The Midwest College Rankings 2026

A year ago, in July 2026, we launched the StartMidwest site with our first-ever rankings of Universities across the Midwest.

A lot has changed since then.

For a start, I think I may have less hair and I’ve also probably slept less over the past year than at any other time in my life. I guess I’m kinda like a college kid cramming all night before a big exam (don’t do it kids!)

But I digress.

The goal of these annual Midwest College Rankings is to measure the impact of local educational institutions upon entrepreneurship and the actual business value which derived from their creation. Our motivation comes from looking at WHO has been educated in the region and WHAT those people have built, often moving elsewhere to do so.

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The Inspiration behind The Midwest College Rankings

No matter which way you cut it, there is a veritable “Who’s Who” of the last few decades of American entrepreneurship that comes from the Midwest of the country:

• Google co-founder Larry Page is from Michigan and completed his undergrad at the University of Michigan.
• Marc Andressen - who created the early Internet browser Netscape and is one half of his namesake VC fund Andreessen Horowitz - was born in Iowa, raised in Wisconsin and got his degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• The Co-founders of YouTube both graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Steven Chen grew up in Illinois while his co-founder Jawad Karim was raised in Minnesota.
• Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban, a former owner of the Dallas Mavericks, is from Pittsburgh, but got his degree from the University of Indiana’s Kelley School of Business.
• Former CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, was born and raised in Michigan and attended Lawrence Technological University in Detroit.
• Max Levchin - a co-founder of Paypal and thereby one of the famous ‘Paypal Mafia’, who went on to found and fund multiple transformative companies - grew up in Chicago and received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• Andy Konwinski, the co-founder of AI search tool Perplexity received his Bachelor’s from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

All of which should reinforce why attempting to measure the ability of these institutions to create entrepreneurs and their ventures is worth our time, and in doing so, to pretend for a second that they all stayed and built their value locally. That adds up to why you should care when reading about it (Hi Mom, btw).

The biggest questions we asked ourselves in 2026 was: has anything really changed? What has moved? Do such movements tell us anything new about how these institutions actually perform over time?

The Methodology of The Midwest College Rankings

Before we get into the list: if you’d like to consider the methodology, you can skip ahead and read it at the end of the article. The method was developed in conjunction with our partners at Dealroom, who also supply the data. Together, we created this dashboard which you can explore and includes more detail on each college and region.

Once you’ve perused our arithmetic, feel free to join all the other nerds with not much else to do with their time and pull it apart. We’re here for it. Hey, we’re one of these people too. It is also worth noting that the methodology isn’t that scientific, ironically, but is based on the most solid data we can find and helpful heuristics. If you’re from one of these institutions, feel free to get in touch with us or the Dealroom team. Last year one such local leader did just that and ended up hosting a webinar with them.

Now, let’s get into the list.

The most notable aspects of the 2026 list are:

• The 2026 top 20 has the same institutions as last year
• Which also means:
  • Illinois has the most entries in the top 20 with seven
  • Ohio is next with five
  • All six states have at least one representative in the top 10
  • Both Minnesota and Wisconsin have only one representative each in the top 20
• The largest drops are Case Western Reserve University, down 4 spots to number 10 and Illinois Tech, down 3 spots to number 20.
• Biggest jumps aren’t huge: Southern Illinois, Michigan State and the University of Illinois were all up 2 spots.
• The top 3 remained the same: University of Chicago, then Northwestern University and then the University of Michigan in 3rd.

Below you’ll see the Top 20 from across the region, with their movement from last year clearly marked.

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Midwest College Unicorn Production

While we don’t consider unicorn production in the calculation, it is worth noting that over the course of the past year, several new, notable unicorns founded by alumni of these regional institutions have been minted.

These include:

Obsidian, founded by alumni of the University of Chicago, and which achieved a valuation of $1.1 billion in August 2026.
AMI, a European AI darling co-founded by former Facebook/Meta AI leader Yann Le Cun and which raised a $1.1 billion seed (!) round in February this year, has an alumni of both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Wisconsin-Madison among its co-founders.
Space tech company K2 Space was co-founded by Northwestern alumni and reached a $3 billion valuation in December 2025.
Agentic AI workspace Legora, which has University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni among its founders, was valued at $1.8 billion in October 2025.
Base Power, which has University of Michigan alumni founders and recently chose Chicago as its second market after its home base of Texas, was valued at $13 billion in October 2025.
Health tech business Histosonics, which began life at the University of Michigan and subsequently moved to Minnesota, was valued at $3.8 billion in August 2025.
And Erebor, the neo bank co-founded by Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey (who is also behind Ohio-located defence tech business Anduril), has alumni of the Ohio State University and was valued at $4.4 billion in December, 2025.

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Notable data points of The Midwest College Rankings

Other than the general numbers of the Top 20 of The Midwest College Rankings, there are additional data points worth noting:

1st among colleges based on the metric of VC-backed startups per 1000 alumni is The University of Chicago with 6.2, closely followed by Northwestern with 6.13.

1st among colleges based on the number of founders per 1000 alumni is Northwestern with 13.26, with The University of Chicago not far behind 12.68. Both are well ahead of the pack with the University of Notre Dame having 6.1 founders per 1000 alumni and the University of Michigan with 5.68.

The University of Chicago also leads when looking at the percentage of companies founded by alumni which have raised more than 10 million. More than 17% of all startups founded by alumni of that school raised more than that amount, with the next best being 16% at both the University of Michigan and the University of Notre Dame.

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How Midwest Colleges stack up Globally

To make a wider comparison as to how these institutions stack up, we’ve included here the total data for university systems worldwide, compared only on total volume: we’re a Midwest publication after all, we ain’t doin all that work outside our own region. (For how the region’s startup hubs themselves compare globally, see where Midwest startup hubs rank in Dealroom’s 2026 Global Tech Ecosystem Index.)

Only one Midwest college system makes it into the Top 20 universities worldwide when sorted by number of alumni founders according to Dealroom data, and that is The University of Michigan. Of the Top 20, 14 are in the US with seven on the East Coast and five on the West Coast. The UK has three universities in the top 20, France has two and Israel one.

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The Final Word - and Methodology

1. Data Sources and Scope

The primary data comes from the Dealroom database of VC-backed startups, founders, funds raised.
Geographically we cover only six of the Midwest states: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
Alumni data is sourced primarily from universities themselves and is therefore measured as approximate, not precise.
For the Top 20 list, data for university systems with multiple campuses is aggregated. However for the raw dashboard data you can see on Dealroom, different campuses are treated as entirely separate entities.
It is important to note that some numbers - like unicorns - can fluctuate. This can be due to improved data, adjustments or fixes from earlier errors.

2. Metrics

Number of alumni who became founders.
Number of alumni-founded startups.
Number of alumni-founded unicorns (companies valued at $1B+)

3. Data Normalization

We normalized alumni data in the following way:
Step A: Retrieve the total number of living alumni for each university (publicly published figures).
Step B: Calculate the rate per 1,000 alumni for the following:
VC-backed startups per 1,000 alumni.
Founders per 1,000 alumni.
Step C: Calculate the Mean (average) of these two normalized figures.
This creates a "propensity to start a business" score that rewards density over volume.

4. The Success Proxy (The "10 Million" Metric)

To measure the quality or success of the startups, not just the quantity, a second calculation is applied with a threshold of startups that raised $10 million or more.
Why? We believe this provides a truer success rate e.g., if 100 startups are founded and only 10 raise $10M, the rate is 10%, regardless of whether the other 90 were bootstrapped or failed.
This also provides a metric for the likelihood that a student will start a business capable of securing what is significant - but not completely insanely high - investment. We could also use Enterprise Value, as Dealroom often does. The only problem is that it is an estimate based on speculation, whereas raising is public and indicates a more ‘even’ measure in our view, that becomes normalized over time and at these volumes.

5. The Final Ranking Formula

The definitive list (Top 20) is not a simple sum of the above. It is a composite score derived from:

The Propensity Score: VC-backed startups per 1k alumni and Founders per 1k alumni.
The Success Rate: The percentage of total startups that raised $10M+.

6. What We Exclude

‘Unicorn Production’ is not factored into these figures because outliers (one massive success) can skew the data too heavily for smaller schools.
The spinout figures are also not considered because they are often too difficult to quantify consistently en masse across the region. In other words, some schools have dedicated, regimented programs and others do not. Meaning some will be more accurate than others.
We also don’t consider the total numbers of founders or startups, except for the per 1k alumni measure. We believe this allows us to avoid bias toward massive institutions.

Thanks for reading this far. You deserve a reward: so here is a link to last year’s ranking!

See you next year, and… if you’re reading this and are starting your first ever year at one of these institutions, you now know what is possible.

So good luck and go, go, go!

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