University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

In brief

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign began as the Illinois Industrial University in Urbana. Its first president, John Milton Gregory, insisted on a full range of liberal arts and science courses rather than vocational training alone. By our measure of academic influence, it ranks #43 in the United States and #121 in the world. It admitted 42.4% of applicants for fall 2024; admitted students had a median SAT score of 1415 and a median ACT score of 32.

It is the flagship of the University of Illinois System and home to the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. It was there that John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Schrieffer developed the BCS theory of superconductivity.

Where Illinois’s influence is strongest

Illinois’s influence is concentrated in computer science, mathematics, physics, and engineering. Its strongest broad fields, by US rank in our data, are:

• Computer science: #23 in the US (#55 in the world)
• Mathematics: #27
• Physics: #28
• Engineering: #33
• Chemistry: #35

Its highest-ranked specialties in our data are:

• #4 in the US: construction engineering
• #7: cybernetics
• #9: early childhood education
• #11: educational psychology

How we measure influence: these ranks come from the citations and recognition earned by a school’s faculty and alumni in each discipline, not from surveys or admissions statistics. See our methodology.

Notable people

Some 30 Nobel laureates are connected with Illinois, among them the physicists John Bardeen and Anthony Leggett, the chemist Elias Corey, the medical physicist Rosalyn Yalow, and the economist Franco Modigliani. Illinois-connected figures also include the novelist Richard Powers, the film critic Roger Ebert, the composer George Crumb, the software entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and YouTube’s co-founders Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. Our full lists of Illinois’s most influential alumni and faculty appear below.

Frequently asked questions

Is Illinois hard to get into? Moderately. It admitted 42.4% of applicants for fall 2024; the middle half of admitted students scored 650–740 on the SAT reading section and 660–780 on math.

What does Illinois cost after financial aid? Tuition is $16,354 for Illinois residents and $36,706 for out-of-state students in 2025–26. The average net price for aided students with family incomes of $48,000–$75,000 was $5,924 in 2024–25; it ranged from about $871 for incomes below $30,000 to $29,998 for incomes above $110,000.

How do Illinois graduates do? 86.3% of students who started in 2019 graduated within six years, and 95% of first-year students return for a second year. Ten years after starting college, former students had median earnings of $87,599.

What is Illinois best known for academically? By our influence data: computer science, mathematics, physics, and engineering, plus specialties such as construction engineering, where it ranks in the US top five.