Circa 1910 Mass.Tech. cigarettes silk.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the most prestigious and highly ranked academic institutions in the world.

MIT enrolled 4,602 undergraduates and 6,972 graduate students in 2018–2019.[381] Undergraduate and graduate students came from all 50 US states as well as from 115 foreign countries.[382]

MIT received 33,240 applications for admission to the undergraduate Class of 2025: it admitted 1,365 (4.1 percent).[383] In 2019, 29,114 applications were received for graduate and advanced degree programs across all departments; 3,670 were admitted (12.6 percent) and 2,312 enrolled (63 percent).[384]

Undergraduate tuition and fees for 2019-2020 was $53,790 for nine months. 59% of students were awarded a need-based MIT scholarship. Graduate tuition and fees for 2019-2020 was also $53,790 for nine months, and summer tuition was $17,800. Financial support for graduate students are provided in large part by individual departments. They include fellowships, traineeships, teaching and research assistantships, and loans.[385] The annual increase in expenses had led to a student tradition (dating back to the 1960s) of tongue-in-cheek "tuition riots".[386]

MIT has been nominally co-educational since admitting Ellen Swallow Richards in 1870. Richards also became the first female member of MIT's faculty, specializing in sanitary chemistry.[387][388] Female students remained a small minority prior to the completion of the first wing of a women's dormitory, McCormick Hall, in 1963.[389][390][391] Between 1993 and 2009 the proportion of women rose from 34 percent to 45 percent of undergraduates and from 20 percent to 31 percent of graduate students.[185][392] As of 2009, women outnumbered men in Biology, Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Architecture, Urban Planning, and Biological Engineering.

Many of MIT's over 120,000 alumni have achieved considerable success in scientific research, public service, education, and business. As of October 2020, 41 MIT alumni have won Nobel Prizes, 48 have been selected as Rhodes Scholars,[403] 61 have been selected as Marshall Scholars,[404] and 3 have been selected as Mitchell Scholars.[405]

Alumni in United States politics and public service include former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, former MA-1 Representative John Olver, former CA-13 Representative Pete Stark, Representative Thomas Massie, Senator Alex Padilla, former National Economic Council chairman Lawrence H. Summers,[406] and former Council of Economic Advisers chairman Christina Romer. MIT alumni in international politics include Foreign Affairs Minister of Iran Ali Akbar Salehi, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President of Colombia Virgilio Barco Vargas, President of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India Raghuram Rajan, former British Foreign Minister David Miliband, former Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, former Minister of Education and Culture of The Republic of Indonesia Yahya Muhaimin, former Jordanian Minister of Education, Higher Education and Scientific Research and former Jordanian Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Khaled Toukan. Alumni in sports have included Olympic fencing champion Johan Harmenberg. MIT alumni founded or co-founded many notable companies, such as Intel, McDonnell Douglas, Texas Instruments, 3Com, Qualcomm, Bose, Raytheon, Apotex, Koch Industries, Rockwell International, Genentech, Dropbox, and Campbell Soup. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, "a survey of living MIT alumni found that they have formed 25,800 companies, employing more than three million people including about a quarter of the workforce of Silicon Valley. Those firms collectively generate global revenues of about $1.9 trillion (£1.2 trillion) a year". If the companies founded by MIT alumni were a country, they would have the 11th-highest GDP of any country in the world.[407][408][409]

MIT alumni have led prominent institutions of higher education, including the University of California system, Harvard University, the New York Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Carnegie Mellon University, Tufts University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, Tel Aviv University, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Purdue University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, KAIST, and Quaid-e-Azam University. Berklee College of Music, the largest independent college of contemporary music in the world, was founded and led by MIT alumnus Lawrence Berk for more than three decades.

More than one third of the United States' crewed spaceflights have included MIT-educated astronauts, a contribution exceeding that of any university excluding the United States service academies.[410] Of the 12 people who have set foot on the Moon as of 2019, four graduated from MIT (among them Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin). Alumnus and former faculty member Qian Xuesen led the Chinese nuclear-weapons program and became instrumental in Chinese rocket-program.[411]

Noted alumni in non-scientific fields include author Hugh Lofting,[412] sculptor Daniel Chester French, guitarist Tom Scholz of the band Boston, the British BBC and ITN correspondent and political advisor David Walter, The New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, The Bell Curve author Charles Murray, United States Supreme Court building architect Cass Gilbert,[413]Pritzker Prize-winning architects I.M. Pei and Gordon Bunshaft.