Surprisingly, it appears that the “Award” component of ARWU’s methodology negatively affects Michigan’s total score:
“The total number of the staff of an institution winning Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine and Economics and Fields Medal in Mathematics. Staff is defined as those who work at an institution at the time of winning the prize. Different weights are set according to the periods of winning the prizes. The weight is 100% for winners after 2011, 90% for winners in 2001-2010, 80% for winners in 1991-2000, 70% for winners in 1981-1990, and so on, and finally 10% for winners in 1921-1930. If a winner is affiliated with more than one institution, each institution is assigned the reciprocal of the number of institutions. For Nobel prizes, if a prize is shared by more than one person, weights are set for winners according to their proportion of the prize.”
http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU-Methodology-2015.html
Seven of the Top 25 in the U.S. per ARWU methodology are located in the Midwest:
1 Harvard University
2 Stanford University
3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
4 University of California, Berkeley
5 Princeton University
6 California Institute of Technology
7 Columbia University
8 University of Chicago
9 Yale University
10 University of California, Los Angeles
11 Cornell University
12 University of California, San Diego
13 University of Washington
14 Johns Hopkins University
15 University of Pennsylvania
16 University of California, San Francisco
17 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
18 University of Wisconsin - Madison
19 New York University
20 Northwestern University
21 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
22 University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
23 Duke University
24 Washington University in St. Louis
25 Rockefeller University