Two years after University of Illinois officials killed a proposal to enroll fewer in-state students at their flagship campus, the percentage of freshmen from Illinois in this fall’s class has dropped to less than 83 percent, the lowest in at least a decade, the Tribune has learned.
Intense public outcry forced administrators at the Urbana-Champaign campus to backtrack in 2006 from a plan to decrease in-state undergraduate enrollment from 90 percent to 85 percent. But this fall only about 87 percent of the campus’ 31,181 undergraduates are from Illinois.