<p>especially in football and men’s basketball, @simba9! </p>
<p>Academically. it remains a top-notch research university. </p>
<p>@glasssculpture, OOS students come to UIUC for business (especially accounting) as well.</p>
<p>As for UMich, if you look at alumni achievements, it’s a near-Ivy ( <a href=“Ivy-equivalents - #31 by PurpleTitan - College Search & Selection - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1682986-ivy-equivalents-p3.html</a>), which would place it in the 16th-22nd range among research universities.</p>
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<p>That’s kinda’ my point. Michigan is living off its past glories.</p>
<p>@simba9: Some of those alumni achievements are those gained by recent alums (like prestigious student awards, PhDs, and elite professional school placement). I kind of doubt that the quality of the UMich student body has dropped off over the past 5-10 years considering that it is harder now than ever to get in there (and the faculty are as highly rated as ever).</p>
<p>Note that the recent USNews Global Universities ranking has UMich at 14th. Following your logic, UMich has suddenly made a massive jump up in quality.</p>
<p>Michigan has a 33.3% admit rate. That’s pretty high.</p>
<p>North Carolina has a 26.7% admit rate. Berkeley has a 17.71% admit rate. UCLA has a 20.43% admit rate. Even the lowly University of Southern California has less than a 20% admit rate.</p>
<p>@simba9 (and @rjkofnovi, since you’ll enjoy this):</p>
<p>Actually, UNC has a 29% admit rate (<a href=“Our Newest Class - Undergraduate Admissions”>http://admissions.unc.edu/apply/class-profile/</a>) and even that is rather misleading. By NC law, UNC’s freshman class has to be at least 85% NC residents. Thus NC residents enjoy a 53% admit rate while OOS applicants have only an 18% admit rate. Yet NC residents, who didn’t have to pass all that high of a hurdle to get in to UNC, make up the vast majority of the student body there. So just how impressive is that student body on average?</p>
<p>Also, even with its higher admit rate, UMich turns out a higher percentage of high-achieving alums than either UNC or USC, so what does that tell you about the quality of the education at UMich vs. UNC or USC?</p>
<p>This is also why I believe more in metrics that rank a school by alumni achievements rather than metrics like admit rates that can be gamed and don’t actually reflect any positive impact that a school may have on its students.</p>
<p>I would put Illinois tied with Wisconsin for third best in the Big 10 academically, behind Northwestern and Michigan.</p>
<p>PurpleTitan. You also forgot to mention how ridiculously easy it is for California residents to apply to multiple UC universities by simply checking off which ones they’d like to attend on their application. California has close to 40,000,000 residents in it now. </p>
<p>Only If had FinAid for internationals, would have been my first choice!</p>
<p>@rjkofnovi, well neither UNC or USC are UC’s, so I didn’t bring that up.</p>
<p>Still, the fact that Cal and UCLA have very similar admit rates yet Cal has a measurably higher proportion of high-achieving alums should indicate that admit rate is a poor measure to rank a school by.</p>
<p>Any opinion on University of Iowa?</p>
<p>We live currently in Illinois but we are a migrant corporate executive family so we have not particular loyalty towards UIUC. I think that UIUC is a great college if you are studying engineering, computer science or HR. For liberal arts or most other majors it is really just another big state school and nothing special in a town in the middle of the plains. </p>
<p>the lowly university of southern california? lol?</p>
<p>@newman22: UIowa is renown for its writing program. Little else comes to mind.</p>
“Lowly university of Southern California”… What the heck? I want to see you get in that “lowly university” that’s actually a highly regarded need-blind private school. Come back and talk then. Don’t degrade other people’s dream universities whilst praising yours.
I am in Maryland and think very highly of the UIUC. (Take a peak at the sky high middle 50% SAT scores for recently admitted classes).
With regard to the discussion on tiers for large public universities, I would put the University of Maryland in the tier just below the top tier (Mich, Cal, UCLA, UVA). UMD is the 21st ranked public university, and has numerous programs ranked in the top 20 (and top 10), including several of its engineering and science programs. It also has a very successful alumni base.