MIT

While it is widely reported that Smith turned down a scholarship to attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Smith denied this in a Reader's Digest interview stating, "My mother, who worked for the School Board of Philadelphia, had a friend who was the admissions officer at MIT. I had pretty high SAT scores and they needed black kids, so I probably could have gotten in. But I had no intention of going to college." This is corroborated in a Wired interview where he states he never applied to MIT.

Despite the above, when Smith appeared on Inside the Actors Studio, he stated that he was admitted to the "pre-engineering program" at MIT.