Yale CS students say the school has 'ceded the battle' to Harvard and Stanford (opens in new tab)

(businessinsider.com)

47 pointsdhatch38711y ago15 comments

15 comments

"With so few professors, Yale's department has no choice but to ignore entire areas of computer science."

This is true of most disciplines at most schools, when it comes to research at least.

hga11y ago

Indeed. The specifics include a comparison to "Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell"

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.

army11y 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.

zhte41511y ago

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-...

tsuyoshi11y ago

This is not really my area of expertise, but is the Harvard CS department actually in the same league as Stanford? When I think of top CS schools, I think of MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Berkeley. Neither Harvard nor Yale come to mind. Maybe they are trying to play up the HYS rivalry for people that know even less about this than I do.

vilhelm_s11y ago

They are not in the same league yet, but in the last decade Harvard has been trying to improve. And they continue to do so, last November they announced that they will increase faculty size by 50% [0]. At the same time, computer science is becoming a more and more popular, in 2014 the intro to CS course surpassed economics as the most taken course at Harvard [1].

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...

Turing_Machine11y ago

UIUC, Washington, and Georgia Tech also rank well above Harvard and Yale in my mind (and, I suspect, most others).

anocendi11y ago

Even if Yale has a comparable CS department, it is still hard to compete against Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU and Princeton: it is a matter of New Heaven vs. Boston, Bay Area, Pitt and NYC.

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.

gdubs11y ago

Disagree. Yale is known for having one of the best painting programs, for instance. If it were location, the kids would go to any school in NYC, because that's where the art-scene action is.

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.

blahblah311y ago

New Haven

mturmon11y ago
Counterexamples: UIUC, Cornell -- among others.

marcusrussi11y ago

Notable that in one night during midterms over 10% of the undergraduate body signed.

verylongname11y ago

Perhaps when it comes to undergraduate work, there is a problem. But Rokhlin, Coifman and Spielman are all members of that department. I would be pleased to have any one of them as a thesis adviser. There are no doubt other faculty members whose work I am not familiar with.

akhilcacharya11y ago

As someone that doesn't go to a school that's Yale by any means, this petition is kind of hilarious.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

15 comments

_benedict11y ago

"With so few professors, Yale's department has no choice but to ignore entire areas of computer science."
This is true of most disciplines at most schools, when it comes to research at least.

hga11y ago
Indeed. The specifics include a comparison to "Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell"
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.

army11y ago

If those numbers about grad students are right, that's pretty weird - it sounds like they're being overly picky about who they admit and only admitting the people who were accepted at other, more prestigious, places.
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.

zhte41511y ago

Squeezed out, indeed. The text of the article took up less than 1/4 of the full page width until half way down the content, mainly accompanied by a picture of a football team training and a 'see also' section.
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-...

tsuyoshi11y ago

vilhelm_s11y ago
They are not in the same league yet, but in the last decade Harvard has been trying to improve. And they continue to do so, last November they announced that they will increase faculty size by 50% [0]. At the same time, computer science is becoming a more and more popular, in 2014 the intro to CS course surpassed economics as the most taken course at Harvard [1].
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...

Turing_Machine11y ago
UIUC, Washington, and Georgia Tech also rank well above Harvard and Yale in my mind (and, I suspect, most others).

anocendi11y ago

Even if Yale has a comparable CS department, it is still hard to compete against Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU and Princeton: it is a matter of New Heaven vs. Boston, Bay Area, Pitt and NYC.
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.

gdubs11y ago
Disagree. Yale is known for having one of the best painting programs, for instance. If it were location, the kids would go to any school in NYC, because that's where the art-scene action is.
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.

blahblah311y ago
New Haven