The skills gap permeates every workforce conversation in Michigan. It's become the central focus of economic development and public policy and defined the fundamental outlook of our collective future.

We've been talking about Michigan's brain drain for two decades. Elected officials, policy wonks, political leaders and, yes, the media have fired darts at the target of stemming the outflow of Michigan's young, educated residents.

The focus, of course, has always been on creating jobs — the good paying kind — as a some sort of snare trap to keep the college types grazing in our borders ... and paying taxes.

Retaining talent. Growing talent. The buzzwords of a post-recession economy long on unfilled jobs and short on bodies. Obviously, education and talent retention are important pieces of the labor puzzle, but also the smallest part.

Fact is Michigan keeps a great many of its prized college graduates right here in the Pleasant Peninsula. The "brain drain" isn't not real, but it's also overblown and focusing on keeping talent is less important than importing it.

In last week's issue of Crain's, you read about a new idea to solve the alleged brain drain. Rob Cleveland, president and CEO of Cornerstone Alliance, a southwest Michigan economic development organization based in Benton Harbor, is calling for the creation of the Michigan HUGE Incentive (Homegrown Undergrad and Graduate Education Incentive). The five-year program relinquishes recent graduates of Michigan colleges and universities of income tax, or at least a portion.

The fundamental goal of Cleveland's idea is to stem the departure of college graduates by flipping economic incentives on its head, offering tax rebates to workers, not companies — something I've also called for recently.

But applying a good solution to a problem that is more falsehood than fact won't render positive results — unless, of course, the objective is to provide debt-burden relief to Michigan college graduates who were most likely going to stay here anyway.

Michigan has one of the lowest outflow migration rates of college graduates in the nation, according to data compiled for Crain's by William Frey, senior fellow at The Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program. According to Frey's data, Michigan lost an average of 43,339 residents who were 25 and older with a college degree annually between 2013 and 2017, or an outflow rate of 2.3 out of 100 college-educated 25-plus-year-olds who leave Michigan.

Comparatively, the rate is 3.2 out of 100 leaving Illinois, 3.3 out of 100 leaving Arizona, 3 out of 100 leaving Massachusetts and 2.5 out of 100 leaving Ohio.

In fact, metro Detroit is the leader at retaining educated talent in the nation, according to The Brookings Institution data reported by CityLab in 2016. Metro Detroit retained 77.7 percent of its college graduates, ahead of metropolitan Houston, New York, Seattle, Atlanta, Dallas, etc.

The numbers drop when you account for the entire state (it wasn't uncommon for a west Michigan resident to head to Chicago for grad school, as several from my alma mater, Grand Valley State University, did). But it's not staggering.

Michigan loses far more 55-and-older retirees every year to Arizona and Florida alone than it does college-educated residents moving anywhere else.

The aptly named HUGE incentive would allow the eligible graduate to pay no Michigan income tax during the first year after acceptance into the program. In the following year, the graduate would pay 1 percent income tax, 3 percent the following year, 3 percent the year after that and 4 percent in the final year of the incentive.

More than 115,000 people in Michigan graduated with an associate, bachelor's, master's or doctoral degree in 2017. The plan doesn't call for proof of an out-of-state job opportunity to qualify.

"You must be a Michigan resident, and you must file a Michigan tax return. It's that simple," Cleveland wrote in Crain's.

So the program could, theoretically, subsidize more than 112,000 graduates to prevent another 2,645 from leaving the state for job opportunities elsewhere each year. Or, if these graduates all made $50,000 — just south of the median annual income for all Michiganders — over the five years of the program, the state would forgo as much as $392 million in income tax to keep those 2,645 people from leaving. That's about $148,200 per job.

Now that's obviously pushing the program to the extreme, but it shows the point. The HUGE Incentive is indeed huge, and inefficient.

The states with the best economies lose talent, too, but they bring in lots more. Washington state, for instance, had a net migration rate of nearly 1, according to Frey's data. In other words, for every college-educated resident who leaves, it attracts two. Colorado and North Carolina have net migration rates of 1.02 and 0.81, respectively. Michigan, by comparison, has a net migration rate of -0.34, meaning for every two people that migrate in, 2.3 migrate out. They just happen to mostly be retirees.

An economic analogy applies here. It's more expensive and less efficient to try to keep the cars inside the parking garage than it is to incentivize all the cars outside the parking garage to enter. Michigan can look to the states with even greater outflow migration and offer debt-reducing income tax rebates to them and build Michigan's population instead of maintaining it.

More than 523,000 people migrated out of California last year. More than 261,000 left Arizona. Nearly 230,000 left Colorado and 280,000 left Georgia.

There's literally "brain drain" everywhere you look, no matter how hot the local economy may be. Michigan needs more college graduates. There are dozens of ways to accomplish this goal. Improving K-12 education and increasing college access is a worthy attempt to grow our own. But they may leave. Some of them inevitably will. Improving mass transit and creating "cooler," more livable downtowns is part of the equation too.

The Latin phrase auribus teneo lupum translates to "holding a wolf by the ears" and it is used to describe a scenario where any decision you make is risky. That's where this conversation lies. It's incredibly expensive to do something, but equally as expensive to do nothing.

Plugging the brain drain won't fill the state's demand for talent — the state projects to have 811,000 open jobs by 2025 — so maybe it's time to find a way to redirect the wellspring.

Editor's note: A previous version of this story did not state the outflow average of college-educated Michiganders was annual and incorrectly identified the number leaving the state and total tax cost. Current version is accurate.