<p>At my current high school, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a school that is recognized as the place everyone gets accepted to. The acceptance rate is ridiculously high for our school (over 95%), so I never gave much thought to UIUC.</p>
<p>But when I was looking at colleges and the rankings for undergraduate engineering programs, I was extremely surprised to see that UIUC was ranked #5.</p>
<p>So my questions are:</p>
<p>Are these ranking systems for undergraduate programs trustworthy enough for me to choose my college-of-choice off of?</p>
<p>And if there are any UIUC graduates or attendees reading this, what did you like and dislike about the institution?</p>
<p>The rankings are good for some things. In particular, they are good at ranking schools into the general areas they belong. In other words, a school ranked 10 in US News is correctly identified as being quite a bit better than a school ranked, say, 60. However, they are not something you should look at to differentiate between a school ranked 9 and 10 or 45 and 50 or anything like that. In other words, they do a pretty good job of establishing tiers, but don’t read too much into them more than that.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that while the overall acceptance rate at UIUC is fairly high, this is in part because the state mandates a certain number of in-state admits to the flagship school each year and partially because the school as a whole is much easier to get into than engineering. The engineering school is absolutely top notch… world-renowned.</p>
<p>So anyway, what did I like? I liked just about everything to be honest. I enjoyed my studies in mechanical engineering and thought I had absolutely every opportunity that I could have wanted (e.g. undergraduate research). I enjoyed my social life. Really the only things I didn’t like were that there were an awful lot of frats, the winters are that horrible combination of wind and cold that just utterly sucks if you walk everywhere, and the Blind Pig was just a little too far to walk for a beer.</p>
<p>State universities are often not as highly selective at admissions due to their large size. However, they may be more selective for some majors or divisions, or “hard” majors may experience high attrition rate as students decide to switch into “easy” majors.</p>
<p>The higher admission rate is a general admission rate, not engineering or business. These two colleges in particular are very picky with whom they admit and expect very high quality applicants. </p>
<p>I am a student now in Aerospace eng and I really enjoy it! Lots of opportunities and great faculty for the most part.it can be quite rigorous at times and most classes you take are theoretical verses hands on or applied, but they are great nonetheless!</p>
<p>STEM at UIUC is elite. Simple as that. It definitely deserves to be up there with Berkley, Stanford, CMU, etc. And you could definitely recognize the split between the STEM students and everyone else. I’m currently part of the CS program, and the energy is electric. You could tell everyone loves what they do. I really don’t see what I could possibly be missing vs. going somewhere like MIT for my undergrad. Super interesting classes, awesome clubs, famous faculty.</p>
<p>The engineering rankings are based on peer assessment. They basically asked school administrators which 10 colleges they believed were the best for engineering. UIUC doesn’t have nearly as much recognition as the likes of MIT, Stanford, Caltech, and Berkeley so it’s pretty incredible that they are ranked as high as it is.</p>
<p>If you looked at the rankings of each of UIUC’s engineering programs, you’d understand why it’s ranked 5th overall:</p>