Rachel M. Beard

When I met my colleague Ryan in-person for the first time, he came into the office wearing a maize and blue striped tie.

“Surely,” I had to ask. “You aren’t a Wolverine?”

“Go Blue,” was his cheeky answer.

He wasn’t the only University of Michigan graduate in my office. Both our deputy chief of staff and our deputy director’s special assistant at the time were Michigan natives and U of M graduates. As a Michigander, I had no problem swapping stories about Ann Arbor and the Great Lakes. But as a Michigan State University grad, our meetings during college football season were a bit more tense.

It happens all the time. I see Michigan license plates driving around Atlanta as often as I see Tennessee or Florida plates. Most cars in my apartment parking lot have Emory or Georgia Tech stickers, but I’m no longer surprised to see Michigan State University’s spartan logo or University of Michigan’s big gold “M” on someone’s bumper. I’ve met Michiganders at house parties, at my neighborhood Kroger, and in foreign embassies.

I once had a woman stop me while waiting to board a flight to Dublin – just because I was wearing an MSU hoodie.

These strangers and I always agree that Michigan is a great place with great people. We often know one another’s hometowns – and if we don’t, we can just point to it on our hands. We’re excited to see the Lions finally winning, to see Detroit back on its feet. We talk up Mackinac Island, Grand Rapids, and Sleeping Bear Dunes. We miss Faygo and Better Made chips – and we desperately miss Meijer.

But the question always lingers in the back of my mind: if we love Michigan so much, why did we leave?

Michigan’s population first reached 10 million in 2002. Since then, it hasn’t moved far from that mark, dropping to 9.8 million in 2010 and peaking at 10.1 million last year.

It’s not hard to see why the population stagnated during this time period. Detroit made national news when it filed for bankruptcy in 2013, due in part to the 2008-10 automotive crisis that heavily impacted the entire state. Aging infrastructure resulted in the Flint Water Crisis three years later and multiple dam failures throughout the early 21st century, including the most recent in 2020 where over 10,000 people had to evacuate their homes. That same year, a home-grown extremist group plotted to kidnap the governor and “start a civil war”.

U.S. News continues to rank Michigan among the ten worst states in the country – 45th in Education and 44th in Infrastructure stand out as its lowest stats, with 22nd in Health Care being its modest best.

And what’s bad may only be getting worse.

Governor Gretchen Whitmer recently released a report outlining the expected impact of President Trump’s proposed Medicaid cuts and local food banks have already started reporting on the potential impact of proposed Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cuts. Climate change is coming for Michigan, too. Severe weather last summer left thousands without power and a heat wave caused temperatures around the state to spike above 90 degrees for days at a time.

Michigan’s 2026 midterm elections promise to be contentious amid an already fraught political landscape. Michigan’s House of Representatives recently filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson over access to election training materials. Detroit’s upcoming mayoral election has already sparked protests in the city. Meanwhile, in Lansing, a former Michigan House Speaker and his wife are facing multiple charges related to embezzlement.

Though many of these problems plague the rest of the country as well (see the rest of the Midwest for easy examples), it’s not hard to understand why Michigan natives may be leaving for greener pastures.

But is it really that simple?

I’ve often argued that Michiganders are leaving home because of the schools. Not because they’re bad – but because they’re too good.

University of Michigan and Michigan State University are consistently ranked as two of the best public universities in the U.S. Combined, their education, communication, public policy, nursing, and engineering schools are some of the best in the world. Both schools also boast large in-state enrollment (60% of undergraduates for U of M and a whopping 78% for MSU).

But the numbers don’t add up.

Over 10,000 people graduated from Michigan State University this year, and University of Michigan has conferred over 8,000 undergraduate degrees every year since 2021. But only 31.8% of Michigan residents over 25-years-old report having a bachelor’s degree or higher.

So what gives?

A quick review of Michigan’s employment projections data provides some answers. Education and health services take up the biggest slice of jobs, but “unskilled labor”, like manufacturing, food services, construction, repair, and transportation, aren’t far behind. The obvious conclusion is that Michigan’s job market just can’t support its overeducated graduates – even the ones who may want to call Michigan home.

University of Michigan, for example, boasts one of the best public health programs in the country. Its graduates end up at the CDC and the EPA, at Harvard University and Johns Hopkins, at Amazon and AstraZeneca, at Mayo Clinic and the World Bank.

None of these institutions have offices located in Michigan.

Just over half (59%) of MSU’s 2024 College of Engineering class took jobs in Michigan upon graduating. That figure was about the same at the College of Business (56%) and the College of Human Medicine (51%). The School of Hospitality Business had the lowest percentage I could find in 2024 at 42%.

Over in Ann Arbor, those numbers drop even lower.

The most recent profile on the University of Michigan’s Career Center website shows the stats for the College of Literature Science & the Arts (34.8%), the Ford School of Public Policy (25%), and the School of Music, Theatre & Dance (20.8%). The university’s most prestigious programs seem to have the lowest rates. About 14% of University of Michigan’s Law School graduates and less than 10% of their MBA recipients stayed in Michigan in 2024.

When Michigan was ranked 49th for population growth at the end of 2023, Governor Gretchen Whitmer launched a commission and appointed Hilary Doe as Michigan’s first-ever “Chief Growth Officer” to try to address the issue.

Doe herself is a Michigan native who moved to New York after graduating from U of M.

There are worse problems to have than good schools and an educated population, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with having a robust economy focused on trade skills. But as long as we’re pushing our high school graduates to seek out a higher education with an unreasonable price tag, we shouldn’t be surprised when they follow the careers and salaries that will pay off their debts.

But leaving home isn’t easy – particularly when your home is a place like Michigan.

“I am a product of Detroit,” Tommey Walker said in a 2018 interview. “I breathe Detroit with every breath that I take.”

After graduating from school, Walker – a graphic designer – secured a job working for major record labels. He frequently traveled for work, and one such trip took him to California.

While presumably relaxing in his hotel room after a long day of travel, Walker flipped on the news. The national headlines, he noticed, were all about Detroit’s mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick was the center of a major political scandal at the time, and he would eventually be convicted of 24 corruption charges, including perjury and racketeering.

“It created a chip on my shoulder,” Walker said. “[B]ecause at that time the renaissance going on in the city of Detroit had already started, and me being a creative figure on the front lines, actually seeing it happen — it’s something you’d have to come to Detroit to see and know, it kind of frustrated me.”

Detroit has long had a negative reputation – whether because of its 2013 bankruptcy filing or its previous association with a high violent crime rate. Even President Trump took part in the mockery during his second presidential campaign.

“It’s just horrible,” he said in 2024. “[B]ecause we’ve been talking about Detroit’s coming back for 40 years, and it’s never come back.”

Comments like this and memes like “can’t have sh*t in Detroit” have made Michigan a national punchline. In the 2010s, musicians from around the world traveled to Detroit just to film music videos in the abandoned Packard plant. Some travel companies still advertise “ruins tours” for tourists interested in photographing abandoned buildings in the city.

“It could be worse though,” as a popular YouTube video from the 2000s once put it. “At least we’re not Detroit.”

It’s not hard to understand why actors like Keegan-Michael Key and J.K. Simmons can often be heard defending their hometown in interviews or why Detroit rappers are so passionate about their city. Even a 2021 film with a joke about Michigan State University was enough to have my brother and I up in arms.

Being from Michigan, as Walker put it, puts “a chip on your shoulder”.

It makes us a little bit defensive, a little bit proud. It’s why we have a reputation for our state pride, why we seek each other out and connect with one another so readily. Michigan isn’t a perfect place, but it’s home – and only Michiganders get to criticize it.

Michigan’s shrinking population trend may be starting to turn a corner. Young people are moving to Detroit, and long-time residents are starting to see returns on their investments in the city.

Detroit’s revitalization is only just beginning. The Packard Plant was demolished last year, and the historic Central Michigan Station was reopened in June 2024 with ambitious plans for expansions through 2027.

In Lansing, Governor Whitmer’s most recent budget proposal seeks to expand on a 2008 commitment to set modest renewable energy goals for the entire state. In 2018, Michigan voters approved an independent redistricting committee in an attempt to undo decades of gerrymandering. They also approved a constitutional amendment protecting reproductive freedoms in 2022 and may soon consider a proposal to raise funding for public schools.

Chief Growth Officer Doe continues to lead the effort to increase the state’s population with everything from grants to local businesses to a welcome program offering perks to new residents and recent college graduates.

“I was a walking Pure Michigan commercial the entire time I was out of state,” Doe said in 2023 of her time spent living in New York. The banner on her LinkedIn profile is a photo of her wrist with Michigan’s outline tattooed on it.

After his trip to California in the 2010s, Walker came home to Detroit and took his frustrations to the drawing board – or rather, the printing press. In 2012, he created a design that captured every Michigander’s attitude about how Detroit was portrayed in the media. He printed it on a t-shirt and leveraged it into a successful business: “Detroit vs. Everybody”.

I wore one of Walker’s shirts on a flight home a couple years ago. As I boarded the plane, the Detroit-based flight attendants recognized the design and gave me a respectful head nod.

“Nice shirt,” one of them said.

“Thanks,” I answered cheekily. I was already dreaming about snow-covered corn fields and cherry-flavored sodas, about driving past the wind turbines between Mount Pleasant and Lansing – about standing in the international aisle at my neighborhood Meijer and leaning on the shopping cart while my mom checks off ‘coconut milk’ on her grocery list. In a way, standing next to that stranger on the plane, I was already home. “Go Green!”