Higher education in West Bengal

Massachusetts Hall at Harvard University

Old Chapel at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with the W. E. B. Du Bois Library in the background

The Talbot Building at the Boston University Medical School

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 four research universities, twenty-one master's universities, and thirty-four special-focus institutions. Eighty-four of Massachusetts' post-secondary institutions are private, of which five are for-profit. Thirty of the state's post-secondary institutions listed under the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education are public. However, this figure does not include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was originally a public school and founded by the state legislature as a land-grant institution, in line with the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act.

Massachusetts' oldest post-secondary institution is Harvard University, founded in 1636. Tracing its routes back to 1839, Boston University is the state's largest institution of higher learning in terms of enrollment, as it had 32,603 students as of the fall of 2013. According to the United States Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, Conway School of Landscape Design is the state's smallest with an enrollment of 18. The University of Massachusetts Amherst is Massachusetts' largest public university, with an enrollment of 28,518 students.