The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded in 1861 in Boston and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1916. It admitted its first students in 1865, four years after its founding charter was approved. MIT describes itself as independent, coeducational and privately endowed. Its campus covers 168 acres.
Teaching and research are organised in five schools (Architecture and Planning; Engineering; Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; the MIT Sloan School of Management; and Science) and the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. MIT reported 11,816 students in October 2025: 4,561 undergraduates and 7,255 graduate students. It counted 3,437 international students in degree programmes in 2025/26. The president is Sally Kornbluth, in office since 2023.