This is kind of a tangent, but EMU is mentioned in this Wall Street Journal article, “Even in Recovery, Some Jobs Won’t Return.” The EMU connection is a sidebar/blurb about a student, 53 year old Jeff Walker of Brighton, “a former auto industry executive, doesn’t mind being among the oldest students at Eastern Michigan University. ‘I’m happier than just being unemployed and looking for a job,’ he says.” The basic theme of the article is a lot of parts of the economy that are suffering the most are just never going to make a come-back. Making it all the more challenging is, according to the economists cited here, it’s awfully hard to predict what jobs are going to come back.
It seems to me that this has been Michigan’s problem for a long time and it’s a potential problem for EMU. Michigan’s ups and downs have been tied too much to the auto industry, and even though it does look like the things are looking better for at least Ford and GM, I don’t think the state powers-that-be ought to give up on diversifying the economy. More locally, I think EMU needs to continue to diversify its “business” and rely less on teacher training.
