One of MIT’s highest enduring priorities is flexible funding. This includes unrestricted gifts, which enable us to seize strategic opportunities, explore the unknown, and remain resilient and agile in the face of ongoing and emerging complexities such as reduced federal research funding and new tax burdens on the returns from our endowment.
Here’s how:
- Unrestricted gifts provide a springboard for MIT to launch critical initiatives in areas such as climate change, health care, AI, and manufacturing
- Unrestricted gifts are critical to our financial aid program. Starting in 2025, undergraduates with family income below $200,000 attend MIT tuition-free. MIT is one of only nine colleges in the United States that does not consider applicants’ ability to pay as part of their admissions process and that meet the full demonstrated financial need for all undergraduates.
- Unrestricted gifts enable academic departments to attract and retain the most talented graduate students and faculty and support them as they engage in new directions of research. Many early-stage ideas are deemed too risky to qualify for backing from traditional sources. Unrestricted resources help fill the gap.
- Finally, unrestricted gifts aid the renewal and evolution of MIT’s infrastructure and physical environment to support the Institute’s academic, research, and community programs and priorities.
Those who give flexible funds are at the forefront of the Institute’s education, research, and innovation enterprise, which is a show of confidence in the mission, power, and people of MIT to do good for the nation and the world.

45% of MIT’s campus operating budget relies on unrestricted dollars

Unrestricted contributions account for half of all MIT undergraduate scholarships and graduate financial aid
Give Flexible Funds
Unrestricted funds have powered us through a century of discovery and are vital to our future.
To learn more about giving unrestricted funds, contact Elizabeth Crabtree, executive director, Development Planning and Initiatives, at [email protected] or 617.715.5798.
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