Is University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign or UC San Diego more selective?

UC San Diego is usually considered harder to get into overall than UIUC. In broad terms, UCSD draws a very large national and international applicant pool and tends to be more selective across the university, while UIUC’s selectivity varies a lot more by college and major. That variation is the main reason you may be seeing conflicting numbers.

If you are looking at the school as a whole, UC San Diego is the tougher admit. It gets a huge volume of applications, and as a UC campus it attracts many students who are also applying across the California public university system.

UIUC is a little trickier to summarize because the difficulty depends heavily on what you apply for. Some UIUC programs, especially engineering, computer science, and certain business pathways, can be extremely competitive and in some cases feel as hard as or harder than UCSD. Other UIUC majors are noticeably more accessible. Since UIUC admits by major more directly than UCSD does in many cases, the specific program matters a lot.

So for an overall comparison, think UC San Diego as more selective university-wide, but UIUC can absolutely be the tougher option for certain majors. If your list includes something like CS, engineering, or another capped program, the answer may depend less on the campus name and more on the department you are targeting.