The Start Midwest University Rankings: 2025

Think back to July at the end of your senior year. You’re half-sunburnt, half-terrified but excited and already picturing your freshman orientation. Despite that, if you secretly hope to build the next Google, Paypal, YouTube or even Perplexity, then standard wisdom says you will be headed for the coasts: Stanford, Harvard or MIT, perhaps.

Right?

Well actually, that’d be a hard no.

All those businesses had at least one founder from our top ten list of Midwest colleges across the six states upon which we concentrate our content (for the moment): Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.

That’s not to say you can only build a world-changing business after attending a Midwestern university. I mean, sure, we’re pumping up the region, it’s in our name after all. But we’re not silly, so we’ll also consider how these institutions match up to national and global numbers.

Our analysis uses data from Dealroom, and together we’ve created the top 20 list below; a ranking based on a combination of data for the output of VC-backed startups, founders and funds raised. The list can be sorted, searched and downloaded. Together, we also created this dashboard with the numbers as total volume, as is displayed on their site. Use our data to search for your school, build ammunition for ribbing friends, for gloating with colleagues, or commiserating with ex-classmates.

Keep in mind that while the data is as accurate as possible, there may be discrepancies, and we’ve tried to analyze this in a way that smoothes out anomalies. While we welcome debate and feedback, in no way should this information be factored into education, or life decisions.

Ope.

So without further ado, let’s get into it.

Why flyover… when you can stay and get a degree?

If ‘startup gravity’ could be narrowed to three particular vectors they would be: ready access to capital, supportive infrastructures and available talent.

We’ve written about fundraising in the Midwest before, and our contention is that there is more than enough capital available in the region to boost local startup investment beyond its current levels; the size of our state economies indicates current fundraising figures to be relatively low in comparison to other states and similar ecosystems around the world.

It is also evident that Midwest states are making definitive strides to improve their infrastructures to better support founders. From economic development corporations to smart zones, state-wide funding programs, tax credits and informal support networks. These are rapidly growing and evolving.

Which leaves us with access to talent. 

More specifically, our educational institutions, and the conveyor belt of skilled, motivated people ready to make a mark in their chosen field. What this data tells us is that the talent is here, beyond a shadow of a doubt. We have world-class universities and students travel from across the country and indeed the world to receive their education in the Midwest. 

As highlighted in our opening paragraph, the list of businesses spawned by alumni of these colleges reads like a veritable “Startup: Who’s Who?”. If we consider founders and leaders from this region, it is even more impressive: Larry Page of Google, Marc Andressen of Netscape and a16z, Max Levchin of Paypal, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, and Steve Chen and Jawed Karim of YouTube were all raised and/or educated in the Midwest.

All that being said, you didn’t come here to read a list of names or a justification for why we've created this list. You’re a discerning reader, and we know you just want the cold, hard facts. So let’s get onto the good stuff: the rankings.

The Start Midwest University Rankings

Here are the top 20 Universities in the Midwest, based on the data.
NOTE: please check the end of the article if you’d like more information on how the figures were calculated.

Of note:

- 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

Some analysts may disagree with our assessment, and that’s totally cool. In fact, a Stanford professor recently suggested that graduates of the University of Cincinnati were the most likely of all to produce a unicorn, even more so than Yale, MIT or Stanford. This might be true, but we decided against factoring in unicorn production in our analysis, although you can see them in the Dealroom dashboard. Hence, the University of Cincinnati sits 13th in our rankings.

Despite that, who doesn’t love a unicorn? So, let’s start with those figures.

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Unicorn Production

A unicorn is so named because of its rarity (Note to our interns: they actually don’t exist, sorry).

But that also means it allows us to find interesting outliers. For example, some schools are just larger than others or have been in existence for longer than your grandfather’s favorite lounge chair. More students, and therefore alumni, will by nature produce more entrepreneurs and thereby more successes; the proverbial ‘at bats”. But this also means that a few notable successes will have an outsized impact.

When considering sheer numbers of unicorns founded by alumni, the University of Michigan comes out on top. However, we came to the conclusion that volume in and of itself isn’t a suitable indicator of producing founders and, moreover, successful ones. For some institutions, this also makes a lot of sense: many of them produce professionals who add a lot to our society: doctors, nurses, civil engineers and others who probably never consider entrepreneurship as a career path and could care less about raising funds. We should probably all be grateful that is the case. Other institutions are also more geared towards business students by the very nature of their curriculum. These two ends of the spectrum will therefore result in vastly different figures, when we look at output as a factor of total alumni.

In any case, we did calculate the number of unicorns as a ratio of the number of startups which raised at least 10 million. On this metric, the number one school in the Midwest is actually Wayne State, with the University of Chicago and Loyola rounding out the top three. 

This highlights the point we made earlier about outsized impact. Take Case Western University as another example. With six unicorns - including Craigslist and Optimizely - founded by alumni, but ‘only’ 51 founders who’ve raised more than 10 million, the difference of even one more or less unicorn impacts the rankings in that metric enormously. That is the nature of outliers though… and unicorns are obviously outliers by their very nature.

Number of Founders

If we considered only total figures, again the University of Michigan is a clear number one, having almost 20% more founders through its doors than the next best: the University of Illinois. 

But if we look further at the ratio of founders to number of alumni, the picture skews slightly. Northwestern comes out on top, with almost 1% of all alumni being a founder, followed by University of Chicago and Notre Dame (not even in the top 10 based purely on total numbers) coming in third. These are also the only institutions for whom half a per cent or more of their alumni go on to be founders.

This number isn’t perfect. The alumni figures come primarily from the universities themselves, but none are precise and nor could they be. But looking at the per 1000 alumni figures above, they do appear to be a solid signal of the propensity of any particular college to produce entrepreneurs.

Number of Startups

Both the total number of startups and total founders do not allow us to properly rate an institution on its ability to prepare students to be business leaders.

Additionally, these figures come from public data, although augmented by self-reporting. A business is added to the database when it has a public event: a grant, a fundraising round, a story about their success. That said, in the total number of startups founded by alumni, the University of Michigan would lead once again. 

If we then consider the number of VC-backed startups per 1000 alumni, the University of Chicago leads with almost 9 businesses created per 1000 former students. This figure beats out Northwestern and is more than double the University of Notre Dame, which once again rounds out the top three.

Raising at least $10 million

Once again, based purely on volume the University of Michigan comes out on top, followed by Northwestern and the University of Illinois. But we’ve taken this metric further, and applied it to the total number of startups founded, NOT VC-backed startups mind you. The reason to choose the total figure is that the total includes anything. Which means the percentage of those raising $10 million of ANY business is just more interesting.

The result?

Founders from the University of Chicago are the most likely to raise $10 million, with an impressive 18% of all of them doing so. Looking for venture-backable businesses? Then perhaps it makes sense to hang out on the Harper Quadrangle in Chicago. 

Global Comparisons

Looking farther afield than the Midwest, we need to rely on our Midwest dashboard and compare it against the global list. 

While the list is indeed truly global, if we were able to dig deeper in a similar fashion to that of the Midwest rankings, would it change? It’s worth considering, but we’re all about the Midwest, not the rest… of the world. We’ll leave that challenge for another day.

In any case, in the top 20 on volume alone, we have 13 institutions from the US, four from the United Kingdom, two from France, one from Israel… and just one from the Midwest. The University of Michigan sneaks in at 18th if ranked by the number of alumni-founded startups, 18th if by number of founders and - most interestingly - 13th if sorted by number of unicorns. 

If we dive just a little further, things get even better for alumni from the U of M. Looking at the likelihood of creating a unicorn - by comparing unicorn numbers to the number of startups founded by alumni - the U of M moves up to 11th. 

Again, we should reiterate that we’ve taken the raw data and analyzed it further to get our definitive list above. So it should be kept in mind that our analysis shows that The University of Chicago would rate even higher. In fact, as far as we’re able to calculate, the University of Chicago system would actually rank first worldwide in any such analysis.

State by State

And finally, we know that some people prefer to only consider their state or school when looking through this kind of list, so here then are the top five schools for each state based purely on volume. You’re welcome. 

Illinois

Indiana

Michigan

Minnesota

Ohio

Wisconsin

What does it all mean?

The goal of this list isn’t to prove who is better or even bigger, but rather to consider what these numbers can tell us about the likelihood of a certain outcome: are you more likely to become a founder if you attend a certain institution? Based on these numbers, yes. But then again, the institutions that prove those numbers are also self-selecting for particular skills and abilities.

As we start, we conclude. With the fact that if you want to create a world-changing business, and you believe that you need to attend college to learn, connect and meet potential co-founders, you can stay in the Midwest, or you can move here. These numbers prove that you don’t need to go to the coasts.

Let that sink in.

A final word: How we created the rankings

Ironically, this isn’t an academic or scientific study. We are relying on the Dealroom data set because it is readily available for anyone to access. 

When we first had the idea for such a story, we began by looking through the total, global list and it became immediately apparent that Midwest colleges ranked high overall. So then we figured, let’s rank all the colleges across the six Midwest states that we cover in our content - Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin - against each other, then within their own states, and against the global data.

The folks from Dealroom deserve a lot of credit for helping improve the accuracy of the data as we worked through it together. But that doesn’t mean it is perfect, yet. If you think something has been missed, then you can certainly contact us. But it would be even more helpful if you contacted them and mentioned that you read this article. We’re certain that they’d be happy to know that the effort has been worth it.

Second, many colleges are in fact systems, in that they have multiple campuses but which operate independently. Should we consider each as a separate entity or combine them? There is no straightforward answer. We even asked around our team and came to the conclusion that different people, who attended different colleges, had very different views. In the end we relied on aggregated data (which can result in a small amount of doubling up) for our top 20, while the dashboard (and subsequently the raw data) has each entity separated out, as this is how they publish publicly. This made only minor differences and barely impacted the top 10 or top 20.

The third and final thing to consider when viewing these rankings, is the metrics upon which they are based. 

These are:

- Number of alumni who became founders

- Number of alumni founded startups

- Number of alumni founded unicorns

- Spinouts

As you will have seen when reading and viewing these lists, taking the figures as written provides a benefit for older and larger institutions. That’s why we decided upon a ratings system. We researched living alumni numbers as publicized by each to come up with VC-backed startups and founder numbers per thousand. This gave us a propensity to start a business, rather than just a total number. Having considered that these figures have some correlation, we decided to work with the mean of these two figures as the most elegant solution. 

We then took fundraising of $10m or more as a proxy for success and survival, and applied that number to the number of total startups, rather than VC-backed. The thinking is that it would give us a different measure, as well as lower propensity overall. This figure therefore provides a neat indication of the likelihood that students of any given institution will start a business which would receive significant investment. The result is that density is rewarded more than volume, and that is a good thing in our opinion.

Finally, we ignored spinouts. In general these are difficult to quantify outside the major institutions. So ranking an entire state or region did not seem valid. 

In conclusion at the end of the conclusion, this list is primarily out of pure interest and to see what we could find. Thanks for reading. Until next year?