V recent ranking of national universities conducted by US News & World Report, the University of Illinois rose from last year’s 41st place to 35th place today.

The Grainger College of Engineering and the Gies College of Business received high rankings in the report. Engineering was ranked 5th in the best undergraduate engineering programs. Several programs in entrepreneurship were ranked in the top 10, with accounting in second and insurance in eighth.

The university is ranked 12th best public school, along with the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Gisselle de la Cruz, junior in LAS, explains that she was drawn to apply because of the university’s consistently high ranking among top public schools.

“One of the reasons I chose to attend UI is because they teach their students how to be successful in any field,” de la Cruz said.

May, US News and World Report announced that they would change their school ranking methodology to place more emphasis on student achievement and remove “alumni giving, college with a grad degree, class size and high school standing” as ranking criteria.

The administration expressed positive feedback about the changes in the ranking indicators.

According to a statement from the chancellor’s office, “It is good to see some of these companies adjusting their rankings to give more weight to factors that speak to the university’s efforts in areas related to educational access, affordability and achievement.”

The statement added that the presence of many highly ranked programs reflects the university’s goals of “delivering excellence at scale.”

The chancellor said in a statement that “the ranking that is always most important to us is the one our students achieve when they have chosen Illinois as their top choice for their higher education.”

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