Who's On Campus?
Just as MIT’s size and appearance has changed over the years, so too has its student body. In the spring of 1876 enrollment totalled just over 300 students from 19 states and 4 other countries. This includes special students and students in the Lowell School of Practical Design, 12 of whom were women, the only women enrolled at MIT at the time (though enrollment increased in the fall of 1876 with the opening of the Woman’s Lab).
In 1926 MIT’s roughly 2,800 students came from every US state and five territories with 168 international students and 29 women, 5 of whom graduated in the class of 1926. Francis Hurd Clark became the first woman to receive a Doctorate in Metallurgy and Materials Science at MIT in 1926. (Four years earlier, Clark was one of the first two women to receive a Masters in Chemistry at MIT alongside Bertha Sanford Weiner Dodge). Dorothy Quiggle received an SB in Chemical Engineering in 1926, and in 1927 became the first woman to earn an SM in Chemical Engineering at MIT.
The undergraduate student body is roughly the same size today as it was in 1976 at around 4,500, but the number of graduate students is much higher, at 7,351, compared to 4,049 in 1976. The number of women students continued to grow over time as well and MIT began including photos of women and minoritized students in recruitment materials, such as the Admissions office publication MIT Today. In 1976 there were just 1,255 women students at the Institute; today there are 5,223, making up 48% of undergraduates and 42% of graduate students.
