A view from 02139

Dear MIT graduates and friends,

This week, when Professors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson PhD ’89 received the 2024 Economics Nobel, institutional pride and respect for their scholarship radiated from everybody you spoke to here – a shared sense of how lucky we are to be part of this community.

I found this very heartening, and very MIT, which made me think that you might like to get a sense of what I see here up close every day: Though it might be hard to discern from a year’s worth of headlines about higher education, MIT is still very much its intense and unusual self – an endless source of inspiring talent, discoveries and ideas.

Whether you measure that in the award-winning breakthroughs of our faculty or the intellectual firepower of our students, MIT, as always, puts a premium on excellence, curiosity and rigor. We emphasize the kind of self-improvement and high achievement that come through concerted hard work – and the kind of mutual support and collaborative problem solving that shape everything from how our students do their psets to how we’re tackling MIT-hard problems in fields from generative AI to the work of the future to climate change. And while 97% of the bachelor’s degrees we award are in STEM fields, we are equally proud to be home to management, humanities, arts, social science and architecture programs that rank among the finest in the world.

A transformative education

Whenever I connect with MIT’s community of alumni and friends – whether at reunions or on my Presidential Welcome Tour – our graduates regularly tell me that, from the creative drive of their classmates to the demands of our curriculum, their MIT experience was transformative – and that’s still true. We believe in potential over pedigree – MIT stands firm in its longstanding rejection of legacy admissions – and 20% of our incoming undergraduates are first-generation college students. For decades, MIT has had the benefit of an increasingly diverse student body – which is why, in the face of this year’s recent concerning setbacks, we’re engaging actively with alumni and others to make sure we do everything we can within the law to regain such diversity in the future. We’re privileged to admit and teach incredible young people, and – thanks to generations of generosity from graduates and friends – we’re able to make an MIT education affordable for them: The Institute is one of just nine US schools with need-blind undergraduate admissions, and 87% of the Class of 2024 graduated from MIT debt-free.

At the same time, the world has never been more ready to reward our graduates for what they know – and know how to do. The average starting salary for our undergraduates last year was nearly $127,000, and on Payscale’s list of highest paying bachelor’s degrees by midcareer, MIT is at the top. More strikingly, among our peer schools, the Institute stands out for enabling students who grew up in poverty to transform their economic circumstances. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, “No U.S. college is better at improving the financial futures of its graduates” than MIT.

Such results have incalculable value for individual graduates, their families, their communities, and, very often, the people they go on to employ; aided by our programs to help students gain the essential skills of entrepreneurship and innovation and cultivate their new ventures, MIT graduates continue to create a disproportionate number of companies, a boon for society as a whole. 

Solving problems, serving society

MIT discoveries and inventions are also offering new answers to problems people face in their daily lives. For instance, MIT is bringing its distinctive expertise to bear on human health, from cancer to mental health. MIT researchers are using machine learning to make breast cancer screening and risk assessment dramatically more accurate; assessing breathing patterns for early detection of Parkinson’s disease; with AI tools, inventing new antibiotics to battle antibiotic resistance; pioneering new approaches to ward off Lyme disease; developing the first prosthetic leg fully driven by the body’s own nervous system; creating an implantable device that can detect and reverse an opioid overdose – and more. In response to concerns about health risks from pollution, MIT researchers are devising new sensors to detect “forever chemicals” in water – and developing novel natural filters for removing them.

In fields like these and many more, MIT research spins out a steady stream of start-ups, and according to a National Academy of Inventors survey, MIT stands as the top single-campus university for number of US patents issued – 10 years in a row.

While MIT’s Jameel Poverty Action Lab is using its groundbreaking data-driven strategies to identify new policies for reducing poverty and increasing economic mobility in the US, the Good Jobs Institute at MIT Sloan is helping major corporations and their workers reap the benefits of a “good jobs strategy.” And MIT’s Living Wage Calculator – the gold standard for gauging the affordability of communities across the country – is now widely used in making policy and setting competitive wages.

In keeping with the Institute’s mission of service to the nation, MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory supports US national defense and security, and continues to be a wellspring of innovations. And we serve society in countless other ways, from reducing the burden of airplane noise in neighborhoods, to helping defend against the threat of deepfakes, to modeling the risk of nuclear war. We’re creating the building blocks for large-scale energy solutions like nuclear fusion, developing crops that can endure extreme conditions and thrive without chemical fertilizers, using wave power to rebuild coasts and islands threatened by sea-level rise, and helping communities take practical steps to become more resilient against climate change.

As you would expect, MIT is also actively exploring the societal risks and rewards of generative AI. Our economists are leading the global conversation about its likely impacts, and we’re actively informing the federal policies that would allow for a thriving AI sector that is both safe and broadly beneficial.

And of course, the Institute founded on the principle of “mind and hand” continues to spawn discoveries, ideas and inventions at the furthest limits of knowledge, from probing the grand undulations of space-time with unprecedented precision through “quantum squeezing,” to creating “a five-lane superhighway for electrons” that could lead to ultraefficient electronics.

Striving for perpetual improvement

MIT is a remarkable place. That is not to say that it’s perfect: We continue to face the challenges and tensions of the past year as thoughtfully and fairly as we can, in a spirit of listening and learning, with the aim of making MIT an even better place for all who bring their brilliance here. But please know that, as we devote this serious attention and care to the quality of our shared life on campus, we are working with equal intensity, creativity and focus to ensure that MIT fulfills its mission of service to the nation and the world.

The challenge of sustaining MIT’s defining excellence and culture belongs to our whole community, and as I lead the Institute in this work, I deeply appreciate your engagement, commitment and support.

Sincerely,

Sally Kornbluth