<p>Anybody who thinks UIUC belongs in the CC Top Universities is silly and kidding themselves. First off, those rankings = DESIRABILITY. The reason why MIT, Ivies, Stanford, Northwestern, Chicago, etc are the top schools is because Wall Street banks recruit from them. Why? Because these schools are the most selective which shows that their students must have busted ass their entire lives to get in and are naturally bright. This means they will probably continue to bust ass and that combined with their natural brightness means they will be likely to succeed on Wall Street.</p>
<p>UIUC is not selective (outside engineering). In fact, if you just separated the schools and made it Champaign Institute of Technology, I’d be willing to bet “CIT” would make that top list. As for LAS (mathematics), UIUC is not that tough to get into.</p>
<p>As for the whole UVA/UNC thing, I never understood why those schools were top schools. I just know they are hard to get into for out of staters and I also don’t know much about their non-engineering disciplines, but I’d imagine they are superb in those.</p>