This is true of most disciplines at most schools, when it comes to research at least.
Stanford, UCBerkely, CMU and MIT are the world's top CS schools, everyone else including Yale has difficulty competing with them. Yale's CS department has always been small, if not idiosyncratic (I'm thinking of their AI professor who said everything else in the field was bunk). In the areas I'm most interested in, their development of T, the first production level implementation of a Scheme, was the biggest thing to come out of it, and that was 3 decades ago.
Edit: I've seen exactly the same thing happen with faculty hiring, it's a bit stranger that it would happen with grad students since it's easier to move the bar year-to-year there.
BusinessInsider clearly know where their loyalties lie.
Footnote of the article: "The 10 most useless graduate degrees" http://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-most-useless-graduate-...
I think the bigger picture is that computer science as a subject is becoming more important. Both Harvard and Yale have historically been considered among the "best" US universities despite being weak in CS. I guess the concern is that because CS is becoming more valued, they need to become strong there as well in order to stay on top.
[0] http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2014/11/ballmer-to-support-... [1] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/9/11/cs50-breaks-enro...
Boston, Bay Area, Pitt and NYC are crawling with major sites for Tech Giants (Google and Microsoft for obvious ones) as well as hot start-ups, whereas New Heaven does not have much to enjoy regarding thriving tech scene within a reasonable radius (< 2 hours commute).
And to chime in my personal preference, if I were to invest about 6 years of my life at a place, I would take Boston or Bay Area any day: there is something refreshing about Boston or Bay Area which I do not find in New Heaven (I have had extended stays in all three places).
So any perceptive and shrewd student who got admissions from Yale as well as one of Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU or Princeton would choose not to go to Yale after admitted students visit day.
If a program is top-notch, then the location is secondary -- most of the socializing is going to be with peers on and around campus, anyway.