Founded in 1927 as Massey Agricultural College and named after former Prime Minister William Ferguson Massey, Massey became a university in 1964.
It has campuses at Albany in Auckland, at Manawatu (sites at Turitea and Hokowhitu in Palmerston North) and in Mt Cook, Wellington. It also has staff based in Napier and New Plymouth.
The University is also the largest New Zealand provider of distance learning, known as extramural. It jointly owns and operates the New Zealand School of Music in Wellington with Victoria University of Wellington.
Academics are in five colleges – Business, Creative Arts, Education, Humanities and Social Sciences, and Sciences.
It has 36,000 students, about half of them extramural and about a quarter postgraduate, more than 3000 staff, assets valued at over $1 billion, including 2000ha of farms used for research and teaching, and total annual revenue of $350 million.
Its strengths are in finance, veterinary science, agri-business and food technology, biological sciences, health sciences, nursing, Mäori studies, sport and exercise science, fundamental sciences and aviation.