List of colleges and universities in Massachusetts
There are one hundred and fourteen colleges and universities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that are listed under the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. These institutions include nine research universities, twenty-one master's universities, and thirty-four special-focus institutions. This number excludes the newly reopened Atlantic Union College, which has yet to receive accreditation. Eighty-five of Massachusetts' post-secondary institutions are private, of which five are for-profit. Thirty of the state's post-secondary institutions are public, a number which excludes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was founded by the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, but later became a private institution.
Colonial colleges
The colonial colleges are nine institutions of higher education chartered in the Thirteen Colonies before the United States of America became a sovereign nation after the American Revolution. These nine have long been considered together, notably in the survey of their origins in the 1907 "The Cambridge History of English and American Literature". Seven of the nine colonial colleges are part of the Ivy League athletic conference: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, and Dartmouth. (The eighth member of the Ivy League, Cornell University, was founded in 1865.)