Up North Michigan, schools struggle between pull of home and promise of college

Jaeden Briley lives on a road named for her homesteading family, a narrow dirt track packed with deep snow. After feeding the chickens, horses and cows on her family’s Montmorency County farm before dawn, she climbs into her Ford Focus and slips and slides five miles to the highway, which is a straight shot to Johannesburg-Lewiston Area Schools.

A few months remain of her senior year at the small, rural school, and the 18-year-old knows she now has a choice of roads.

She’s been accepted into the University of Findlay in Ohio, where she could study to become a veterinarian, a career that typically takes eight years of higher education.

Or, she may become a welder. Being a vet would bring at least twice the paycheck. But welding offers the chance for something just as valuable, Briley said.

“I want to stay here.”

Wide swaths of northern Michigan have high levels of poverty and low levels of college education. In areas like Mio, Harrison and Kincheloe, upward income mobility — doing better than your parents — is as low as the poorest neighborhoods of Detroit and Flint. College is typically seen as a ladder out of poverty, especially with net costs going down. Yet enrollment in higher education continues to be lower in rural Michigan than almost anyplace in the state.

Up North leaders say they’re torn between wanting the best future for their students and acknowledging that some who could flourish in college prefer to remain among the forests, rivers and lakes of the region, even if jobs pay less and everything from dentists to Walmart are farther away.

“Our mission is different than schools in metro Detroit,” said Katy Xenakis-Makowski, who grew up in Oakland County and is now superintendent at the 600-student school district that Briley attends. “The goal is to build good humans who can hold jobs and support their families.”

No internet, no homework

About 1 in 16 students in Michigan, 87,000 total, attend school in districts that are rural and have a total enrollment under 1,000. Almost a third of Michigan’s traditional public districts (170 of 539) fit that description, many of them in regions where down-staters visit in the summer.

Students in those schools tend to be poorer than the state average: The 11 counties with the lowest median income are all in the northern Lower Peninsula or in the Upper Peninsula.

They also are less likely to go to college. The two regions of the state with the lowest college enrollment and college readiness scores as measured by the SAT are both rural — the 11 counties east of I-75 in the northeast Lower Peninsula and the six counties of the Thumb, according to an analysis conducted by the Michigan College Access Network.

In both regions, just over half, 51.2%, of high school grads enroll in college within 12 months compared to 59% statewide.

Up North school leaders say more of their students are interested in career tech than four years of college, especially in fields like carpentry, welding and agriculture.

Life outside of school comes with extra challenges here. In Rudyard Area Schools in the Upper Peninsula, students typically miss a full day of school to see doctors or dentists because the drive each way can take several hours. Many don’t have primary physicians and rely on the school nurse, who regularly drives her kindergarten daughter 4.5 hours to Grand Rapids to see a hearing specialist.

At the 200-student Posen Consolidated Schools in Presque Isle County, in a room set aside for dual enrollment online classes, there is a rack of used suits and dresses that students can pick from to wear to the prom; they return them after the event.

“You have to drive over two hours to get a prom dress,” said Posen Superintendent Michelle Wesner.

There are no in-person advanced placement classes at Johannesburg-Lewiston because there aren’t enough students for the classes or a teacher free to be the instructor.

That’s typical in small districts: Only 35% offer AP classes, compared to 90% for districts with 1,000 or more students.

There are dual enrollment classes by video, when the video connection works. On the day Bridge visited, Alpena Community College had called a snow day, leaving four high school students enrolled in psychology 101 without work for the class period. In another class, students recently had to help the instructor figure out how to take attendance online.

An estimated third of students in Rudyard and Johannesburg-Lewiston do not have access to high-speed internet at home.

“I don’t give homework because they can’t access those resources at home,” said Johannesburg-Lewiston middle school history teacher Missy Tallman. “I also never know what’s at home in those kids’ lives. I don’t know if some of them are babysitting siblings, (while) their parents are working full-time jobs, that kind of thing.

“You just do the best that you can,” Tallman said. “If you can’t afford a dance, or you can’t afford a field trip, or you can’t afford something, we’re constantly moving funds around, or we take care of it ourselves — somebody covers it.

“We’re like a family,” Tallman said. “We’re able to take care of each other a lot easier than growing up in a bigger district.”

At Posen, students pitch in to help the about four dozen school employees who are stretched thin with multiple responsibilities. They set up the folding tables and chairs on the basketball court where lunch is served daily, and empty classroom trash cans while others help with elementary recess duty. High schoolers regularly volunteer to unload trucks for the local senior center and help set up dinners at the Knights of Columbus.

That sense of community forged in rural Michigan is a metric of success that is hard to quantify in policy discussions in Lansing, said Rudyard Superintendent Tom McKee.

“My kids’ goals may be to be a doctor or a lawyer or a pediatrician,” said McKee, who grew up in Rudyard and displays the football helmet he wore when he played for the Bulldogs above his desk. “But even more so, I want people who, if someone is broke down by the side of the road, one of our kids is going to be helpful. We don’t have enough of that in the world.”

Up North culture

Ryan Fewins-Bliss grew up in the heart of northern Michigan, in Gaylord. Even as he advocates for higher education as executive director of the Michigan College Access Network, he admits interest in college declines the farther north you head on I-75.

“There’s a northern Michigan culture, where there’s disinterest because people have to leave to get education and likely would have to go elsewhere to get a job,” Fewins-Bliss said. “There’s also a ‘fancy-pants’ issue with attending college. People say, ‘Oh you’re too good to be here.’”

Only five of 42 counties from Clare County north have a higher rate of residents 25 and older with an associate’s degree or higher than the state average of 42.2%.

Lake County has the lowest adult college attainment, at 20%. In northeast Michigan, Oscoda County, 23.4% of adults have at least an associate’s degree; in neighboring Montmorency, it’s 25.5%.

That matters because less education typically leads to smaller paychecks. The median Michigan worker with a high school diploma earns $33,000 a year five years after graduation; With a certificate, it’s $56,000; associate’s degree, $54,000; and a bachelor’s degree, $66,000.

Fewins-Biss earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Central Michigan University and recently was appointed to the CMU Board of Trustees. He has cousins who chose not to go to college who still live in northern Michigan.

“They survive and they’re good people, but everything is harder,” he said. “They struggle to pay the medical bills, the house payment, the car payment. It’s a different lifestyle.

“The options are leave or stay and struggle.”

One who may choose to stay is Ava Ewing, whose rural home borders two school districts. She chose to attend Posen, where there are fewer total students (207) than there are kindergartners (262) in Alpena Public Schools.

She gave up extracurriculars and French class and advanced math she could have gotten elsewhere because Alpena is “too big.”

She’s toured Central Michigan University, Ferris State University, possibly to become a nurse, as well as Alpena Community College. She’s also considering becoming an electrician or a utility company line worker.

“People think there’s nothing to do here. But there’s water and the woods,” she said. “You drive down the road and people wave, even if you don’t really know them.”

She’s been hunting since she was 5, spending days at her family camp nestled among cedars deep in the woods during turkey and deer season. She hands over her phone to flaunt a photo of a seven-point buck she shot when she was 15. “My dad and brother dragged it out (of the woods),” she said, “but I helped gut it.”

Data indicates her community is poor, but the bonfires with friends are free and she can get cell service at her family’s camp if “you go out in a field and wave your arm around till you get a bar.”

When she wants a taste of the city, she and friends drive to Alpena to walk around Walmart and eat at her favorite restaurant, Taco Bell.

She’s not sure about spending years in a city like Mt. Pleasant, where CMU has more students (about 14,000) than Presque Isle County has residents (13,000).

“I want the experience of the big cities,” she said, “but I feel like I’d end up in a place like this.”

Want a good job? Leave

How to best support northern Michigan youth who choose to stay in their communities rather than leave for college is a question that Up North school leaders are asking.

Those who spoke to Bridge encouraged the state to boost access and choices in career tech. Among school districts with more than 1,000 students, 66% offer career tech education; among schools of under 1,000, which are common across northern Michigan, just 36% do.

In 2024-25, Michigan spent eight times more in college scholarships and grants ($558 million) than on career technical education ($67 million).

In 2025-26, career tech got a one-time boost of $70 million to expand programs into areas that are currently underserved. That money is being distributed in competitive grants, and up north school leaders worry their kids will be overlooked for districts with more students. Decisions on those grants are expected at the end of March.

“If there’s more training in the trades for those kids, they can make good money,” said Johannesburg-Lewiston Assistant High School Principal Dan Serba. “Holy smokes, plumbers and electricians, they’re making a lot of money these days.”

A recent report by the Education Trust Midwest suggests rural schools are short-changed in funding in Michigan, and that the state needs more “weighted” formulas that would send more dollars to small rural districts without the dog-eat-dog current system of competitive grants.

Serba suggested that the most impactful influx of cash may not be in schools, but in business incentives to create more and better jobs for the youth who want to stay close to their families.

“Our kids are hard workers, but without good jobs, they’re going to find a job at a gas station and barely make ends meet,” Serba said.

Whatever extra support the state were to provide should come without strings attached, advises Michigan College Access Network’s Fewins-Bliss.

“It’s got to be regional decisions (on how best to spend funds), and emanating from the schools,” Fewins-Bliss said. “The minute it looks like the state is doing something, it doesn’t work up there. They don’t want to be told what to do.”

A good starting point would be to consider the experience of Ethan Purol, who graduated in a class of 16 in Posen and who now is a junior at Massachusetts Institute of Technology outside of Boston.

“It was an incomprehensible change,” he said. “There were as many people in my freshman dorm as in my whole town. Here, you see people you’ve never met every single day.”

The 21-year-old is studying mechanical engineering and hopes to work in the aeronautics industry when he graduates. He knows his career path won’t take him back to northeast Michigan, but he understands why many of his classmates turned down college to stay in their hometown.

“I know people who could have gone to college and been super successful,” Purol said. “If you can get by and you’re happy, why go to college? I can stay here and weld.”

He gets the attraction. “I’ve been in Massachusetts for three years, and I never see stars,” he said. “When I go home, I’m reminded that I love it.”

Advancement in the traditional sense of leaving for a job isn’t necessarily how advancement is defined in his rural community, he said, something that would be good for policymakers in Lansing to keep in mind.

“People choose it — it’s what they want,” Purol said.

“Everyone has a different definition to what success means.”

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This story was originally published by Bridge Michigan and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.