University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign

University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign is a public institution that was founded in 1867. It has a total undergraduate enrollment of 32,695, its setting is urban, and the campus size is 1,783 acres. It utilizes a semester-based academic calendar. University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign's ranking in the 2015 edition of Best Colleges is National Universities, 42. Its in-state tuition and fees are $15,602 (2014-15); out-of-state tuition and fees are $30,228 (2014-15).

The University of Illinois is located in the twin cities of Urbana and Champaign in east-central Illinois, only a few hours from Chicago, Indianapolis and St. Louis. The school’s Fighting Illini participate in more than 20 NCAA Division I varsity sports and are part of the Big Ten Conference. The university boasts the largest Greek system in the world, and almost a quarter of the student body is involved. It’s not hard to find something to do on campus with more than 1,000 student organizations, including professional, political and philanthropic clubs. All freshmen are required to live on campus.

University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign comprises 17 schools and colleges. Its Graduate School of Library and Information Science, College of Engineering and Department of Psychology are among the best in the country. The school’s College of Business, College of Education and College of Law are also highly ranked. The school is classified as a university with very high research activity by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The University of Illinois was the first school to provide disability access to all university services, curricula and facilities. Notable alumni include Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert and the co-founder of YouTube, Steve Chen.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the state's flagship institution: a classic land-grant university, dedicated to its traditional excellence in education, research, and public engagement, and driven to innovate in each of these missions.

More than 1,850 Urbana-Champaign faculty members lead more than 42,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional students in a process of discovery and learning in 16 colleges and schools and more than 80 research centers and labs.

Undergraduates make up three-quarters of the student population. Roughly 80 percent of the undergraduate students come from the 102 counties of Illinois, with the rest traveling to Illinois from all 50 states and more than 100 nations. All are highly qualified and choose between 150 undergraduate programs of study. The middle 50 percent of freshmen at Illinois score between 26 and 30 on the ACT, and these same students ranked between the 84th and 96th percentile in their high school graduating classes. Undergraduate students often travel around the globe through one of the top ten study abroad programs among major research institutions in the United States.

Faculty members also are well connected internationally, collaborating with other top scholars from around the world and across disciplines. They are world-renowned scholars who have been recognized with such top awards as Nobel Prizes, Pulitzer Prizes, Guggenheim Fellowships, Tony Awards, MacArthur "genius" awards, and memberships in the nation's elite academies of arts and sciences. Of twelve Nobel laureates who have served on the faculty, two were honored for work undertaken at this University. Illinois became only the third American public university, and the eleventh institution in the world, ever to have two Nobel Prizes (in different fields) awarded to members of its faculty in the same year.

Urbana campus alumni are similarly recognized. Eleven University alumni have won Nobel Prizes.

Campus resources include the world's largest public university library, with millions of items circulated and hundreds of thousands of reference questions answered each year. Outstanding centers for performance and training in the arts include one of the nation's best performing arts facilities, the Krannert Center. World-class research facilities in Urbana include the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Beckman Institute, Institute for Genomic Biology and Siebel Center for Computer Science.

Of course, many people across the nation know Urbana-Champaign as the home of nine men's and 10 women's Big Ten sports teams. The campus Division of Intercollegiate Athletics is know for its integrity and its emphasis on scholarship among its athletes. Men's basketball and football are high profile sports, but Illinois also has won recent national and conference champions in such programs as gymnastics, tennis, and wrestling.