In Defense of the Midwest
GSB conversations that peg the Midwest as second-tier are common. A prominent investor and professor recently asked our class who would want to work for a Fortune 500 company in Cincinnati. Of 75 people, only one timidly raised her hand. And this year, Stanford GSB began offering a full ride to students who commit to working in the Midwest for two years after graduation — a scholarship modeled on those offered students who choose to work in developing economies. Even working in Chicago qualifies GSB students for tuition reimbursement.
As a relocated Midwesterner, I feel my blood boil. The place I know from both my childhood in Michigan and my young professional life in Ohio is not a place we should have to pay people to live.
Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin — the states named in Stanford’s new scholarship — have a combined GDP of nearly $4 trillion. Eleven of the 12 achieved higher real GDP growth in 2016 than either California or New York. The Midwest makes up 25 percent of our country’s GDP and it’s growing.
But Silicon Valley continues to ignore it. Last summer I realized why. At barbecues and work dinners across the Valley, Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance’s memoir on life in Kentucky and southeastern Ohio, was the must-read. Like our peers, I was mesmerized by the book and the debate surrounding it. I spent three years working and living in Cincinnati. I attended Miami University, a school just north of Cincinnati with a satellite location in Middletown, Hillbilly Elegy’s primary setting. My husband, a CPA, worked for AK Steel, the central community and company in the book. While I was struck by the stark contrast between Vance’s description of life outside Cincinnati and my own experience as a young professional there, many of our classmates were struck by a description they assumed applied to all of Ohio.
Therein lies the problem. With little or no direct experience in the Midwest, those outside the region are left to make judgments based on what makes the national news. When what makes the national news isn’t pretty — the Flint water crisis, Ferguson, the opioid crisis, or a book on dysfunction in hillbilly families — judgments about the region aren’t pretty either. Thus is born the idea that there’s nothing worth stopping for in the middle.
Solving flyover mentality is two-fold.
Midwesterners, stand up, speak up, and start up companies to claim your spot on the map. Highlight on a national level the many things going right in the region, then do more of it.
Non-Midwesterners, visit the Midwest. Plan a vacation to the beaches of Lake Michigan. Take a job interview in Chicago. Interview business owners. Don’t write off the region. Its resilience may surprise you.
