My IL daughter enrolled at UA because she preferred UA to UIUC. We could afford to send her wherever she wanted to go and she got into the business school at UIUC, so that wasn’t an issue. I don’t doubt that a lot of students choose UA for cost, and still others because they’re shut out of UIUC (particularly if they want business or engineering), but there are plenty of kids who do a comparison and Bama comes out on top. And I guess I shouldn’t refer to her as my IL daughter anymore, because she has every intention of staying in Alabama.