Michigan has some of the best universities in the country, dunno what you’re talking about. University of Michigan is 45 minutes away and it’s ranked #23 in the world according to https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...
And that's one world class university in the entire region. Compare that to Boston, SF, LA, DC, Chicago, Pittsburgh and others.
The Detroit metropolitan area includes Ann Arbor, it’s in the same commute range. Yes if your main goal is to attend a university, you should live closer than the nearby metropolis, regardless of which university you choose. It doesn’t mean Detroit has “limited higher education access”.
And there’s plenty of other quality universities nearby. Michigan has a lot of faults but lack of quality universities isn’t one of them. Unless your standards are “it’s not Stanford or Harvard”, in which case you’re just being unreasonable.
LA has USC, CalTech, and UCLA within a closer distance than UM, and SF has Cal nearby and Stanford further out. If you want to count UM for Detroit, you have to count all of those schools for their respective cities.
Detroit is not as strong as any of these cities or metro areas with regard to higher education. You can get as defensive and incredulous as you want, but no reasonable person is going to argue otherwise. The fact that UM is 45 miles away isn't going to make a lot of people choose to live in Detroit proper.
That wasn’t your first claim, you’ve moved the goalposts. You claimed Detroit has “limited access to higher education”. I never meant to imply Detroit is as good as Boston or SF or the other cities you mentioned, only to point out how ridiculous it is to claim that Detroit doesn’t have some very high quality universities nearby. I didn’t get into Wayne State, MSU, Michigan Tech, Lawrence Tech, UofM Dearborn, or Kettering either, but there are plenty of mid-to-high tier universities close by. “Limited access to higher education” is a flatly ridiculous claim.
You're the one trying to poke random holes in my claim in what appears to be an attempt to defend Detroit (there are none, because it's based in the objective fact that Detroit has less to offer than many, if not most, other large cities in that area by any metric), and now are saying I'm moving the goalposts when I address your generally inaccurate statements.
To be clear, both the city of Detroit and its metro area offer less access to quality higher education than many other major cities in the US. It is limited in that regard, especially since this program isn't trying to entice people to move to the general metro area. It wants people to move to the city.
DC, Baltimore, Boston, and Atlanta are all around the same size and blow Detroit out of the water. Not to mention the metro areas that are around the same size, which you have to include to count UM.
You can continue to lie to yourself all you want, but Detroit is not attracting many people to the city with its higher education opportunities.
I had to look it up because of the now multiple Detroit apologists who are acting like Brentwood is on the moon and Pasadena is on Mars to make sure I wasn't completely losing my mind. UM is 43 miles from downtown Detroit, and there isn't some sort of express route guaranteed to be traffic-free that you can take to get there. Like I said before, that's about the same distance from Philly to Princeton, and no one is talking about how essential Princeton is to the city of Philadelphia. I get that it's somewhat different, but it's also not that different.
Detroit lags behind most major US cities (including many that are smaller) when it comes to higher education. I'm not bashing the city when I say that, it's just a fact.
Also remember that plenty of people went on to do great things without “world class” degree. I know people who went to UofM who MC pub trivia for a living, and I know people who went to smaller public universities in Michigan and are multimillionaires. The name on the paper only takes you so far.
I really enjoyed MacHack.