FAQs

A: “Postsecondary” refers to any valuable credential beyond a high school diploma, including certificates, associate degrees, bachelor’s degrees, and graduate degrees.

A: Collective impact is a method for solving complex problems and advancing social change by bringing together community leaders around a common agenda and shared measurements and goals. Rather than one organization or institution tackling a problem, collective impact is a cross-sector approach to changing and aligning systems to better serve the community. Learn more here.

A: The Compact’s geographic scope aligns with the Chamber’s 11-county service area, with a special focus on Macomb, Oakland, and Wayne counties.

A: Compact strategies focus on college access and success for high school-aged students, as well as adult upskilling and attainment. In addition, initiatives such as the Race to the FAFSA Line Campaign for high school seniors and Detroit Reconnect, which offers personalized advising to adults looking to reconnect to education, provide programmatic support to the larger framework.

A: Employers play an integral role in the Compact and the region’s talent strategy more broadly. There are many ways employers can get involved. Outreach into K-12 schools through mentorship programs, career exploration, work-based learning, or simple presentations to students about your business and corresponding education and career pathways contributes to a stronger school-to-work pipeline. Similarly, employer partnerships with higher education institutions can lead to better educational program alignment and internship opportunities that fill talent needs while giving students meaningful work experience. Finally, employers can play a major role in adult upskilling initiatives by offering tuition assistance, onsite learning, and education-friendly policies that make postsecondary attainment accessible and valuable for workers.

A: Equity is front and center in the Compact, with one of our two primary goals being to decrease the racial equity gap by half by 2030. In fact, if we do not make significant progress in closing equity gaps, we will not reach our attainment goal. To reduce the racial equity gap in attainment by half and achieve the overall 60% attainment goal, over 90,000 Black and 15,000 Latinx students will need to earn degrees in the next decade. We are taking steps to ensure this is accomplished. All of our data is disaggregated by race to allow us to examine the discrepancies between Black and white outcomes at every stage in the talent pipeline and build interventions around these discrepancies. Each institutional action plan incorporates strategies to address equity gaps.