When Matthew Jackson graduated from Morehouse College with a degree in computer science, he had a hard time deciding whether to stay in the Atlanta area or return to his hometown of Detroit and pursue a career in data science.
“All my friends are going to New York, L.A., where do I want to be?” Jackson told Work Shift. “I even wanted to come to Chicago, to be home, but not home.”
Jackson says his decision ultimately came down to wanting to make a difference in his community, particularly at a time when energy was brewing in Detroit around its emerging tech ecosystem.
Fast forward to today, and the 24-year-old is currently studying at the University of Michigan, less than an hour’s drive from Detroit.
“The more that I talked about it with my family and close friends, the more I realized that even if I wasn’t sure if [Detroit] was going to be the place I’m going to be for the next 10 years, I had an obligation to come back to at least use my skill set for a little bit of time.”
The Big Idea: Michigan’s “brain drain” problem, in which young residents leave after graduation, has long embittered state and city officials. Michigan increasingly lags behind other states in retaining working-age people between the ages of 25 and 44.
The state’s talent migration is felt across the tech industry: about 45% of STEM graduates leave Michigan within two years for tech hubs on the West Coast, Texas, Georgia, or the Northeast, according to a 2024 survey of tech talent by McKinsey & Company.
“It’s really up to us at this point…the ones who are coming out of college and who are making those decisions, do I come back to Detroit or not, to at least take a step like I did, and see what we can do here,” Jackson says.
Detroit not only struggles with attracting individuals but also major tech companies. In 2018, Detroit’s lack of mass transit, as well as local challenges in retaining talent, were among the major reasons why e-commerce giant Amazon opted not to build its second North American headquarters within city limits.
But city officials are hopeful that the city’s recent growth is an indicator of things to come: between July 2022 and July 2023, Detroit’s population grew for the first time in 66 years, with some analysts crediting the city’s tech boom with driving inbound migration.
Detroit’s outgoing mayor, Mike Duggan, who made population growth a priority of his tenure, has said in the past year that he envisions the city’s tech industry as part of its appeal to younger Detroiters and out-of-state residents.
Fresh Investment: In late July, Detroit city officials, including Mayor Duggan, convened at tech incubator Newlab to unveil the Detroit Startup Fund, an initial city investment of $700K for early-stage companies looking to launch or scale their tech-driven businesses.
“We’ve got a long way to go to get to Silicon Valley, but this room today is showing the potential, and with the Detroit Startup Fund, we’re going to keep building that,” Duggan said at the announcement of the fund.
In a contested mayoral race, multiple candidates are echoing Duggan’s vision.
“My goal and my vision for this city is to create a place, the best place in the country, for entrepreneurs to grow and to thrive, and I believe that we can and we will get that done, and today is a step in that direction,” Mary Sheffield, president of the Detroit City Council and a mayoral candidate, said at the event.
Exploration and Hands-On Learning
When Jackson graduated from Morehouse, he was excited to come back to the same program that sparked his interest in computer science.
In a classroom tucked away on the Wayne State University campus in Detroit earlier this summer, Jackson looked on as a dozen high school students worked through a coding exercise in Swift, a programming language. By summer’s end, Jackson says, they’ll have developed enough skills to produce an app.
A decade earlier, Jackson was in the students’ exact position, participating in a program through JOURNi, a local nonprofit focused on teaching tech and entrepreneurial skills to young people. It was his first exposure to programming, he says, and set him on his eventual path.
“They were instilling in me skills to be successful in the corporate world” from an early age, Jackson says. “They were giving me the hands-on learning experience, how to code, how to use those skill sets that I didn’t get a lot from college.”
The kind of career exploration Jackson did is essential for entry-level pathways, according to Detroit Future City, a think tank that identified software developers as one of the top “growth occupations” in the city. In a 2023 report, the group highlighted a few programs leading the way, including NPower and Growing Detroit’s Young Talent.
“These programs are important to improve the skill level of Detroit’s workers and to provide exposure to growing occupations in the economy,” the report said.
As is, roughly three-fourths of Michigan companies surveyed by McKinsey & Company reported being unsuccessful in hiring Black tech talent, citing a lack of technical experience or proficient work readiness.
Alternative Pathways: In a city where less than one-fifth of residents earned a bachelor’s degree, alternative education models like bootcamps and workforce training programs are a popular method of upskilling and reskilling working-age Detroiters, including members of Gen Z like Christian Kinsey.
When Kinsey enrolled in Morehouse College to study computer science, he didn’t think he’d return home to Detroit for a long while. But within a year, a medical emergency prompted the 25-year-old to re-route his plans.
Kinsey planned to continue his studies at a local community college, but then he heard about NPower, a national tech bootcamp that was preparing to launch a Detroit location in the winter of 2020. Designed to teach IT fundamentals, the program required Kinsey to defer college for a few more months to participate full-time.
“When everything shut down during COVID, NPower’s promise was they would get you an internship at the end of the program,” Kinsey says. ”I got that first internship, and I was like, ‘Man, I’m making what I’d be making straight out of college. I don’t really see a reason for me to go back.'”
Miranda Stanfield, a cybersecurity policy analyst and educator, says diversifying the tech workforce and keeping young people engaged in the field requires “meeting people where they are” with programming that reflects their culture.
In 2024, she began to partner with Wayne County Community College District to offer cybersecurity workshops, digital skills training, and career readiness lessons to Detroit youth and adults. This fall, she’s preparing to launch “Tech on the Yard” a national HBCU campus tour that will host pitch competitions, resource fairs, and networking events for students curious about entering the tech industry.
“We want to over-resource the students, make them aware of their opportunities within tech, no matter what their major is,” she says.
‘Bringing More Good People Back’
Jackson and Kinsey are both excited about the changing nature of Detroit. Headlines about the city’s Chapter 9 bankruptcy, in 2013, dominated the news while they were in middle school, but the Detroit of the past few years inspires them.
“I’m excited to see Detroit shift and get a more positive light on the city so everybody can see what I’ve been seeing my whole life. It’s a great place to be,” Kinsey says. “There’s a lot of good opportunities, a lot of good people here, and it’s bringing more good people back to the city, which I really appreciate.”
Jackson, the Morehouse grad, credits city initiatives like Grow Detroit’s Young Talent and Detroit At Work with building up a pipeline for Detroit youth, but he wants to see the city collaborate with more companies to offer internships and apprenticeships for early-career tech workers.
“They don’t have too many specialty corporations that maybe someone like me would want to work for,” he says. “I work with AI technology, but there aren’t a lot of options for that…there are a lot of us who want to make new changes or try something different.”
Some of that innovation is already happening at Newlab, where initiatives like Black Tech Saturdays and the 240 startups housed at the incubator have diversified the tech companies within city limits.
As Detroit prepares to elect its next mayor this fall, Jackson says youth should play a greater role in how the city operates.
“The next mayor has an opportunity to change the city for the next 10-20 years,” he says. “We have an opportunity to be a part of that change.”
Ethan Bakuli is a Detroit-based reporter and contributor to Work Shift. This piece is the final one in a series focused on Motor City’s growing tech industry and what its longtime residents and new graduates need to break into the good jobs it offers. The series is the result of months of in-depth reporting supported by a Kapor Foundation Research Fellowship.