@hungryteenager, yeah, I would say that is a poor assumption for a school that is mostly known for STEM like UIUC. If a school is top 10 in pretty much every engineering field but not considered top 10 in any humanities field, you wouldn’t expect demand for its humanities majors to be equal to the demand for its engineering majors.
Granted, CompE almost certainly doesn’t have as low an acceptance rate as CS in Engineering at UIUC (which is about 20% now), but the overall Engineering acceptance rate for UIUC is below 40% now, if I remember correctly.
You can’t really compare UIUC to UT anyway because you have no idea what their applicant pools are. One is in the South and one is in the cold Midwest. Austin, Texas IMO is definitely more desirable that being in timbuktu Illinois (I live in a Chicago burb and there is absolutely nothing in Champaign other than a fantastic university and a lot of cold weather).
Also, while I agree that females have an advantage in Engineering as we hear plenty about how the %'s of women are increasing, I actually disagree that white male’s are discriminated against. There are so many top Asian and Indian students that I think they’ve become the majority and the white male is becoming the minority. We recently took a visit to UIUC and in a group of 30 students standing outside a classroom in one of the Engineering buildings, there was only one white male! That’s no exaggeration.
Further, Texas in general is a bitch to get into and yes, they take a ton of Texans leaving not as many in-state spots as the rest of us would like. Their in-state tuition (unlike UIUC) is also a big draw to Texans, so that also makes it more difficult for outsiders to get in. And finally, like UIUC they may also have a low % of internationals they accept, which again goes to my point about location. They may have a much larger international applicant pool than UIUC (Texas also borders Mexico and may get a lot of hispanics as well), so while your stats may be amazing, comparing UT and UIUC is not necessarily comparing apples to apples.
Further, either school is phenomenal and I believe UIUC is actually ranked slightly higher than Texas for Computer Engineering (although 1 or 2 slots doesn’t make much of a difference anyway), so instead of focusing on the negatives of not getting into UT, I would instead focus on the amazing opportunity you have been given at UIUC. People would kill to have a spot in their Engineering program, so it is definitely not anything to sneeze about!!