Michigan Campus Diag

Students walk through the Diag on the University of Michigan campus.

(Melanie Maxwell | The Ann Arbor News)

The University of Michigan was the highest ranked public university in America, and the only public university nationally that earned a top-25 ranking in the QS World University Rankings for the 2014-15 year.

In the rankings, which were released Monday night, U-M joined a dozen private schools across the country – including MIT, Yale, Harvard and Stanford – as the top domestic institutions, while the University of California Berkeley was the only other public school to join Michigan in the top 30.

Overall, the school was ranked 23rd, one notch down from 2its 013-14 rank.

The rankings compare these top 800 universities across four broad areas of interest to prospective students, and examine research, teaching, employability and international outlook.

These four key areas are assessed using the following six indicators: academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty-student ratio, citations per faculty, international student ratio and international staff ratio.

The QS World University Rankings said its primary goal is to help students make informed comparisons between their international study options.

Since it was first compiled in 2004, the rankings have expanded to feature more than 800 universities around the world.