University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, or colloquially the University of Illinois or UIUC). It is a public land-grant research university located in the Illinois twin towns of Champaign and Urbana. This flagship school of the University of Illinois system was established in 1867 and is the oldest in the state. The University of Illinois, with approximately 56,000 undergraduate and graduate students, is one of the country's biggest public institutions in terms of enrolment, ranking third in the nation.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified as one of the "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity" institutions. It has also been designated as a "Public Ivy" institution by Howard and Matthew Greene in their book The Public Ivies: America's Flagship Public Universities (2001). During the 2019 fiscal year, Illinois researchers spent a total of $652 million on research. The campus library system, second only to Harvard University in terms of holdings, is the second-largest university library system in the United States. Furthermore, the institution is home to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), which houses the world's fastest supercomputer on a college or university campus.

Illinois is home to 16 colleges and universities that provide more than 150 undergraduate and more than 100 graduate programmes in various fields of study. There are 651 buildings on 6,370 acres (2,578 hectares) of land within the institution, and the university's yearly operational budget in 2016 exceeded $2 billion. It also runs a Research Park, which houses innovation labs for over 90 start-up businesses and major organisations, including Abbott, AbbVie (formerly Caterpillar), Capital One (formerly Dow), State Farm (formerly Yahoo), and Yahoo (formerly AOL).