"College students can take out loans to pay for college, but it's absolutely impossible to take out a loan to pay for your own preschool. It's just not something a 3- or 4-year-old can do to manage their own education. So the idea that we have...
How Kohn Professor Luke Shaefer and the pandemic paved the way for an expanded Child Tax Credit
By Lauren Slagter
The passage of the American Rescue Plan Act in March ushered in a "euphoric" couple of weeks for Luke Shaefer, the Hermann and...
Who would pay if we stop using natural gas?
New research co-authored by economist Catherine Hausman considers the equity impacts of transitioning from natural gas to other energy sources.
According to the U.S. Energy Information...
By Olivia Bradish (BA ‘23)
From childhood, sociologist and new associate dean Celeste Watkins-Hayes was interested in social justice. She says she is "grounded in an upbringing where she was acutely aware of the consequences of inequality and the...
By Olivia Bradish (BA ‘23)
Armed with her BA from Rice University, Morela Hernandez entered the corporate finance world. In a setting where nobody looked like her, she pondered a question that was both practical and intellectual: as she puts it,...
Earth spirit burns,
an internal fire.
The shadow lives on in the body,
just as it does in the memories of the blood.
Gasping for air, struggling,
desperate to find life’s fragile lines
under the relentless weight of...
By Rebecca Cohen (MPP '09)
Thousands of Afghans holding pro-democracy values—some with ties to the U-M community—were left behind in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. In August, Taliban forces rapidly took control and formed a new...
By Rebecca Cohen (MPP ‘09)
Two-directional learning helps small businesses and students thrive
Lily Hamburger (MBA ’16) supports economic mobility for entrepreneurs as the senior director of the pandemic-born Detroit Means Business, a...
News outlets are applauding Tom Ivacko and the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy's announcement about a project with the city of Flint that will examine whether a new fiscal reporting mechanism can help create transparency in local fiscal...
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis faced criticism after the January 6 insurrection, with critics saying it could have helped to prevent. Javed Ali, professor of practice, commented on his former employer and...
Federal lawmakers continue to seek out University of Michigan faculty members to lend their expertise and knowledge to help inform federal policy.
In the last year, 13 U-M faculty members and researchers testified at 14 congressional hearings...
The water crisis in Flint and the bankruptcy in Detroit were separate events that had a common theme -- they had been caused in part by fiscal challenges decades in the making. Avoiding similar tragedies in the future could be tied to greater...
A survey of Michigan’s local government leaders shows a sharp degradation in trust in the functioning of democracy at the state and federal levels, echoing trends seen across the country.
The Spring 2021 Michigan Public Policy Survey (MPPS),...
As a debate over the impact of President Joe Biden's Build Back Better bill continues, John Leahy, professor of public policy and economics, discussed the economics of the bill.
"Inflation is the result of too much demand chasing too little...
I am working urgently on universal coverage. I also want to make sure that we remember that coverage alone does not guarantee access to high quality care. Those are two very different things. We have to center equity in all of these efforts. As we...
The Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (MICRC) is nearing the end of its work to draft new maps in an effort to end partisan gerrymandering.
The mission was straightforward—use an independent commission instead of the state...
“The federal (infrastructure) funding is probably a once-in-a-lifetime lifeline, and it certainly is going to move the needle. But Michiganders need to understand that we have a long-term challenge. This federal money will last for a while, it will...
After months of haggling and horse-trading, Congress has passed—and President Joe Biden is poised to sign—a more than $1 trillion infrastructure bill. The law will usher in long-sought investment in roads, rail, bridges, broadband, the power grid...
On election security as a national security issue
Javed Ali and a bipartisan group of former national security officials recently co-signed a letter urging Congress to take more action against the security threat of election...
Voter turnout among University of Michigan college students jumped to 78% in the 2020 election, according to a report released by the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University.
Up 18 percentage points from 60% in 2016, U-M...
Brittney Barros, dual MSW and MPP student, will brief Congress this week on the Protecting Sibling Relationships in Foster Care Act, legislation which Barros developed as a 2018 intern with the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute (CCAI)....
The University of Michigan is joining with other policy schools across the Big Ten to launch Democracy in the 21st Century, a conferencewide collaboration to develop educational programming that promotes active civic education and...
When Michigan’s Independent Citizens’ Redistricting Commission (MICRC) held a public hearing recently in Grand Rapids, two students were assisting attendees with submitting citizen comments and suggestions for the Commission’s consideration. Working...
Local leaders from across the state have reported lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report, and worsening outlooks for how much longer some of those impacts will last. While the numbers of local communities reporting on...
Michigan's redistricting commission is not allowed to consider incumbency as it redraws the state's districts. John Chamberlin told Bloomberg Government that the headaches it's causing for both major parties means it is working.
“A bloodbath for...
At a time when democratic institutions are under pressure and the University of Michigan community is looking to engage, U-M will continue Democracy & Debate, its university-wide collaboration on democratic engagement, through the 2021-22 academic...
Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) has suggested that lawmakers pick just one of the family policies in the safety net spending bill. The New York Times asked Luke Shaefer which one he would choose.
"The child tax credit is elegant in that it does...
As Congress continued to debate the debt ceiling this week, Betsey Stevenson weighed in.
"I want to clarify that the debt ceiling fight is not a fight over how much debt we should have. When we debate how much we're going to spend and how much...
This week, Betsey Stevenson spoke to NPR and PBS about the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, from supply chains around the world, to a changing workforce, and U.S. government debt.
"COVID's affecting the entire world. There are entire...
Michigan's local economies are still struggling with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic but at a much lower rate than at the start of the crisis in spring 2020, according to a University of Michigan statewide survey of local government...