University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a public land-grant research university. It was chartered in 1867 as Illinois Industrial University, opened in 1868 and took the name University of Illinois in 1885. The campus spans the twin cities of Urbana and Champaign in east-central Illinois, about 135 miles south of Chicago. It is the flagship of the University of Illinois System, which also has campuses in Chicago and Springfield.

The university has more than a dozen colleges and schools. They include the Grainger College of Engineering, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Gies College of Business, the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, the School of Information Sciences and the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, an engineering-based medical school founded in 2015. It is known for computer science, engineering, physics, accountancy and library and information science. Major research units include the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where the Mosaic browser was built in 1993, the Beckman Institute and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.

Illinois enrolls about 59,000 students, and roughly 20,000 of them are graduate and professional students, including large online master's cohorts. More than 10,000 international students attend, from over 100 countries. Physicist John Bardeen, the only person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice, taught here. Alumni include Nobel laureate Jack Kilby, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and film director Ang Lee.

The Graduate College oversees PhD and research master's programs. Professional degrees such as the Master of Computer Science and the iMBA are offered both on campus and online. Doctoral students are usually funded through research and teaching assistantships and fellowships. The academic year runs on semesters. Champaign-Urbana is a mid-sized metropolitan area, and the Research Park at the south edge of campus hosts corporate research offices that hire graduate students.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign lists 239 graduate programs across 54 subjects: 131 master's programs and 103 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in education, biology and health & medical sciences. University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign holds rank 41 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.