RMIT University (officially the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, informally RMIT) is an Australian public research university located in Melbourne, Victoria.
Founded in 1887 as the Working Men's College by Francis Ormond, it initially opened as a private night school offering instruction in art, science and technology in response to the industrial revolution in Australia. It was made a public university by act of the Parliament of Victoria in 1992 after merging with the Phillip Institute of Technology. A dual sector institute, its enrolment of 320 trades students in 1887 has since grown to around 83,000 vocational and higher education students in 2015; which makes it the largest tertiary education provider in Australia. With an annual revenue of A$1.163 billion in 2015, it is also one of the wealthiest universities in Australia.
The foundation campus of RMIT forms part of the Melbourne city centre and is located on the northern edge of its Hoddle Grid. It began as the Working Men's College building, on the corner of Bowen Street and La Trobe Street, and has since grown to 87 buildings that are contiguous with the surrounding city. In addition to its City campus, it has two radial campuses in the Melbourne metropolitan area which are located in the northern suburbs of Brunswick and Bundoora. It also maintains a training site in the western suburb of Point Cook located on the Royal Australian Air Force base Williams, and a research site in the Southern Grampians region located in the rural city of Hamilton. Outside Australia, it has a presence in Asia and Europe. In Asia, it has two branch campuses in Vietnam which are located in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and maintains teaching partnerships in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, and Sri Lanka. In Europe, it has a coordinating centre in Spain located in Barcelona.
