A2A You do realize that you are asking an Harvard Fellow who did a post Doc at Harvard that worked with MIT research group this question. So my answer is very bias based on my experience in the 1980's. However, I will try to be objective in my answer. Assuming you can actually get into either Harvard or MIT, then you would need to be more specific: Undergraduate or Graduate, Department, Major. Because "better" is applied to majors not to universities or institutions - MIT is an Institution. And at the graduate level, the term is meaningless because it is faculty who you do research with when the comparison are made, it is based on yours and theirs original research. Engineering is technical studies and a very board term that consists of a number of departments and faculty members. For example, if you are talking about Computer Science, MIT based on research is ranked higher than Harvard, but not by much. Having sat in the Harvard classroom taught by an MIT professor, the