About University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
A talented and highly respected faculty is the university’s most significant resource. Many are recognized for exceptional scholarship with memberships in such organizations as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering. Our faculty have been awarded Nobel Prizes (13), Pulitzer Prizes, McArthur Genius Awards, and the Fields Medal in Mathematics. The success of our faculty is matched by that of our alumni: 11 are Nobel laureates and another 18 have won Pulitzer Prizes.
Academic resources on campus are among the finest in the world. The University Library is one of the largest public university collections in the world with 13 million volumes in its 37 unit libraries. Annually, 53,000,000 people visit its online catalog. Students have access to thousands of computer terminals in classrooms, residence halls, and campus libraries for use in classroom instruction, study, and research.
Students and scholars find the university an ideal place to conduct research. The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology is a model for interdisciplinary research, where eighteen research groups from sixteen university departments work within and across three broadly defined themes: biological intelligence, human-computer intelligent interaction, and molecular and electronic nanostructures. The university is also home to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
The university has a fundamental commitment to undergraduate education. More than 32,000 undergraduate students are enrolled in nine undergraduate divisions, which together offer some 5,000 courses in more than 150 fields of study. Undergraduate admission is highly selective. In the 2001 freshman class, students in the middle 50% had ACT scores between 25 and 30 and ranked between the 83rd and 96th percentiles of their high school graduating classes. The university enrolls more than 12,000 graduate and professional students in more than 100 disciplines. It is among the top five universities in number of earned doctorates awarded annually in the United States.
The university has a long history of global engagement, and is consistently placed among the 30 best universities overall—and the top five in engineering/technology and computer science—in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities. With just over 10,000 international students enrolled on campus, the campus is home to more international students than any other public university in the United States.