Illinois Institute of Technology

Illinois Institute of Technology is a private technical university in Chicago, Illinois. It traces to the Armour Institute of Technology, founded in 1890, which merged with the Lewis Institute in 1940 to form IIT. The main campus in Bronzeville on the South Side was planned in the 1940s by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who directed the architecture program. It is an urban institute of technology that houses architecture, engineering, law, and design together.

Units include Armour College of Engineering, the College of Architecture, the College of Science, the Institute of Design, the Stuart School of Business, Chicago-Kent College of Law, and the College of Computing. Graduate work is strongest in engineering, architecture, industrial design, computer science, and law. The Institute of Design, in the New Bauhaus lineage, and Chicago-Kent are the distinctive professional schools.

About 7,000 students enroll, with graduate students a large share and international students often more than 40 percent, from more than 80 countries. Faculty number a few hundred. Alumni include Martin Cooper, who led development of the first handheld cellular telephone, atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon, and generations of Chicago architects trained in the Mies tradition.

Illinois Tech is known for the M.S. and Ph.D. in engineering and science, the M.Arch., Institute of Design degrees, the J.D. at Chicago-Kent, and professional master's programs, many aimed at working students. Doctoral study is laboratory-centered; architecture and design use studios. The calendar is a semester system. Research assistantships and industry projects fund many STEM students. The Mies campus is a compact grid south of downtown, with law teaching in the Loop.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, Illinois Institute of Technology lists 136 graduate programs across 36 subjects: 99 master's programs and 23 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in computer science, law and biology.