Philadelphia Inquirer reporterMaggie Prosser spotlights senior Alice Hall, who was selected as one of the 2026 Rhodes Scholars. “Never stop trying to learn, especially from the people around you,” says Hall. “You don’t have to be a Rhodes scholar to change the world. Just be yourself.”
Vivian Chinoda '25, Alice Hall, Sofia Lara, and Sophia Wang '24 have been named 2026 Rhodes Scholars, reports Michael Nietzel for Forbes. “This class of U.S .Rhodes Scholars will pursue studies across the social sciences, humanities, and biological and physical sciences,” writes Nietzel.
Boston 25 spotlights Vivian Chinoda '25, Alice Hall, Sofia Lara, and Sophia Wang '24 who have been named 2026 Rhodes Scholars. “The students will attend the University of Oxford as part of the Rhodes scholar program, which awards more than 100 scholarships worldwide each year for students to pursue two to three years of graduate studies.”
Vivian Chinoda '25, Alice Hall, Sofia Lara, and Sophia Wang '24 have been selected as 2026 Rhodes Scholars, reports Lila Hempel-Edgers for The Boston Globe. “It’s just a thrill and an inspiration to meet each one of them,” said Prof. Nancy Kanwisher, who co-chairs MIT’s Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships. “You just can’t believe how accomplished they are and how thoughtful they are about the major problems facing the world.”
As part of an overall effort to help prevent head injuries, the MIT football team has implemented the use of helmets that have an extra layer of padding to reduce the impact of hits to the head, reports Esteban Bustillos for GBH. Engineers Head Coach Brian Bubna notes that MIT athletics staff are regularly updating their helmets to ones with the highest safety ratings, adding that after introducing the new helmets, coaching staff have seen a downward trend in head injuries, based on their day-to-day observations.
MIT will offer free undergraduate tuition for students with a family income below $200,000, reports Frances Klemm for Boston.com. “In addition to free tuition, students with household incomes below $100,000 may also receive financial support for supplies housing, dining, an allowance for books, and other personal expenses.”
Prof. Dimitris Bertsimas, vice provost for MIT Open Learning, speaks with Forbes contributor Aviva Legatt about AI usage among university students. “Universities have a responsibility to ensure students, faculty, and staff gain a strong foundation in AI’s concepts, opportunities, and risks so they can help solve society’s biggest challenges,” says Bertsimas.
Boston Globe reporter Yogev Toby spotlights the Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow program (MEET), an MIT initiative that brings together Israeli and Palestinian high school students to provide education in “computer science and innovation while promoting intercultural dialogue.” The program was designed to serve as a way to “bridge the social, economic, and ideological divide through innovation and entrepreneurship,” Toby explains. “The idea is to create connection and understanding through shared professional interests, dialogue, and teamwork.”
MIT has been named one of the top private colleges in the country for return on investment, according to Princeton Review’s latest rankings, reports Kamaron McNair for CNBC. “MIT meets 100% of demonstrated financial need for students,” McNair explains. “Beginning with the 2025-26 school year, families earning $200,000 a year or less will pay $0 for tuition and families earning $100,000 or less will have fees like housing and meals covered as well.”
Boston Globe reporter Jeffrey Kelly spotlights the MIT Student Lending Art Program, which allows MIT students to borrow original works of art from the MIT List Visual Arts Center. “No artist wants their work to be collected by a museum and to sit in storage forever and come out once every 10 years,” says Natalie Bell, MIT List’s chief curator. “That’s not why they’re doing this. So it’s a really unique collection in that way, because the priority is for people to experience the work and to live with it.”
Writing for The Atlantic, Prof. Joshua Bennett explores the relationship between poetry and AI. “A large language model is a prediction machine. Crucially, it does not think or dream. It establishes the likeliest sequence of words based on its training data and relays it back to you,” writes Bennett. “A well-crafted poem performs a nearly opposite function. It is made from original, dynamic language choices, and it lives and dies on its ability to surprise. It is a means of preserving the particular.”
Interesting Engineering reporter Saoirse Kerrigan spotlights a number of MIT research projects from the past decade. MIT has “long been a hub of innovation and ingenuity across multiple industries and disciplines,” writes Kerrigan. “Every year, the school’s best and brightest debut projects that push the boundaries of science and technology. From vehicles and furniture to exciting new breakthroughs in electricity generation, the school’s projects have tackled an impressive variety of subjects.”
Prof. John Ochsendorf speaks with Chronicle about his work teaching students how to build bridges while highlighting the importance of history in the process. Ochsendorf emphasizes the importance of bridge maintenance, noting "our economies depend on it, and our daily life depends on it. We would like to see more research and investment in the maintenance and assessment of existing bridges because this is really a frontier for the US today.”
Undergraduate student Mason Estrada was drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 2025 MLB Draft, reports Jesse Borek for MLB News. “Pro baseball was never really on Estrada’s radar until his freshman year at MIT when he reared back, fired and got a radar gun reading of 95 mph,” writes Borek. “There aren’t many humans walking the earth capable of that, let alone ones that willingly enlist in a thermodynamics course.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif examines how the proposed endowment tax on colleges and universities will likely “raise the cost of a college education and hurt US competitiveness.” Reif notes that universities use income from their endowments to provide financial aid for students and support research. “Without financial aid, students from less wealthy backgrounds would not be able to attend the country’s great private universities,” writes Reif. “This would be not just a loss to them but also to the nation itself, which benefits when talented people from all backgrounds have the same opportunity to rise based on academic achievement.”