Fellowship Spotlight: Supporting Michigan's 60 by 30 Efforts
In 2019, the University of Michigan’s Youth Policy Lab placed a Data & Policy Fellow with the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity (LEO) to provide LEO leadership with technical assistance and strategic support in improving its state-run programs. When the COVID-19 pandemic set in roughly six months into the placement, the Fellow was reassigned to assist the State of Michigan in identifying its short- and long-term priorities to address Michigan’s growing economic and healthcare crisis. Frontliners was one of those priorities.
In April 2020, the Fellow joined a small, new interagency team, which was led by the Governor’s Education Advisor and included 1 staff member from LEO and 5 from the Department of Treasury’s Student Scholarships and Grants Outreach (SSGO) office. The Fellow was assigned to support the project team leaders in designing and marketing the Frontliners program to help ensure the team met their goals in time for the program’s scheduled launch in September 2020. As a brand-new program and first-of-its-kind in the nation, much of it had to be shaped during the condensed period of time. This challenge presented a perfect opportunity for the Fellow to assist in all aspects of the process while promoting the use of data and evaluation to drive decisions around the program’s design and reach.
Key findings
Michigan’s labor market demands a more educated and skilled workforce, yet it ranks 34th in the country with only 48.9% of its adults holding a postsecondary education.1 And until recently, Michigan was one of nine states without an educational attainment goal. To address this, during her first State of the State address in 2019, Governor Whitmer set an ambitious goal to raise the state’s postsecondary attainment rate to 60% by 2030 and outlined a series of initiatives focused on improving the state’s economy by:
- closing the skills gap
- increasing opportunity for Michiganders, and
- making the state’s economy more competitive.
