Prior to a fairly recent overhaul, the technology licencing office (rough quote from memory from Tech Talk, the Institute's official newsletter): "focused on the details of licencing vs. doing a lot of licences" and averaged a little over 1 per year (!!!). Given that I know 3 of those, the LMI Lisp Machine licenses and the same plus Macsyma to Symbolics....

They notoriously screwed up the 3D core memory patent ($40 million lump sum to IBM vs. the offered 1 cent per core) and a synthetic penicillin patent. Either could have paid for a complete replacement of the entire campus. I very strongly suspect these weren't the only screwups, and e.g. Symbolics scammed an exclusive license to Macsyma mostly to keep it out of other people's hands, one reason Wolfram was able to beat it sort of starting from scratch.

Back then, when the prime rate was over 20%, and inflation was over 15%, MIT was getting a much lower return on its endowment. I want to say 4%, but I'm not sure. MIT does a lot better now, but that is also recent.

It got its charter just as the Civil War started, and set up operations just after. So as noted it doesn't have the 2 centuries or more of additional compounding alumni donations the famous Ivies have.

Not sure when it started, and it was again fixed only fairly recently, but the alumni magazine, Technology Review, was dedicated to telling most of the alumni that what they were doing was evil. And again by then the Institute apparently had convinced a lot of alumni that it couldn't be trusted with unrestricted gifts. In its favor it never tried a Princeton Woodrow Wilson Center type donation theft, then again I don't know of any other top school so brazen.

Ah, it also was wretched, not interested or perhaps in part stymied by city government (which hates Harvard with a passion, and MIT gets some of the blowback) in making money off of local real estate. When I showed up the Kendal Square area had that bombed out sort of look, in part due to NASA deciding after JFK's assassination and LBJ becoming President that, oh, on second though Texas is where we should build our space center. There was almost no housing, let alone vaguely affordable and safe, to be found close to campus. I'm sure that bit of MIT's studied indifference to student welfare didn't escape some of the alumni who were the sort to later make a fortune.

Bottom line: not a lot of money to grant to students, and a total focus on needs based aid. And, hmmm, rather obviously students like me who were crushed by the intersection of the financial aid policies of MIT and their parents would never be in a position to donate a lot of money, and not inclined to donate much of what we do have.