University of Illinois

Urbana

According to the school, the University of Illinois—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 2,000 Urbana-Champaign faculty members lead more than 40,000 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. Nearly 90 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 an average 1.1 million items circulated and 225,000 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.