Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. William Barton Rogers founded it in 1861, and classes began in Boston in 1865. It moved to its current campus of about 168 acres along the Charles River in 1916. MIT is a land-grant, sea-grant and space-grant institution, and its founding model was built on laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering.

MIT is organized into five schools: Architecture and Planning, Engineering, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, the Sloan School of Management, and Science. The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing was added in 2019. It is known across engineering, physics, mathematics, economics, computer science and linguistics. Major research units include the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the Media Lab, the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, and Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington. MIT is also closely tied to the Broad Institute and the Whitehead Institute.

MIT enrolls about 11,800 students, and roughly 60 percent of them are graduate students. International students come from more than 130 countries and make up a larger share of the graduate population than of undergraduates. About 100 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with MIT as faculty, researchers or alumni. Alumni include physicist Richard Feynman, astronaut Buzz Aldrin and former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Graduate degrees include the PhD, the SM, the MEng for MIT's own undergraduates, and the MBA and executive programs at Sloan. Doctoral students in science and engineering are typically fully supported through research assistantships and fellowships. Most first join a faculty research group, and many rotate through labs before choosing one. The calendar has fall and spring semesters with a January Independent Activities Period. Kendall Square, next to campus, is one of the densest biotechnology and technology districts in the country.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology lists 105 graduate programs across 37 subjects: 42 master's programs and 57 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in earth & environmental sciences, business & management and civil engineering. Massachusetts Institute of Technology holds rank 3 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.