On a recent day, he called in one of the high school’s high-achieving juniors to talk about possibilities, including the University of Michigan scholarship. “Do you know how much your parents make?” Mr. Harris asked Jessica Albrecht, who is 17. She told him that her father is a truck driver, and her mother works in the school district.
“I’m smart here, but I’m not sure I would be there,” Ms. Albrecht said of the possibility of the University of Michigan. Still, she seemed intrigued. If her parents’ combined income is under $60,000, Michigan could be a real option, Mr. Harris told her. If not, he said, pausing, as he tried to balance encouragement with reality, it is tougher.
For years, young people in this area did not feel a lot of pressure to go to college. They could graduate and get a job at “the shop.” The U.A.W.-negotiated salary was a gateway to a middle-class life that supported places like Bay County, allowing people to marry, have a family, buy a house and, if they could eke out 20 years of service, even own a home or a boat “up north.”
“You could have a very nice life,” Mr. Harris, who grew up in Bay City, recalled.
Racing from one job to the next
There is hardly a better place to watch today’s job shuffle than Coonan’s, where office workers, teachers, mechanics and others come to work extra hours as a second, third, even fourth job.
The unemployment rate in Bay City is 4.7 percent, but that masks the fact that many jobs simply pay too little to make ends meet.
Erin Sitkowski works as an account manager at the F.P. Horak Company, a prominent printing company in Bay City. But when she gets out of work at 5 p.m., she drives as fast as she can across town to reach Coonan’s within 15 minutes.
“I knew it was time to get a second job when I was borrowing from my family to make ends meet,” said Ms. Sitkowski, who struggled financially after getting a divorce.