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.
University of Massachusetts Boston
The University of Massachusetts system dates back to the founding of Massachusetts Agricultural College under the Morrill Land-Grant Acts in 1863. However, prior to the founding of UMass Boston, the Amherst campus was the only public, comprehensive university in the state. Even as late as the 1950s, Massachusetts ranked at or near the bottom in public funding per capita for higher education, and proposals to expand the University of Massachusetts into Boston was opposed both by faculty and administrators at the Amherst campus and by the private colleges and universities in Boston. In 1962, the Massachusetts General Court expanded the University of Massachusetts system for the first time to Worcester, Massachusetts with the creation of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In 1963, UMass President John W. Lederle informed the General Court that more than 1,200 graduates of Boston area high schools qualified to attend the University of Massachusetts were denied admission to the Amherst campus due to lack of space, and despite opposition from the Amherst campus, endorsed expanding the UMass system with a commuter campus in Boston. At the time, there were 12,000 freshman applications to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst with only 2,600 slots, yet the majority of the applicants lived in the Greater Boston area.