Fellowship Spotlight: Advancing Postsecondary Education for Adult Learners in Michigan
In 2019, Governor Gretchen Whitmer set an ambitious goal of getting 60% of working-aged adults in Michigan a postsecondary credential by 2030. Youth Policy Lab (YPL) hired one of its first Policy Fellows, Avazeh Attari, to work with the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity (LEO) on this Sixty by 30 goal. Four years later, in 2023, the governor created a new state department, the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential (MiLEAP), to handle all state education projects outside of K-12. In doing so, Michigan became the last state to create a state higher education body by combining the Sixty by 30 team focused on the governor's attainment goal, along with the MiStudentAid team focused on other state scholarship programs.
Recalling the previous policy fellowship, members of the Sixty by 30 staff reached out to YPL to create a new position. This fellowship was created with MiLEAP and the Office of Higher Education (OHE) team to provide capacity for longer term data projects and goals. Some of these longer term projects included a landscape analysis of transfer students from two to four-year institutions, analyzing compliance around the corequisite mandate within the Reconnect Grant Act, and analyzing the growth of Credit for Prior Learning (CPL) programs for community colleges and outcomes for students. As OHE was brand new with minimal data staff, the fellowship was an ideal partnership for the state to add extra capacity during this transition.
Key findings
This fellowship was the perfect opportunity for Dimitri Przeslawski in his professional journey as he transitioned from the classroom into the education policy space. He was able to use his experience as a teacher and the knowledge he gained from his masters degree to make an immediate impact with the state. He built on his data skills by learning new programs such as PowerBI and analyzing statewide datasets. He was also able to gain invaluable experience in understanding the state government landscape, and Michigan's postsecondary landscape. Dimitri was able to use this experience to earn a full-time position with the state and the Office of Higher Education as a Data and Compliance Analyst for the Data and Evaluation team. In this new role, he will continue the work he began as a policy fellow.