Just to clarify Duncan's post from a separate posts regarding this program; GIES has chosen not to participate in any rankings whatsoever at this time. It has nothing to do with how new the program is. Dean Brown believes the "metrics" aren't there to accurately reflect how groundbreaking this program is and has commented on this in several Town Halls and with his interview on the iMBA with the Poets and Quants magazine. 

Gies is a name, not an acronym.

I wouldn't say that the students are not up to scratch. Most have at least 10 years of work experience in highly desirable positions (e.g. SVP of a Hollywood studio). However, unlike other programs for instance, students do not need to complete a pre-MBA primer or anything like that. Thus, for those that have not dealt with stats since high school, there is a lot of valuable class time that must go into teaching the basics again. I am in Business Stats right now and it is sometimes painful in having to listen to students ask questions about the most basic things time after time during live lectures.  
With that said, they have a lot of extracurricular initiatives that are not found in other online MBA programs at this price point.  However, I do hope that they don't go "too big". It used to be a ~20% acceptance rate, now its more than double. The program is now profitable at a scale of 3000 students.  

Per Dean Brown, Gies iMBA will not participate in global rankings but will publish their own data/statistics: 
https://giesbusiness.illinois.edu/news/2020/06/30/gies-offers-alternative-to-online-mba-rankings

I do hope that they keep the imsm selective. Their online MBA used to have an acceptance rate of about 30 percent or so if I'm not mistaken and now it's about 50 percent.