The difference is 96 in detroit is moving at 60mph pretty much all times of the day. You don’t reach those speeds in socal until like 9pm.
And it still doesn't matter because the point is that there is much better access to higher education and its ancillary benefits in LA, not that a commute that no one has any reason to make is longer at times than it would take on average to reach the best university in the Detroit metro area.
I had to look it up because of the now multiple Detroit apologists who are acting like Brentwood is on the moon and Pasadena is on Mars to make sure I wasn't completely losing my mind. UM is 43 miles from downtown Detroit, and there isn't some sort of express route guaranteed to be traffic-free that you can take to get there. Like I said before, that's about the same distance from Philly to Princeton, and no one is talking about how essential Princeton is to the city of Philadelphia. I get that it's somewhat different, but it's also not that different.
Detroit lags behind most major US cities (including many that are smaller) when it comes to higher education. I'm not bashing the city when I say that, it's just a fact.