Wealth & Money Quote by Jennifer Granholm

Competitiveness is doing a lot of quiet work here: it turns a social policy preference into an economic necessity. Granholm frames postsecondary education not as a personal aspiration or a civic good, but as a national survival tactic in a "global economy". That phrase is politically useful because it feels factual and impersonal, like weather. If the market is the climate, then leaders aren’t choosing values so much as responsibly dressing the state for conditions.

The subtext is a pivot from blaming students for not going to college to blaming systems for not preparing them to enter it. "Expectation" is the tell. It signals that a high school diploma is no longer enough, and it also normalizes the idea that the default path should be education-after-education. But she pairs that expectation with "tools" and "opportunity", a softer, equity-coded vocabulary that acknowledges barriers without naming them: cost, test access, uneven counseling, and the way college admissions often functions like a game with rules some families learn early.

Dropping in "college entrance exam" is strategic and culturally specific. It’s not a sweeping reinvention of schooling; it’s a concrete, fundable intervention (think: universal ACT/SAT access, in-school testing, fee waivers). The exam becomes a symbol of readiness and an administrative lever: if the state can get more students to take it, it can claim momentum toward college-going rates without immediately confronting the harder problems of college affordability and completion.

Contextually, it fits a late-2000s/early-2010s governance style: workforce development dressed as education reform, equity sold through efficiency, and aspiration translated into metrics.