Is UIUC a competitive university?
In what way?
for getting admission
Yes, especially for certain majors like CS and Engineering.
It depends. Overall, it’s not among the most selective colleges in terms of admissions. It’s definitely more competitive than any other Illinois public university and most public flagships nationwide.
And as momofasenior1 said, it varies a lot by major. Business, CS and many engineering majors are very selective for admissions, some like CS/BioE/Mechanical are supposedly close to 10% admissions to students with excellent ACT/SAT/GPA. Other majors are much less competitive and the overall acceptance rate is over 60%. By comparison, GA Tech, Michigan, Cal, UNC and Virginia are all under 30% overall.
To give you some idea of the differences in difficulty of admission to each college, you should review the Freshman Class Profile providing the unweighted GPA and test scores of the middle 50% ranges of those who enroll in each of the colleges https://admissions.illinois.edu/Apply/Freshman/profile, e.g. the 25% ACT range of the School of Social Work is 24 while for the engineering college it is 32.
Ranked #5 in CS (very competitive)
Institution Count Faculty
1 ► Carnegie Mellon University 17.3 151
2 ► Massachusetts Institute of Technology 12.1 85
3 ► Stanford University 11.2 58
4 ► University of California - Berkeley 11.0 84
5 ► Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 9.8 88
6 ► University of Michigan 9.6 77
7 ► Cornell University 8.9 76
8 ► University of Washington 7.8 58
9 ► Georgia Institute of Technology 7.0 80
10 ► University of California - San Diego 6.7 52