NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. (AP) New Jersey state officials are working on rearranging the state's higher education system to give Rutgers control of a medical university in hopes that would help move the university, as former Gov. Tom Kean put it, from good to great.

Education experts see it as a step likely to help but hardly the only one the state's 246-year-old flagship university needs to take to become one of the nation's elite public universities.

They say the school needs to prioritize which departments will be targeted to try to attract top faculty; find ways to cut bureaucracy for undergraduates; and find ways to sell itself to the state's top high school students as a place they'll want to spend the next four years.

"Rutgers is a traditional, proud school that has the opportunity to become great," said Greg Brown, the chairman of Motorola Solutions and a Rutgers trustee.

Rutgers is known as a strong university. Two surveys that college officials follow by The Times of London and the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University both place it in the top 100 universities in the world. And several of Rutgers' graduate programs particularly in the humanities and social sciences were ranked highly by the latest U.S. News and World Report survey.

But several U.S. public universities rank ahead of Rutgers on those surveys. A handful, including the Universities of California-Berkeley, Washington and Michigan, consistently rank among the top 20 in the world.

It's that list that Rutgers officials seek to join.

"What you're going to see is a limited number of places around the country and around the globe will have critical mass to accomplish cutting-edge research," said Richard Edwards, the Rutgers vice president who is slated to be the university's interim president in July and August. "The whole point is not to be rated highly but what happens because of that research," Edwards said.

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Those highest-ranked public universities in the U.S. all have medical schools.

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Medical school not only way Rutgers could improve