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The Metropolitan Institute of Technology, or ITM, is a public higher education institution located in the city of Medellín in Colombia.The institution, which is based on five campuses, has a strong vocational and technical focus, and was founded by the City of Medellín in 1944 when the local council created the Public Works Institute. Its purpose was to provide education to the working classes of a city that was growing as an industrial centre in Colombia at the time.The ITM is split into four faculties: the faculty of arts and humanities; the faculty of economic and administrative sciences; the faculty of exact and applied sciences; and the faculty of engineering.Some 24 undergraduate degrees and seven master’s programmes are offered at the institute, which was the first public university to be granted a high-quality accreditation by the Colombian Ministry of National Education.The Institute's Laboratory Center manages 62 workshops and instructional laboratories. The centre promotes interaction with public and private organisations away from the university, and has signed several cooperation agreements with, among others: the Hospital General de Medellín; Panasonic; and Siemens.The ITM mission statement, and its education and academic objectives, say that ITM aims to consolidate a culture of excellence that follows the guidelines for education improvement along with the municipal and institutional development plans.Medellín is the second-largest city in Colombia and the capital of the Antioquia region. It is located in a central region of the Andes Mountains known as the Aburrá Valley, and has an estimated population of about 2.5 million as of 2017. When the wider metropolitan area is taken into account, the population was roughly 3.7 million in 2017.