The University of Michigan maintained its ranking as the top U.S. public university in the QS World University Rankings for 2017-18, and ranked 21st among all institutions on the list, moving up two spots from last year in the ranking released Thursday.

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The QS World University Rankings, launched in 2004, are based on six factors: academic reputation, employer reputation, student-faculty ratio, citations per faculty, proportion of international faculty and proportion of international students.

The ranking has been expanded this year to feature 959 universities — 43 more than last year — in 84 countries.

U-M was one of 31 U.S universities in the top 100.