what’s been started with the Promise. Last year, the Community Foundation—a local philanthropic group with $400 million in assets—funded a new consortium called the Learning Network with a $5 million grant (the Kellogg Foundation kicked in another $6 million). It’s taking on everything from increased support of after-school programs to the establishment of parent literacy centers in churches and community buildings. When I spoke with the school district’s superintendent, Michael Rice, he proudly ticked off a list of other local programs spurred by the Promise, from an effort to boost AP classes offered in schools to a broad summer reading program that mails books to students to keep them reading. He has his own big goal for the town: “There is no wholly literate urban community in the United States,” he says. “We aim to be the first.”

Another challenge is figuring out how to lure the newly minted college graduates back home – in some ways, the goal of the entire experiment. Local recruiter Sheri Welsh tells me she’s doing her part, trying to find good jobs for them, and launched a blog, kzooconnect.com, a few weeks back explicitly for Promise scholars entering the job market. “That’s why we’re paying for their education: We want them to come back and become a vibrant part of our community,” Welsh says, and in a way she speaks for the town she is a relentless booster of. She is glad, of course, that there are thousands of students now who can say they went to college without crippling debt, who found careers and possibilities they might never had encountered. But she wants the city to benefit too, for it to live up to the slogan she has plastered on her blog, Kalamazoo, “a good place to be.” But, she acknowledges, it is not easy, even with the four years of tuition paid, the booming public schools and the renewed sense of civic pride. “We are,” she tells me, still “in a war for talent with every other Midwestern city.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story inccorectly reported that the 2005 announcement of the Kalamazoo Promise occured at a recital hall rather than a school district adminstration building.