Undergraduate students with a combined family income below US$200,000 will be able to attend MIT tuition-free from September 2025, thanks to newly expanded financial aid. Eighty percent of U.S. households meet this income threshold.
For the 50 percent of American families with a combined family income below US$100,000, parents can expect to pay nothing at all toward the full cost of their students’ MIT education, which includes tuition as well as housing, dining, fees, and an allowance for books and personal expenses.
This $100,000 threshold is up from US$75,000 this year, while next year’s US$200,000 threshold for tuition-free attendance will increase from its current level of $140,000.
These new steps to enhance MIT’s affordability for students and families are the latest in a long history of efforts by the Institute to free up more resources to make an MIT education as affordable and accessible as possible.
“MIT’s distinctive model of education — intense, demanding, and rooted in science and engineering — has profound practical value to our students and to society,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth says.
“The cost of college is a real concern for families across the board,” Kornbluth adds, “and we’re determined to make this transformative educational experience available to the most talented students, whatever their financial circumstances. So, to every student out there who dreams of coming to MIT: Don’t let concerns about cost stand in your way.”
In September 2024, The Wall Street Journal released fresh data looking at what U.S. colleges had the most outsized impact on a graduates’ future earning potential. MIT ranked fourth overall in terms of a graduates’ median salary ten years after enrolment.
Across the board, women remain under recognised in STEM higher education and careers. Globally, 35 per cent of STEM students in higher education are women, with this figure dropping off slightly when they enter the workforce to comprise about 28 to 30 per cent of STEM jobs.
Tech executives including former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and former COO of Facebook (now Meta) Sheryl Sandberg have been outspoken supporters of encouraging young girls to pursue STEM careers, and for employers to improve workplace policies like paid parental leave to make continued success feasible once they arrive in industry.
Prominent women to graduate from MIT include Barbara Liskov, the first woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science in the U.S., Radia Perlman, known as the “mother of the Internet” for her invention of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), a key component of network infrastructure, and Daniel Feineberg, who has had a long career as a technical director at Pixar Animation Studios, working on iconic films such as Finding Nemo, WALL-E, and most recently, Brave.
First reported on MIT News