I'm a UM student and I can't say there's much alumni activity in Detroit itself. Grads generally either work in Ann Arbor, Metro Detroit (Birmingham, Royal Oak, etc.) or leave the state entirely.

This graphic from Forbes is pretty telling: http://goo.gl/4uBr

I'm a UM grad and I live in downtown Detroit. It's amazing: great culture, music, food, night-life, and I feel safe. I took our entire office to my place before a Tiger's game last week and now multiple people are looking into moving downtown and others are interested after that graduate.

Downtown might be okay. However, if you go outside just a little bit, you are in the danger zone. This isn't speculation.

Even 8 years go it was bad. I worked downtown and could regularly hear gunshots from my office during the day.

Wow, that's a pretty crazy graphic. At first I thought I just couldn't see the black lines, so I clicked Seattle.

I'm an alum of UofM.

If graduates do stay in Michigan, it's to continue working or studying in the Ann Arbor area. Only a handful do find jobs in the metro Detroit area (mainly engineers and consultants), but that's a trickle opposed to the flood.

Detroit's premier college is Wayne State University, and I can not speak for its graduates.

I think the reason a lot of grads from the state of MI don't live in Detroit is there is nothing attracting them to do so. When I graduated from MSU (2005) I knew more people from MSU and U of M moving to Chicago than Detroit to work. If Detroit were anything like Chicago or any other big city you would find a lot of U of M, MSU, CMU, WMU, OU, etc grads going to live and work in the city.

I also graduated from U of M, and then moved to Chicago, and I know others who have. Originally born and raised in Michigan.