Detroit couldn't compete with education of other Amazon finalists

Do you wonder what Amazon meant when it said Detroit lacked the talent pool for a second headquarters? Consider a simple comparison:

About 34% of metropolitan Detroit younger adults have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher. Of the U.S. metro areas on Amazon’s finalist list, every one but Miami boasts a more highly educated populace — the sort of workforce Amazon made clear it's looking for in its second headquarters.

Only Miami, where 31.5% of the younger adults hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, ranks lower than metro Detroit. The other urban regions show educational attainment ranging from 35.5% of younger adults with degrees in Dallas to 58% in Boston.

Many things may explain Michigan's lower ranking in educational achievement. It could speak to Michigan’s problems with K-12 test scores or to cutbacks to higher education financial aid in the state. Perhaps student debt is pricing some young people out of the educational market. Then there's the “brain drain” of new graduates who earn their degrees here and then leave the state.

And, of course, southeast Michigan's low ranking may speak to a lingering belief that a 18-year-old can get a good job for life simply by walking down to the local factory gate. That reality vanished long ago, even if some young people still think it's true.

Whatever the reasons, southeast Michigan — indeed, Michigan as a whole — has a lot of work to do.

The data comes from the American Community Survey, an arm of the Census Bureau, and covers adults ages 25 to 34 in the year 2016. Economists at the University of Michigan's Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics compiled the data. The Canadian city of Toronto, the only non-U.S. Amazon finalist, was not included in the comparison.

The data provides "validation of the fact that Detroit really doesn't have the talent compared to these other communities," Don Grimes, an U-M economist, told me.

If there's one brighter spot in the data, the educational attainment level in southeast Michigan is now growing faster than in some of the Amazon finalist regions, including Boston, Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C. The percentage of metro Detroit's 25-to-34-age population with a bachelor's degree or higher grew by 11% between 2013 and 2016, faster than several cities on Amazon's shortlist.

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"That's probably the one area that's sort of optimistic," Grimes said. Places like Boston and Washington "have gotten pretty expensive, so it may be that educated young people may be discouraged from moving into those communities. Young people may be getting priced out."

But metro Detroit's growth rate for educational attainment still lags well behind that in many other urban regions, particularly in Denver and Austin, Texas. The growth rate for younger adults with degrees in both those metro areas nearly reached 18%.

"One of those two cities is where Amazon's going to go," Grimes predicted.

Civic and educational leaders in Michigan have talked for many years about the lagging levels of classroom achievement here. As Sandy Baruah, CEO of the Detroit Regional Chamber and one of the planners behind Detroit's Amazon bid, said the other day, our talent pool in metro Detroit is good and getting better — but not yet good enough to win a high-stakes competition like Amazon's.

So where do we go from here? We need to take an "all of the above" approach. We need to get serious about fixing Detroit schools, and come up with a way to pay for education that doesn't bankrupt our young people. We need more technical training programs so that tech-savvy young people can find one of the skilled jobs in industry that require heavy training but not necessarily a college degree.

And we need to focus also on the other issues that Amazon cited in leaving Detroit off its shortlist — most prominently the lack of a robust public transit system in metropolitan Detroit.

But top of the list is education and training. We need to become the kind of place that not only produces and hangs onto its talented and skilled young people but attracts them in large numbers from elsewhere.

And we need to start now, lest we set ourselves up for another disappointment the next time somebody like Amazon comes calling.

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.

The List

Share of the population ages 25-34 with a Bachelor's degree or higher in 2016:

Metro area Percentage

Detroit 34%

United States 34.9%

Atlanta 38.8%

Austin, Texas 45.7%

Boston 58%

Chicago 45.2%

Columbus 40.6%

Dallas 35.5%

Denver 44.7%

Indianapolis 37.4%

Los Angeles 37.8%

Miami 31.5%

Nashville 41.9%

New York 47.8%

Philadelphia 43.7%

Pittsburgh 48%

Raleigh, N.C. 49.9%

Washington 54.5%