Source: lonelyplanet.com

Michigan State University in East Lansing has been a steady leader among public universities in the United States for sending its students abroad for a portion of their academic studies. On the flipside, the university along with seven other Big Ten universities has been the lucky recipients of a growing influx of international students, particularly undergraduates from China in the past five years. According to the Open Doors 2011 report from the Institute of International Education, of the 25 universities in the United States with the largest international student population, …

Look out, Silicon Valley.
Read the report from Brookings here, which notes the success Rust Belt cities have had in attracting skilled immigrants.
The report notes:
“Perhaps most notable is the very high concentration of high-skilled immigrants in older industrial metro areas in the Midwest and Northeast such as Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Syracuse. Detroit, for instance, has 144 high-skilled immigrants for every 100 low-skilled immigrants. Immigrants in these metropolitan areas tilt toward high-skill because they blend earlier arriving cohorts who have had time to complete higher education with newcomers …

Here’s an affordable idea that we can put to use to immediately make our region a more enjoyable and attractive place to live.  We need to straighten out our thinking about our weather – stop complaining about it – start enjoying it and making it a selling point.  When locals complain about the weather, visitors and new comers pick up on it.  We need to set aside all the moaning we’ve heard (and done) our whole lives.  Let’s take a clear-eyed look at the weather in the Rust Belt, especially …

Stephan Whitaker, a research economist at the Cleveland Fed, has noticed two salubrious trends in RustBelt demographics:

1) between 2000 and 2008, college graduates rose sharply as a share of the work-force in several urban areas

2) in the future, the graduate share will keep rising as older, less-educated workers retire

This news is good taken at face value, because research by Ed Glaeser and other urban economists suggests cities thrive as idea-generating centers. When educated people interact face-to-face, they breed businesses and insights.

Take a look at the pieces created by Buffalo artist Dennis Maher using materials salvaged from demolished buildings.

The Baltimore native came to Buffalo eight years ago and finds the city to be a very inspiring place, he said in an interview with Rust Wire.

“There are very few places where I could do the kind of work I’m doing here,” working with debris, Maher said.

When he first came to Buffalo, he worked on a demolition crew to earn extra income.

His interest in demolition has different aspects, he said: the physicality of it, the political aspect of it as a development strategy, and as a process of erasure.

When I was an undergraduate headed to Canada for my freshman year, I remember trying to get a money order to pay for my visa application in advance of crossing the border. Standing at the counter in my credit union in Erie, PA, trying to persuade the clerk to make a money order out in Canadian dollars? I might as well have asked for Mauritian rupees. Before I left the credit union, half the staff had been called on deck to figure out how to perform such an exotic transaction. I shook my head at the apparent difficulty of using the currency of a country which, on a clear day, I could see from my bedroom window. Eventually getting what I’d come for, I left the credit union in disbelief of my hometown’s provincial ways, and made for the border.

Editor’s note: This piece comes from Michigan correspondent Ivy Hughes. -KG
Mid-Michigan doesn’t need economic indicators to validate the recent surge of entrepreneurial activity. In less than two years, four incubators have popped up giving business, technology, science and creative startups an opportunity to make money doing what they love.
Incubator is a loose term generally used to describe the capture of new talent, economic programs and business support in a physical structure. The greater Lansing area has four: The TIC, the Hatch, ITEC and the NEO Center. Between the four, approximately …

Check out Shrinking Cities from Virginia Tech’s Dept. of Urban Affairs and Planning.
The blog comes from the Shrinking Cities – Sustainability studio in Virginia Tech’s School of Urban Affairs and Planning, Alexandria Campus.
It  “aim(s) to explore the opportunities and challenges of shrinking cities in the context of contemporary urban planning. We will evaluate strategies and commentary on shrinking cities, including urban agriculture, storm water infrastructure, pocket parks, vacant property reclamation, land banks and community energy generation.”
Lots of good stuff here on Baltimore, Cleveland, Youngstown and more.
-KG
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Good Magazine is reporting that four Detroit High Schools will begin training students to work at Wal-Mart.
Students will receive 10 credits for 11 weeks of job readiness preparation with the retail giant.
Advocates say it’s a good opportunity for students, given the city’s staggering unemployment rate.
Advocates for the poor say the students are being trained for dead-end jobs and lives of subserviance.

-AS
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Take a look at this column, published in Buffalo’s weekly Artvoice.
It reviews a book, Hope and Despair in the American City by Gerald Grant (Harvard University Press 2009), which examines school desegregation through metropolitan-wide school reorganization.
The premise? This work “compares the sorry recent history of Syracuse, New York with the glad success of Raleigh, North Carolina. One town tried desegregation within the boundaries of the old city and failed, and is dying, while the other town regionalized schools, and has been growing by leaps and bounds,” writes reviewer Bruce Fisher. (Fisher is …