U-M Ranked As No. 1 Public Ivy College In Country

NEW YORK ? The University of Michigan was ranked in a new survey as the No. 1 Public Ivy college ? a term coined by Richard Moll, an admission officer for Yale University, who believed that several public institutions were delivering an Ivy League collegiate experience at a public school price.

Moll wrote a book about them in 1985, shining the spotlight on eight schools in particular. He didn’t rank them, though he did cite the University of Michigan as a leader, “the prototype Public Ivy.”

Thirty years have passed, and Michigan remains the group’s pacesetter. The best public college in America today, according to a statistical analysis by The Business Journals, is the University of Michigan.

Rounding out the top five in TBJ’s new rankings of public colleges are the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary, and the University of California-Berkeley. Each of these runners-up also qualified for Moll’s Public Ivy list three decades ago.

Michigan Public Ivies in the top 250

1. University of Michigan

37. Michigan State University

124. Michigan Technological University

140. Grand Valley State University

147. University of Michigan-Dearborn

224. Eastern Michigan University

243. Western Michigan University