Almost no university publishes a real, official acceptance rate broken out by major -- our piece on why engineering and CS programs can be far harder to get into than the university's headline rate suggests covers several well-known schools that simply don't. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a genuine exception: its own admissions office publishes a first-choice-major admit rate for every college on campus, updated for the current cycle, on its own site.
The number: 7.4%, and what it's actually measured against
For the 2025 first-year cycle, UIUC's official admissions page puts the university's overall admit rate at 36.6%, and its first-choice-major admit rate -- the rate for students admitted into the specific major they applied for -- at 30.2%. Inside that figure, Computer Science sits at 7.4%, compared to 21.2% for the Grainger College of Engineering as a whole (the college CS sits inside) and 20.9% for the Gies College of Business. Every other college on campus admits its first-choice applicants at a meaningfully higher rate than CS -- ranging from Applied Health Sciences at 28.0% up to the Division of Exploratory Studies at 53.4%.
Why CS is roughly a third as selective as its own parent college
UIUC applicants apply directly to a specific college, and for the most competitive majors, effectively to that specific major -- there's no general "admitted to UIUC, pick your major later" pathway for CS the way there might be at a school with a true open-enrollment first year. Grainger Engineering's 21.2% overall rate is already an average across every engineering major it houses; Computer Science's applicant pool inside that college is large enough, and competitive enough, that the major-specific rate runs less than half of even the already-selective college-wide number. This is the same mechanism our broader piece on engineering admissions describes at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon: a fixed number of seats divided among a self-selected pool of applicants who all specifically want that major produces a real rate that has nothing to do with the university's, or even the college's, headline number.
What UIUC doesn't publish
UIUC's admit-rate page is genuinely rich, but it stops at admission -- it doesn't publish an average GPA or test score specifically for admitted CS students the way it publishes the admit-rate breakdown. Treat any specific GPA or SAT/ACT figure you see quoted for UIUC CS admission as an outside estimate, since it isn't part of what the university itself has released alongside this admit-rate table.
What this means for you
- 7.4% is the real, current, officially published number for CS -- use it, not an aggregator's estimate. UIUC's admissions office updates this table itself; check it directly for the current cycle rather than trusting a number you find quoted elsewhere.
- Don't use Grainger Engineering's 21.2% as a stand-in for CS's odds. CS is roughly a third as selective as its own parent college's overall rate -- the college number meaningfully understates how competitive CS specifically is.
- This is a first-choice-major rate, not a guarantee either way. A first-choice CS applicant who isn't admitted to CS specifically may still be offered a different major at UIUC -- the 7.4% describes admission into CS, not admission to the university overall.
- No official GPA or test-score figure exists for CS specifically -- don't anchor your expectations to a number UIUC hasn't actually published.