The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign was first established in 1868, and is considered one of the original units of the school. The Grainger College of Engineering is consistently ranked one of the best engineering colleges in the US and in the world.

Every engineering program in the college is ranked among the best in the US and in the world. Engineering at Illinois is the most cited institution in engineering worldwide, with the highest total citations to research papers. The department has historically spearheaded worldwide innovation in technology. Inventions such as the transistor, the integrated circuit and the LED, ubiquitous in virtually all modern electronic systems, stemmed from professors or alumni of the College of Engineering. Illinois engineers have largely contributed to the proliferation and usability of the Internet. Most notably, engineering alumni produced the internet broadband (DSL), the first web browsers (Mosaic and Netscape) and the "programming language of the web" (JavaScript). The engineering school has produced founders of countless modern tech giants such as Oracle, Tesla, YouTube, Mozilla, AMD, PayPal, Yelp, Malwarebytes and Optimizely.