The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a public research and land-grant university, and it's best-known for its strong engineering and computer science programs.
UIUC is a huge school, with over 35,000 undergraduate and 20,000 graduate students. The school offers more than 150 majors, including bioengineering, community health, media and cinema studies, and special education. Students also have access to the country's second-largest university library system. (Only Harvard's is larger.)
Its faculty includes Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel Prize winners and Guggenheim Fellows, so students can be confident they're learning from the best in their fields.
All that knowledge doesn't stamp out some old-fashioned superstition, though. As per campus tradition, generations of students have rubbed the nose on a campus bust of Abraham Lincoln for good luck before exams, and people who kiss at the Eternal Flame landmark are said to enjoy eternal bliss.
The University of Illinois System's flagship campus scores highly on Money's measures of affordability, with an estimated net price of a degree of roughly $113,000 (not including state and federal aid) for in-state students. While the vast majority of students are from Illinois, UIUC has one of the largest populations of international students of any public university, with nearly 20% of the student body hailing from outside the U.S.
Next time you're on campus, make sure to check out a performance by the Marching Illini, which composer John Philip Sousa once declared "the world's greatest college band.”
