The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT is organized into five schools and one college, containing 32 academic departments and 53 interdisciplinary laboratories, centers and programs. As of 2006, MIT’s endowment stands at $8.4 billion, the sixth-largest in the United States.
Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of America, MIT’s mission and culture is guided by an emphasis on teaching and research grounded in practical applications of science and technology. MIT is one of two private land-grant universities as well as being a sea-grant and space-grant university.
As a federally funded research and development center in World War II, MIT scientists developed defense-related technologies that would later become integral to computers, radar, and inertial guidance. After the war, MIT continued to have a high profile throughout the Space Race and Cold War and its reputation expanded beyond its core competencies in science and engineering into the social sciences including economics, linguistics, and management. MIT graduates and faculty are also noted for their entrepreneurial spirit: a 1997 report by MIT claimed that the aggregated revenues produced by the 4,000 companies founded by MIT and its graduates would make it the twenty-fourth largest economy in the world.
Website: www.mit.edu