Located 140 miles southeast of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the state's flagship public university. It is continually ranked as one of the best universities in the world. Originally chartered as a land-grant institution in 1867, the University currently provides graduate and undergraduate education in over 150 fields of study, conducts both theoretical and applied research, and provides public service to the state and the nation.

Faculty
The University employs nearly 2000 tenured faculty. Ten scientists have received the National Medal of Science, and more than sixty have received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award.

Students
The undergraduate population at UIUC hovers near 28,000 students. (In addition, there are nearly 9,000 graduate and professional students enrolled in more than 100 disciplines.) Admission is highly selective. In the 1999 freshman class, for example, students in the middle fifty percent had ACT scores between 25 and 29 and ranked between the 81st and 95^th percentiles of their high school graduating classes. Over 4000 courses are offered in more than 150 undergraduate fields.

Alumni
The University has had many distinguished alumni, among which ten have received Nobel Prizes for the United States and another sixteen, Pulitzer Prizes.

Budget and Facilities
The campus includes some 200 buildings on nearly 1,500 acres of land in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana (combined population: 100,000). It has an annual budget of about $1 billion, of which about 27 percent comes from state appropriations and the rest from tuition, gifts, grants, contracts and other revenues.