“I understand business must not be your thing and you seem to love UM – but please recognize that some people actually DO want to study business and may even feel passionate about it.”
That has not been my experience happy1. Most business majors I knew were fairly open about the fact that they were in it mostly for the job prospects. They cared little about the subject matter, they just wanted that job at GM or Ford or at some zippy tech company out West, or at a consulting or financial firm in Chicago or NYC. But I suppose you will have oddities and outliers who truly love studying accounting, finance, operations management and marketing. Then again, I did not get the feeling that is the case with the OP, who just recently discovered that she wants to major in business. In her case, I think she is more concerned about job prospects when she graduates. In that sense, I just do not think OSU will give her the edge she seeks.
“FWIW, one recent economics major I know from UM (didn’t get into Ross after freshman year) had trouble finding a job after graduation and after a year went back for a MS in Accounting. Of course that is a sample size of one…”
I am sure that many of the 400-500 Econ majors who graduate annually from Michigan will have trouble finding jobs. When I graduated, roughly 25% of Econ majors went straight to graduate school (mostly law school or Econ PhD), and 65-70% had job within 3 months of graduation, and many of them with jobs that they “settled” for rather than dreamed of. The remaining 5-10% were sadly unemployed. I doubt things have changed much over the years. The same can be said of any program and university. My administrative assistant at one point was a Yale graduate. She graduated with a 3.7 GPA and could not find a job other than the one we offered her. No degree is a guarantee for success. Thankfully, she applied to law school and ended up getting her JD from Georgetown. But that’s the benefit of attending Michigan over OSU, and majoring in Econ instead of Business. If a graduate is unlucky and cannot find a good job, the Michigan degree will be more versatile.
I cannot stress enough that Michigan and OSU are not peer institutions, and since it is cheaper for the OP to attend Michigan, it only makes sense to go for the cheaper and superior university. Even fit isn’t an issue since Michigan and OSU are both large Midwestern universities. It’s not like she is choosing between Michigan and Occidental College or Michigan and the New College of Florida.