Campus and city
ITAM is small, urban and intense rather than sprawling: its main Río Hondo undergraduate campus sits in the Álvaro Obregón borough of southwest Mexico City, with graduate studies at the nearby Santa Teresa campus, and the whole institution enrols only around 5,000 students — a deliberate contrast with the ~350,000-student UNAM. The culture is highly competitive and academically demanding, with a strong, lifelong alumni network across Mexican finance and government; the same intensity drove a 2020 student strike over academic pressure and mental-health concerns. As a compact private institution it offers fewer sports facilities, residential options and large-scale campus amenities than big universities, and most students commute, making student life close-knit and focused rather than broad. Mexico City itself — a vast, culturally rich capital — provides the wider social, cultural and professional environment.