Is Harvard or UIUC harder to get into overall?

The key difference is that Harvard is extraordinarily selective for virtually every applicant, while UIUC’s difficulty changes sharply by college and major. UIUC can be highly competitive in areas such as computer science and engineering, but its overall applicant pool and admission process are less uniformly selective than Harvard’s. Harvard evaluates applicants through a broadly holistic process in which exceptional academics are expected but rarely sufficient on their own.

At UIUC, your intended major matters much more in the initial admission decision. Applicants to its most in-demand programs face a much tougher bar than applicants to less capacity-constrained majors, and changing into a popular program later may not be easy. That variation is why an applicant might find UIUC very difficult for one program yet more attainable for another.

For overall admission difficulty, Harvard is harder to get into. UIUC is still a selective public university, particularly for certain majors, but Harvard remains the more difficult admission outcome when you are comparing the institutions as a whole.