The Georgia Institute of Technology (commonly referred to as Georgia Tech, GT, and simply Tech or the Institute) is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Established in 1885, it has the largest student enrollment of the University System of Georgia, with satellite campuses in Savannah, Georgia, and Metz, France.
The school was founded as the Georgia School of Technology as part of New South efforts to build an industrial economy in the Southern United States after the Civil War. Initially, it offered only a degree in mechanical engineering. By 1901, its curriculum had expanded to include electrical, civil, and chemical engineering. In 1948, the school changed its name to reflect its evolution from a trade school to a technical institute and research university. Georgia Tech is organized into seven colleges with about 30 departments and academic units. It emphasizes the academic fields of science and technology. Georgia Tech's $5.8 billion economic impact for fiscal year 2024 led all public institutions in the state.
Georgia Tech fields eight men's and seven women's sports teams; these compete in NCAA Division I athletics and have won five national championships. The university is a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference.
The idea of a technology school in Georgia was introduced in 1865 during the Reconstruction period. Two former Confederate officers, Major John Fletcher Hanson (an industrialist) and Nathaniel Edwin Harris (a politician and eventually governor of Georgia), who had become prominent citizens in the town of Macon, Georgia, after the Civil War, believed that the South needed to improve its technology to compete with the North's industrialization. Many Southerners at this time agreed with this idea, known as the New South Creed. Because the American South of that era was mainly populated by agricultural workers and technical developments lagged, they proposed establishing a technology school.
In 1882, the Georgia State Legislature authorized a committee, led by Harris, to visit the Northeast to learn how technology schools worked. They were impressed by the polytechnic educational models developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial Science (now Worcester Polytechnic Institute). The committee recommended adapting the Worcester model, which stressed a combination of "theory and practice," the "practice" component including student employment and production of consumer items to generate revenue for the school.
On October 13, 1885, Georgia Governor Henry D. McDaniel signed the bill to create and fund the new school. In 1887, Atlanta pioneer Richard Peters donated to the state 4 acres (1.6 ha) of the site of a failed garden suburb called Peters Park. The site was bounded on the south by North Avenue and on the west by Cherry Street. He then sold five adjoining acres of land to the state for US$10,000, (equivalent to $360,000 in 2025). This land was near Atlanta's northern city limits at the time of its founding, although the city has since expanded beyond it. A historical marker on the large hill in Central Campus says that the site occupied by the school's first buildings once held fortifications to protect Atlanta during the Atlanta campaign of the American Civil War. The surrender of the city took place in 1864 on what today is the southwestern boundary of the Georgia Tech campus.
The Georgia School of Technology opened in the fall of 1888 with two buildings. One building (now Tech Tower, an administrative headquarters) had classrooms to teach students. The second building featured a shop and had a foundry, forge, boiler room, and engine room. It was designed for students to work and produce goods to sell and fund the school. The two buildings were equal in size to show the importance of teaching both the mind and the hands, though, at the time, there was some disagreement as to whether the machine shop should have been used to turn a profit.
Georgia Tech's Evening School of Commerce began holding classes in 1912. The evening school admitted its first female student in 1917, although the state legislature did not officially authorize attendance by women until 1920. Annie T. Wise became the first female graduate in 1919 and was Georgia Tech's first female faculty member the following year. In 1931, the Board of Regents transferred control of the Evening School of Commerce to the University of Georgia (UGA) and moved the civil and electrical engineering courses at UGA to Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech replaced the commerce school with what later became the College of Business. The commerce school would later split from UGA and eventually became Georgia State University. In 1934, the Engineering Experiment Station (later known as the Georgia Tech Research Institute) was founded by W. Harry Vaughan with an initial budget of $5,000 (equivalent to $120,336 in 2025) and 13 part-time faculty. In the 1940s, President Blake Van Leer focused on making Georgia Tech the "MIT of the South." He lobbied government and businesses for funds for new facilities. The Research Building was expanded, and a $300,000 (equivalent to $4,000,000 in 2025) Westinghouse A-C network calculator was given to Georgia Tech by Georgia Power in 1947. A new gymnasium, new textile and architecture buildings, and a $2 million library was completed.
Founded as the Georgia School of Technology, Georgia Tech assumed its present name in 1948 to reflect a growing focus on advanced technological and scientific research.
During President Blake Ragsdale Van Leer's tenure, Georgia Tech expanded its campus with new facilities, added new engineering courses, and became the largest engineering institute in the South and the third largest in the United States. The first Georgia Tech Ph.D. was awarded in 1950 in electrical engineering. Van Leer also admitted the first female students to regular classes in 1952 and began steps toward racial integration. He stood up to Georgia governor Marvin Griffin's demand to bar Bobby Grier from participating in the 1956 Sugar Bowl game between Georgia Tech and Grier's University of Pittsburgh. After Van Leer's death, his wife, Ella Lillian Wall Van Leer, bought a house on campus and opened it to female students. She also set up the first sorority on campus along with a Society of Women Engineers chapter. In 1968, women could enroll in all programs at Georgia Tech. Industrial Management was the last program to open to women. The first women's dorm, Fulmer Hall, opened in 1969. Rena Faye Smith, appointed as a research assistant in 1969 by R.A. Young in X-ray diffraction, became the first female faculty member (research) in the School of Physics. She went on to earn a Ph.D. at Georgia State University and taught physics and instructional technology at Black Hills State University from 1997 to 2005 as Rena Faye Norby. She served as a Fulbright Scholar in Russia in 2004–2005. By Spring 2009, women constituted 30.3% of the undergraduates and 25.3% of the graduate students.
In 1959, a meeting of 2,741 students voted by an overwhelming majority to endorse integration of qualified applicants, regardless of race. In September 1961, nine months after the University of Georgia's violent integration, Ralph A. Long Jr., Lawrence Williams, and Ford C. Greene enrolled at Georgia Tech, becoming the first African American students at Georgia Tech. Ronald Yancey enrolled the next year and in 1965 became the university's first African American graduate. Georgia Tech became the first university in the Deep South to desegregate without a court order. In the 1967–68 academic year, 28 students out of 7,526 were Black. In 1968, William Peace became the first Black instructor, and Marle Carter became the first Black member of the homecoming court. In 1964, Calvin Huey became the first Black player to play at Grant Field when he took the field for Navy. The first Black person to play for Georgia Tech was Eddie McAshan in 1970.