Is the University of Michigan harder to get into than Duke overall?

Yes. In overall undergraduate admissions, Duke is generally considered harder to get into than the University of Michigan.

That is true for most applicants because Duke is a smaller, highly selective private university with a very limited freshman class, while Michigan enrolls a much larger class and has a broader public-university mission. Michigan is still extremely competitive, especially for out-of-state students, but in an overall admissions sense Duke is the more selective of the two.

For a student looking at Duke, the pool tends to be packed with applicants who already have top grades, rigorous coursework, and strong extracurriculars, so standing out is especially difficult. Duke also has the kind of national applicant pool that drives selectivity across the board, not just in a few programs.

Michigan fits a somewhat wider range of very strong applicants, particularly because it is a large flagship public university. Its admissions bar can vary more depending on residency, and in-state applicants usually face a different landscape than out-of-state applicants. That makes Michigan less straightforward to talk about than Duke, but not harder overall.

So if your question is simply which school is tougher to get into in the broadest sense, the answer is Duke. The only reason people sometimes debate this is that Michigan can feel very selective in certain contexts, especially for nonresidents, but that still does not usually put it above Duke overall.