I “like” Engineering at Illinois on Facebook. There’s a new post saying that they received 11,000+ applications this year. I guess that means applications can’t be down too much this year due to taking away EA?!
The extra 35 days to apply helped. The number is actually pretty close to 12,000 according to the Dean of the College speaking at the SITE event today. I guess hopes for an easier admission cycle this year should be abandoned.
I will add that he confirmed the most popular first choice major was CS once again, 3,000 apps roughly. That is a big number, considering these are just the ENG CS apps. Still mum on yield expectation, so no telling how many they need to accept to get to the 200ish enrolled number, but admit rate will be another low…
I was wondering how many of those were CS. I dropped my son off today. I haven’t gotten to talk to him about anything yet.
He didn’t give any other numbers, except to say that Bio-eng only has room for about 75 new students a year, and is extremely selective as a result. These were answers to questions; his talk in general had nothing to do with admissions.
His presentation was fantastic. There is so much going on there, and planned for the near future, that it almost made me want to go back to school. What an amazing place to be an engineering student.
Oh, and if I hear from my son without prodding I will be shocked. Think he was pretty happy to be rid of me 
@YZamyatin Do we know how many Engineering applications were in last year? How many CS?
@YZamyatin Wow… Any idea on Math & CS? I’m 100% sure I’m not getting into normal CS so…
@longwait20
Short answer, no we don’t know exactly.
Long answer…
Last year it was 10k+ apps for ENG, I don’t remember the exact number. It was up a lot last year too, like 20%+ from the previous year.
Apps per major is much harder to come by. I got a different number from admissions vs the CS department, and frankly, the admissions office was very dodgy. You would think I was calling the White House asking for launch codes. This was almost a year ago so my memory is sketchy too.
Furthermore, everyone seems to count apps differently. If I apply to CS in ENG, with CS+X in LAS as my second choice, and I am rejected from CS in ENG, does that count as one or two CS apps?
My best guess is that apps are up 10-20% in CS from last year, based on Dean Cangellaris’ comments, which were obviously just a ballpark number (3k apps for CS in ENG for this year), so I wouldn’t draw too firm a conclusion.
@emshadez
No idea, most rejected CS in ENG applicants will have CS+X as second choice though. That’s a lot of applicants, independent of how many 1st choice applicants there are.
Good luck
Hey guys, this is probably just to make me feel better, but here’s some numbers I came up with:
Suppose the best case scenario has happened for us CS applicants: Dean Cangellari counted both CS in ENG apps and CS+X in LAS apps in the total number of CS apps, regardless if only one person is tied to two CS apps (CS in ENG as first choice and CS+X in LAS as second). Assuming a lot of CS applicants did in fact apply to CS twice, let’s say 30%, then the real number of people applying is only 70% of ~3,000 apps, or 2,100. Now, we know the yield is relatively low at UIUC, and although I’m unsure of the specifics for CS, we’ll say 40% of those admitted actually enroll. The CS department has ~300 spots to fill (I think it’s somewhere in the high 200s or extremely low 300s). They know they need 300 matriculates, but this is only 40% of those admitted, so the actual number they accept is ~750.
From these numbers, 750 admits out of 2,100 applicants gives an acceptance rate of about 35%.
If I incorrectly assumed that Dean Cangellari counted some CS apps twice, then there are approximately 750 admits out of 3,000 applicants, which gives an acceptance rate of exactly 25%.
This is all probably so, so wrong—remember the dangers of extrapolation, folks! And good luck to all of you!
My son has several friends waiting for UIUC results, all with stellar stats. Interesting to find out how they do. One thing we have heard from students and parents is that UIUC has great merit aid for top stats.
Hmm you will have to wait and see. My friends son got zero for computer science at UIUC and he was valedictorian with straight As and a 35 ACT. She was shocked her son got zero merit aid. He did get 6,000 financial aid but that is because she is a widow and it is based on her income. Just have to wait and see
Record year for engineers? Does this mean that there is some hope for the terrible state of disrepair our bridges and roads are in?
Merit aid at Illinois (and everywhere I suppose) is an enrollment incentive, nothing more. If any department at Illinois doesn’t need to offer merit money to entice strong applicants to enroll, it’s CS.
With that said, there is University money and department money allocated to incoming freshman, so some students do get merit aid. I would guess a department like CS uses merit aid differently than others (more to sculpt demographics than to simply attract high stats), but just guessing.
YZamyatin - agree with your assessment.
With CS, it seems there is considerable overlap in the set of schools the students apply to. Like someone mentioned in CC, if you want a good education in CS/engineering you don’t apply to Ivies for the sake of Ivies, you apply to the best CS schools. There is the obvious selection bias of the CS applicants being very strong academically and test score wise and there are quite a few of them. Each of the top schools can get - on average - exactly who they want - if not this person, then the next on the list is likely as good. Their incentive is likely more on creating diversity in every possible way.
Given the numbers posted here and past year’s data, I would be surprised if they accept any more than 350 out of the 3000 applicants, possibly fewer. As an OOS parent, that reality check is helpful.
@GuidoStroustup
Apparently CS apps are indeed a record, up about 25% from last year.
Roughly 3300 total CS apps, including CS+X. But expectation of 400+ enrolled, according to posting on reddit by a CS prof.
I guess they are filling up all those CS+X programs. I know the department added staff recently, but that is a huge increase in department size from just a few years ago.
@YZamyatin, UIUC may finally be matching their profs teaching loads and classroom sizes to the demand for CS. For a while, a constraining factor was (for instance) the size of the lecture hall that Algorithms was taught in and the number of TA’s assigned to that class. Also, since you just need to meet a certain GPA to declare for CS+math and CS+stats and UIUC engineering has guaranteed transfer relationships with various IL CC’s (and CS likely was loathe to turn away transfers with high GPA’s from CC’s or elsewhere in Engineering), they kept the freshmen intake lower than they could have to work through the glut.
BTW, note that the CS+X majors place less of a load on the CS faculty since all of them take more or less the same 8-11 or so “core” CS classes with limited electives (in fact, I think only CS+math and CS+stats get electives). So so long as you have enough TA’s (and not only PhD’s but masters students and even upper-level undergrads can and are willing to TA for a discount on tuition), you can ramp those programs up much more easily. By contrast, a CS in Engineering major takes almost twice as many CS classes.
BTW, I should state that the CS+X majors are only required to take 8-11 CS classes. No doubt that they can take more and I’m sure that not all of the upper-level CS electives fill up, but growing the CS+X majors is the easiest way for UIUC to allow more kids to pick up a CS major, the CS in Engineering kids to take all the electives that they want, and not have to grow the faculty much, and make better use of faculty resources (note that the new X majors: anthropology, astronomy, chemistry, and linguistics, are all majors that currently graduate something like 30-60 kids a year, so they likely have plenty of excess capacity).
Still, the growth is incremental. 400+ total is probably about 250-275 CS in Engineering, around 75 CS+Math, and 20-25 each in the other 5 CS+X majors.
Actually, that might be an overstatement of CS in Engineering.
Seems that UIUC is definitely using the draw of its CS major to fill up underutilized majors in LAS, however. So expect the next CS+X majors to be atmosphere/earth/environment/geology/geography, philosophy, maybe physics, maybe sociology.
I’m sure UIUC would combine Classics and CompLit with CS if it could. You can count the number of CompLit majors at UIUC on one hand. Not many more in Classics.
CS+Physics is nice i guess