The University released its Fall 2025 first-year enrollment report on Sept. 10. Presented as a series of tables and charts, the annual report visualizes data from the largest class in its 158-year history.

These infographics will dive further into the record-breaking student count.

Race/ethnicity

The largest self-reported ethnic groups for first-year students include white, Asian, and international. The University classifies international students as its own separate category.

The Daily Illini created a series of visualizations exploring the self-reported backgrounds of the freshman class, separated by college. 

Total enrollment

This year, 38,572 undergraduates are enrolled in the University. In 2015, the University had 32,878 undergraduates — 5,694 students fewer than today.

As for individual colleges, the majority of this year’s students are in LAS, followed by Engineering and the Division of Exploratory Studies, respectively. Social Work is the smallest college with 96 new students.

DES saw a consistent decline in freshman enrollment, from 1,757 students in 2015 to just 1,052 new students this year. 

The college with the highest percentage increase over the past 10 years is the School of Information Sciences. Its Fall 2025 freshman class is roughly five times larger than its inaugural 2020 class. 

However, one of the two undergraduate majors in the college — information sciences + data science — was not available for new freshmen until Fall 2023. 

Applicants and enrollees

The University accepted 36.59% of this year’s 83,045 applicants, and applications to the University have more than doubled since 2015.

In Fall 2022, the University began allowing students to apply through the Common App. It observed a 15,000-applicant increase that year, due in part to the change.

Big 10 acceptance rates 

The DI graphed the acceptance rates of all colleges within the Big Ten Academic Alliance. 

The data were gathered from Common Data Sets published annually by the universities. The Common Data Set is organized by the College Board, Peterson’s and U.S. News and World Report, and is used in U.S. News and World Report’s best colleges rankings. 

Northwestern University’s acceptance rate was the lowest of the 18 schools, and the University of Oregon’s was the highest. The University ranks as the fifth most competitive school overall. 

Not all Big Ten universities had published their Fall 2025 Common Data Sets as of this writing.

Residency

The 10th day report also detailed the residency status of the new student class. The class of 2029 is made up of 71.54% Illinois residents, 13.14% out-of-state nonresidents and 15.31% international students.

The series of graphics below shows the data separated by college. Some of these students hail from University partners, through collaborations like China’s Zhejiang University. The University has partnerships with at least 10 countries, according to the UI System website. 

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