system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Are there any universities in Asia that compete with Harvard, Oxford, MIT, etc, for engineering?

Looking for some lengthly answers hopefully. Thanks!
gpt
MIT is regarded as the world's best engineering school.  Stanford is pretty close and then there are some R1 state universities (Berkeley, Michigan, Illinois, Georgia Tech, etc.) before it starts declining from there.  Most people would rank American universities for 9 out of the top 10 engineering schools in the world (and possibly all 10).

Harvard and Oxford both *teach* engineering, but they're not particularly well-regarded.

In terms of Asian universities, it's a mixed bag.

In American universities - at least at level we're talking about - emphasis is placed on understanding the material over rote learning.  Professors don't want you to just repeat their words back to them - they want you to be able to creatively apply what you've learned.  In contrast, most Asian education is very much by rote.  Innovation and creativity are discouraged in favor of simply regurgitating exactly what the professor said.

However, if you've got enough students (which you do with billions of people) and you stack all the best ones in a very small number of designated 'elite' schools, you'll end up with exceptional student bodies - the kind of students where you can hand them a library card, walk away and they'll be able to master the material even without your help.

But there's not much value add to that sort of educational approach.  You start with exceptional students and you're going to graduate some exceptional students.  However, those students would have likely been better served by a different approach.

You also end up losing what might be termed the 'misfit toys' - the people who have exceptional talents shackled to various limitations (autism spectrum would probably be the most obvious one, but there are all sorts of other problems students can have that conceal their brilliance in a purely rote learning structure).

So:

Are there any universities in Asia that compete with MIT?  No - because there are no universities *anywhere* that compete with MIT (note: there are universities that are better in specific niches than MIT, but MIT is probably in the top 3 for any niche you care to name).

Are there any universities in Asia that compete with other elite American universities?  Singapore is probably your best bet here.  It's not up to the elite U.S. state universities, but it's pretty close.  But even in Singapore, the output of the universities tends to overstate the quality of the university because the students they're admitting are so strong.