Greater Opportunity
Greater Education
If you don’t have the education you need to tackle some of these careers, it’s not too late to get it. Our region offers educational opportunities that range from pre-school foreign language immersion programs (OK, it might be too late for that) to Ph.D. programs.
College
Education pays. Median lifetime earnings for people with some college – but no degree – are still 19 percent higher than those with a high-school diploma only. (Not so good at math? Taking college classes means you’ll likely earn $1.19 for every dollar earned by your friends who stopped at high school.)
People with bachelor’s degrees earn more than 60 percent more than those with high-school diplomas, and people with master’s degrees earn almost twice as much. People with professional degrees (like doctors and lawyers) earn almost three times as much.
More than 40 percent of the Greater Lansing region’s residents have college degrees. Want to be one of them? Your options are almost limitless.
The best-known is Michigan State University (MSU). MSU is part of Michigan’s University Research Corridor (URC), which is an alliance of the state’s top research institutions: MSU, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. Together, the three URC schools produce more than a hundred patents each year, capture almost all of the federal research dollars awarded to Michigan universities, and spawn at least one new business each month.
That’s big stuff.
MSU has more than 460,000 living alumni worldwide, so going there will provide you with lots of valuable connections. And if you’d like a smaller school, you’ve got lots of other choices in the Greater Lansing region.
Elementary and Secondary
If you’re thinking about a place for (pre-college) kids, the Greater Lansing region offers lots of options.
Because of our region's emphasis on education, our public schools are solid ones—and a few of them are spectacular. (Here's just one of our many points of pride: East Lansing, Okemos, and Williamston High Schools all earned silver medals in U.S. News and World Report's 2009 edition of "America's Best High Schools"—placing them among just 500 schools nationwide to do so.)
Not looking at high schools? The Lansing School District is one of a handful of Michigan school districts to offer a foreign-language immersion program – and it offers two of them. Students in Post Oak Elementary’s Chinese immersion program spend half of each school day in an Eastern-style classroom speaking only Mandarin, while Forest View Elementary offers a similar Spanish immersion program. In addition, the East Lansing School District offers a preschool-only Chinese immersion program.
View Greater Lansing School Districts