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In December 2024, Carl Meyers visited the 51��Ƶ-Dearborn campus for his official swearing-in to the University of Michigan Board of Regents. For him, the location felt apropos. “What better place to start than at the beginning?” Meyers said in his remarks, referring to his formative undergraduate years at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn in the late 1970s. Meyers, who grew up two miles from the university, says he and his family chose 51��Ƶ-Dearborn for reasons that will sound familiar to many of today's students. Living at home was a practical way to make college more affordable — which was important given that Meyers had to pay his tuition with money he saved from his summer night shifts on a truck assembly line and a personal side business painting and wallpapering people’s homes. His original plan was to attend 51��Ƶ-Dearborn for a year, do well and then transfer to the Ann Arbor campus. But from his first moments as a student, he started putting down roots that proved hard to pull up. “Some of the people I met at my orientation at the Henry Ford mansion are still friends to this day,” Meyers says. “That first year, I got involved in Student Government, got involved in politics on campus, and I ended up staying all four years.”

Meyers says 51��Ƶ-Dearborn in the mid-to-late 1970s was, in some ways, a pretty different place. For one, it was cozier, with a total enrollment under 5,000 students and a much smaller physical footprint. He estimates his incoming class was around 1,000 students and he remembers playing intramural football on the site where the Renick University Center now stands. But in other ways, he thinks the vibe has remained remarkably consistent over the 50 years since he attended. On a non-residential campus, he says you had to work a little harder to cultivate a social life — an ethos that’s still echoed by students today. Most importantly, he says Dearborn was then, and is now, “a serious place.” It’s not a place you go, he says, if your idea of college is huge frat parties on the weekends, or even sit-ins in an administration building. “Students at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn are people who have families, mortgages, homes, they have car payments, they have childcare to worry about,” Meyers says. They are pragmatic students who primarily see college as a path to a better economic future for them and their families.

To keep that dream within reach, college must remain affordable for working and middle class families, Meyers says. Affordability was the backbone of his 2024 regents campaign — and three previous unsuccessful runs for the board dating back to 2004. Meyers says his concern over the affordability of higher education grew organically out of his own professional life as an investment advisor. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he helped many clients put together financial plans to pay for their children’s college education. Back then, he says there were some pretty good options. “The bond rates were 8%. The Michigan Education Trust was priced below market value,” he recalls. But in the early 2000s, tuition rates began a steep climb, which Meyers attributes mostly to the increased availability of student loans and decreased investment by the state in higher education. “That dream started to become out of reach,” he says. “Families couldn’t afford it with normal investment and savings strategies. So what did they do? Some sacrificed their own future for their children by raiding their retirements or home equity. More often, people took on student loans.”

At that time, Meyers, who has long been active in the Michigan Republican Party, started sounding the alarm bells, including with some U-M Regents, with whom he was friends or acquaintances. He says the prevailing attitude, however, was essentially that the debt was still worth it, given that those with college degrees had much higher lifetime earnings. Meyers didn’t see it that way. Instead, he saw that student debt often rippled through people’s lives, including delaying other important life decisions, like buying a home or starting a family. And that had consequences for their long-term wealth, their ability to pass wealth onto their children and their well-being. “When I ran in 2004 for the first time, I was saying that in the next generation or two, if we don’t get a handle on this, there will be a massive student debt problem in this country and college education will be out of reach for many,” Meyers says. “Twenty years later, Americans are carrying $1.9 trillion in student debt. To put that in perspective, there is approximately $1 trillion in consumer debt outstanding today. And the travesty is that it’s very difficult to discharge student debt through bankruptcy.”

This time around, Meyers' affordability-based message resonated with voters: He was the top vote-getter among all candidates elected to governing boards for U-M, Michigan State and Wayne State — the three state universities with constitutionally mandated elected boards of regents. He says he’s excited that one of the big agenda items for the U-M Regents will be working out the details of a recently announced expansion of the  — a financial aid program that supports free and reduced tuition for high-achieving students from lower-income families on all three campuses. Meyers says the initiative has the ability to put college back within reach for thousands of families. "If you can take the cost issue out of the formula, you can begin to address greater affordability for all — at least to a point. For example, to tell a family to go out and borrow $150,000, it’ll be a good investment — that’s a very hard message to sell to a family whose home might not even be worth that much. But now, if you can say that tuition for your son or daughter is free at the University of Michigan, I think they’re going to figure the rest out. So I think the expansion of the Go Blue Guarantee is absolutely one of the best policy decisions we can make.”

Along with continuing to beat the drum on affordability, Meyers’ other big priority is to advocate for investment in 51��Ƶ-Dearborn and the regional campuses more generally. He says that’s not something that just started with his term on the Board of Regents. For example, he says, for years, he urged his friend Ron Weiser, who Meyers is succeeding on the board, to “get over to Dearborn” and see what makes the place special. Weiser did, and  for the renovation of the campus’ Engineering Lab Building. “Mike Behm, who’s on the board now, he’s close to 51��Ƶ-Flint like I am close to 51��Ƶ-Dearborn. So it’s kind of up to us to keep the awareness out there,” Meyers says. “It’s so easy to become immersed in everything that’s going on in Ann Arbor and see Dearborn or Flint as a secondary product. But I see 51��Ƶ-Dearborn as a valuable part of the University of Michigan’s portfolio, because it gives students a chance to get a University of Michigan education who might not otherwise have the means to do it. So I’m honored to be the first regent from the Dearborn campus. A bunch of us have tried before, and I’m honored to be the one who could do it.”

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Story by Lou Blouin