Virginia Tech was originally founded in 1851 as a Methodist academy called the Olin and Preston Institute. After the passage of the Morrill Act, the institution became a state-supported land grant military institute called the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1872; the modern school considers this to be its founding date. Under the 1891-1907 presidency of John M. McBryde, the school reorganized its academic programs into a traditional four-year college setup (including the renaming of the mechanics department to engineering); this led to an 1896 name change to Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute. The "Agricultural and Mechanical College" section of the name was popularly omitted almost immediately, though the name was not officially changed to Virginia Polytechnic Institute until 1944 as part of a short-lived merger with what is now Radford University. VPI achieved full accreditation in 1923, and the requirement of participation in the Corps of Cadets was dropped from four years to two that same year (for men only; women, when they began enrolling in the 1920s, were never required to join).

Throughout the early 20th century, a school rivalry developed between Virginia Tech and Charlottesville's University of Virginia (founded 1819). Today, the two universities have the second and third largest student populations amongst public institutions of higher learning in the state of Virginia, respectively. The rivalry continues, both in academics and athletics.

President T. Marshall Hahn (1962-74) was responsible for many of the changes that shaped the modern institution of Virginia Tech. The merger with Radford was dissolved in 1964, and in 1966, the school dropped the two-year Corps requirement for male students (in 1973, women were allowed to join the Corps; Tech was the first school in the nation to open its military wing to women). One of Hahn's more controversial missions was only partially achieved; he had visions of renaming the school from VPI to Virginia State University, reflecting the status it had achieved as a full-fledged public research university. As part of this move, Tech would have taken over control of the state's other land-grant institution, a historically black college in Ettrick, Virginia south of Richmond then called Virginia State College; this failed, and that school eventually became Virginia State University. As a compromise, the school added "and State University" to its name in 1970, yielding the current formal name of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. The new acronym of VPISU was derisively spoken as Vippy-sue by students and Hahn detractors. In the early 1990s, the school quietly authorized the official use of Virginia Tech as equivalent to the full VPI&SU name; most school documents today use the shorter name, though diplomas still spell out the formal name. Similarly, the abbreviation VT is far more common today than VPI or VPI&SU, and appears everywhere from athletic uniforms (most notably on football helmets) to the university's Internet domain vt.edu.

From 1970 for the next five years, the student population grew from about 13,500 to 22,000.