Everything in my heart is telling me to go to Yale (social life, fit, location), but I also got into MIT. I’m a prospective comp sci and economics double major but my parents won’t let me go to Yale unless I can convince them that I’m not drastically missing out on opportunities by attending Yale over MIT. A few things they have noted are the median starting salary, and departmental and school rankings for each university. Especially regarding STEM, the internet seems to trash Yale.
Is Yale CS that horrible?
What are departmental rankings based on (why is somewhere like UMich ranked higher than Yale in CS but drastically lower in overall ranking)?
Will I be missing out on a lifetime of opportunity by not attending MIT?
BTW: my goal is to go into business/managerial work and have tech knowledge/background. (Perhaps IT consulting)
Different schools have different student composition. Yale has more humanities majors. As a result, the average starting salary for Yale is lower than its peers, say HPSM. But if one control for differences in majors, I do not think Yale underperforms in any way.
In addition, if your parents really care about salary, they ought to pay more attention on salary potential 10 or 20 years down the road. That is where it makes real difference.
MIT would be a better choice for you but you seem to want the Ivy cachet. I’m with your parents.
Yale is a liberal arts school and therefore does not have the “preprofessional aura” of some other schools. As stated above, I am sure the starting salary data is skewed because Yale graduates true liberal arts majors like my Literature major child who is not looking into going into the work world right after college. But I am sure that those who graduate with degrees that are more marketable with a BS, then Yale would stack up well as far as salaries are concerned. Yale and MIT are very different schools and I am a staunch supporter of fit, especially when you start talking about the top schools that have little difference academically. Visit both if you can, talk to students, and go where it feels “right”.
Is Yale Compiter Science that bad? No.
I will PM you.
To answer all your questions:
- The median salaries are highly skewed based on the composition of majors at each school. Yale has a much higher number of humanities/arts majors than even Princeton or Harvard, which lowers the figure.
If you compare the salaries of CS majors at Yale to that of Caltech or MIT I daresay there won’t be any difference. If you look at the Yale career reports, several prominent tech companies are among the major employers, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Since you mentioned consulting, Yale is a target school for all the big 3, McKinsey, Bain and BCG (not exactly IT consulting, but similar):
If you’re looking at general employer perceptions, Yale tends to do pretty well. I couldn’t find a more recent version of this surver, but the results should be similar :
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2012/10/25/world/asia/25iht-sreducemerging25-graphic.html?ref=asia
- CS Rankings tend to be mainly based on citations and peer reputation, which tend to be highly influenced by the size of faculty. Yale tends to not be known for its CS Department, but that is largely due to its relatively smaller size, and the fact that it is overshadowed by its much more famous social sciences/law/arts/humanities departments. The department has grown by more than 20% in the last 2-3 years, and a quick look at the website shows they’re still recruiting. The last few people to join Yale were previously full professors at U Mich (Dragomir Radev) and Cornell (Rajit Manohar), which shows they can obviously attract high caliber people.
It’s up to you to weigh the greater variety of CS offerings/student culture at MIT versus the student culture/campus/social life at Yale, but if you’re talking about business/managerial/tech career prospects, the stats don’t show much difference.
Almost all department rankings are based on the research outputs of their professors, which matters little to most undergrads. Yale is much smaller in size than other departments, which could contribute to lower rankings (less research output).
Is Yale computer science bad? Yeah, if sending dozens and dozens of students to top tech firms, quantitative hedge funds, PhD programs and prop trading students is bad, Yale is terrible. Yale’s undergrad computer science program will still have you spending 20+ a week on problem sets for many of the core classes.
After spending a lot of time with students at both Yale and MIT, my impression is that you will get much stronger written skills at Yale, and that at Yale you will also develop better qualitative reasoning abilities. This could be important moving into a managerial role if you don’t want to be a software engineer forever.
If there’s a particular program or department that you really like at MIT (ie media lab), it would make sense to go to MIT. Yale and MIT couldn’t be further apart culturally so keep that in mind.
Most Yale computer science undergrads I know who took the tech firm or hedge fund route were earning well north of $100k after graduating for what it’s worth.
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@3tonythetiger3 Yale is by no means terrible but n these fields MIT is clearly superior.
Unless you are going for quant jobs on wall street, tech investment banking.consulting or pure engineering jobs, then MIT will not have a substantial advantage over Yale.
Tech investment banking has absolutely nothing to do with computer science. As an investment banker, most of your time is spent doing research for presentations, drafting documents such as prospectuses and information memorandums, followed by a bit of modeling. Someone with a BA in history would probably be a better tech banker than a computer science student without strong writing skills, because you never delve into the algorithms of the company’s software from a business perspective. I say this as a former investment banker.
I had a friend who was a history major at Yale work at D.E. Shaw (one of the top quant finance firms) and had friends who weren’t even computer science majors end up at Google and Microsoft as engineers and product managers. The only area of STEM I would encourage people to look elsewhere for would be chemical engineering, as the major doesn’t have critical mass to attract graduate employers. Otherwise the employment outcomes are great from Yale STEM, because there are people with rigorous scientific training who are strong communicators and can reason with both words and numbers.
I was waiting for @IxnayBob to weigh in since I have watched his son’s successful CS journey (with all its ups and downs) over the last three years. I am sure his offline advice is on point.
@exyalie15 having worked in the tech group of a major investment bank and then tech PE, i can tell you that usually people with a good tech background in addition to all the other necessary skills are given a leg up. Schools with very strong and prestigious STEM programs especially Stanford and MIT can give you an edge. Not saying an MIT or Stanford grad will always get this kind of job over a Yale grad, far from it, but there is a slight bias in favor of these schools. Has to do with the prestige these schools have in the tech industry. also the level of preference largely depends on the firm and it can range from none to substantial.
As for wall street quant jobs and of course actual engineering jobs MIT is definitely playing at another level.
MIT grads in general have a disdain for Wall Street but those who actually pursue it are extremely sought after, in general more so than ivy grads, at least in my experience.
I was in M&A at a top three bank and when I worked on a tech deal, there was no overlap in skills needed between my BS and what the tech deal required. My bosses also gave the most interesting work to an associate who was an accountant and a senior analyst who held a JD.
This particular group had little interest in hiring science and engineering graduates, and preferred people with stronger qualitative skills, as well as people who had taken a lot of initiative to get up the finance learning curve prior to internships. An MIT graduate would be less competitive when interviewing for this group - evidently there is no universal rule for what banks want.
I only recently left banking, and decided to transition to something more technical within finance. When interviewing, the universal response I got was “ok, we can see you can do the numbers, but can you write?”. My Yale science degree was more than enough to demonstrate quantitative rigor, but that was not the only thing they were looking for.
I don’t think we are disagreeing here. As I said it is not about skills needed, it is more about the bias some hiring managers have for Stanford, MIT. Of course the person needs to have all the necessary skills. It also varies between firms. I worked in the technology group of a top 3 bank and there was slight bias. I feel it is more common in industry groups. In my PE gig there is a slight bias too, but of course that doesn’t mean one would take a clearly inferior Stanford grad over a superior & better fit Yale grad, not at all.
Nothing at Yale is bad, congrats on getting in. However, when it comes to computer science and economics, only a few schools are better, and MIT happens to be one of them. I’m out here in silicon valley, and a friend of mine who’s daughter got into Yale, went to the admit day reception out here, and he was frankly unimpressed with where the graduates ended up. His daughter did not choose Yale, for a few reasons, but that was one of them. I did a similar path to yours - BS undergrad tech/business school, though I’m in product marketing not consulting. I have not met an MIT undergrad (or grad for that matter) that was not top-notch. You’ll have plenty of opportunity at bus school to sharpen your communication skills. As others have said, if you want to do finance, I-banking on the east coast, both schools are fine. If you want to run a high tech company, MIT is your best bet.
I joined CC in 2006. I don’t think I’ve ever seen these 8 words strung together like this before. I’m sorry that your parents are doing this to you. It’s unfortunate and ill advised.
Seriously, are you going to college for training or are you going for an education. Sure CS is better at MIT. If that is your only concern, then nothing else needs to be said. But students good enough to get into either of these schools often have broader human interests. You will meet a broader variety of people at Yale. These will be your lifelong friends. These will be the people that motivate you, that challenge you, that excite you.
You need to do well, and you need to be happy. You will give something up by going to either place.
You need to do your due diligence and then go with your heart. It’s a very personal decision as it should be. After all, it’s about who YOU want to be.
My daughter had a similarly difficult and unconventional choice to make between a so-called no-brainer and where her heart was taking her, and in the end went with her heart. I played devil’s advocate for both, but it was her decision, and I think she made it for the right reasons. It was the right move in foresight, it was the right move in hindsight. It is unlikely she could have had the same academic experience that she was after at the no-brainer. She’s now in a top PhD program in her field.
IMHO both schools are very strong academically, both have a VERY strong reputation, both will be very challenging, and if you do well there then you will learn a lot and have strong opportunities going forward. I agree strongly with other posts that if MIT has a higher average starting salary for graduates, then this is only because MIT has more STEM majors. A computer science major at Yale will have a significantly higher salary than a history major at MIT (when I was at MIT I knew someone who changed their major to history), and probably exactly the same salary as a computer science major from MIT.
I guess my question would be: Why do you prefer Yale? If you prefer Yale only because it is “Ivy League” then I would agree with your parents. However, I have the impression from your original post that you prefer Yale for reasons along the lines of you feel that you would fit in better there. If you have good reasons to prefer Yale (even if it is just that you would be happier there) then you should go to Yale.
MIT is not the happiest place on earth. I don’t think that you should go there unless you want to.
I’m not sure I would agree with that, but I will say as an alum, I can tell you that you really have to take the place with humility and a healthy sense of humor or it can be devastating.
It IS hard to fondle penguins (IHTFP)
http://www.mit.edu/people/mjbauer/ihtfp.html
You will be spending the next 4 years of your life living at one of these institutions. I can assure you, because I have experience in the field, that you will have a wealth of CS opportunities at either college. I have not met a single colleague who said “I strongly prefer this kid because he went to Yale vs MIT” or vice versa. What really matters in the career of CS is how much you learn and can contribute after 5 years on the job. Communications skills matter a lot too. If a grad from one school starts at 100k and 105k at another, this amount of money will be so insignificant when you are in your 40s, that it will be laughable. Do NOT base such a huge choice on starting salary. Go where you think you will be the happiest. And, congratulations. Both are awesome schools and both have world class CS programs.