<p>@gibby (#37): it cannot be just budget. Cornell, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown are all far less wealthy than Yale (technically Princeton too), yet they all invested in their growing CS departments. The money is there. If Salovey blames it on poverty, then it is a question of priorities, not money. It means he doesn’t want to spend it on CS.</p>
<p>It also can’t be just slow-change bureaucracy. It’s not as if Harvard and Princeton don’t have bureaucracies, and Cornell and Columbia have famously bigger, more entrenched, New York-style (!) bureaucracies. If Salovey blames it on bureaucracy, then it’s because he doesn’t want it, and between him and Levin, they haven’t wanted it for 10 years, even before the mortgage bust.</p>
<p>It has to be something other than money or slow change. Either Salovey isn’t letting go of the money, which is there but he wants to spend it elsewhere, or else he is giving it to Eistenstat with terms Eisenstat doesn’t want to accept. One of the two will have to back off.</p>
<p>No, the money was there. It was just not a priority at Yale to spend the money in growing its CS department. It was a priority at Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Penn, Columbia, etc. to grow their CS departments, so they did it, despite the same 20% - 30% hits their endowments took. Money is fungible. Yale’s self-imposed cuts were exactly that, self-imposed, and they did so because they did not want to grow its CS. The other colleges choose to grow their CS, even those with less money in their endowments – and that’s ALL BUT ONE of them.</p>
<p>So yes, the budget construct is an excuse. There’s got to be another reason, and if it is not Salovey or Eisenstat who is holding things up, then it is somebody, or something else (and this is no judgement call, but logic). But it is not money. It has to be something unique to Yale. Budget constraint is not unique to Yale.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that Yale spends more on financial aid than the colleges you quoted in post #40 (Cornell, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown). My son, who is on financial aid, is who of the kids who is benefitting. FWIW, four years ago, my son was also admitted to Princeton, Dartmouth and Brown – all offered less financial aid than Yale. The actual dollar difference between what Yale offered and what Dartmouth and Brown offered was close to $30,000 per year. That’s how much Yale is spending on FA. Maybe in the long run they will not be able to afford to do so, but at the moment they’re trying to go head-to-head with Harvard and Princeton offering the same financial aid.</p>
Hahahaha! Your comment shows how little you understand money management. I suppose parents should use that line when their kids move back home because they can’t afford to live on the money employers are paying them. </p>
<p>You’re correct that Yale probably made some un-wise choices when the financial crisis hit. Growing the CS Department or any department, wasn’t a priority. They started to build two new dorms and then halt construction. They didn’t cut their budgets enough like Harvard did (Harvard eliminated hot breakfasts for upperclassman but Yale continued to offer them throughout the crisis – small stuff like that does adds up.) Because of the decisions made in 2008-2010, Yale finds itself now living like many Americans – hand to mouth. Why that is so hard for you to understand is beyond me. You keep looking for something else, but I don’t think it exists. </p>
<p>The budget construct is an excuse. Everyone else had budget pressures, but onlyYale claims – I am putting your words into the mouth of Yale’s administration – that its unique budget pressures required it to freeze hiring in CS for 10 years. End of story.</p>
<p>The story is that other colleges like Brown, Dartmouth and Cornell enrolled MORE full-fare paying students to cover their budget shortfall and to help with hiring new staff. Yale did not. Instead, they along with HP, raised the upper limit threshold for families qualifying for financial aid – up to $200,000 (and then backed it down to $140,000 several years ago). Brown, Dartmouth and Cornell didn’t even attempt to match HYP’s new threshold because they couldn’t afford it. Williams College did, but then had to back off because they couldn’t afford doling out FA. </p>
<p>Harvard has deeper pockets than Yale, and more donors who give earmarked money to the university – that’s how Harvard has done it. I don’t know enough about Princeton to know how they have managed to avoid the same pitfalls that Yale has fallen into. </p>
<p>@4thfloor You keep mentioning “10 years,” but even if the department didn’t expand in the last 10 years, it hasn’t really needed to until the last couple. It’s really only seen an explosion in student interest since the rise of startup culture, since social network came out, etc. and for much of that time Yale was in the red. I’m pretty sure that these tensions with the CS department vs practical courses are rather recent - pretty much only spanning the last couple years. If there were tensions with the CS department in prior years, I don’t think it was over this (and I don’t know anything about that history).</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, Yale’s putative budget woes don’t seem to have ruined its academics. If Yale does not hire more faculty before it expands the studentry, that might change…</p>
<p>% Yale senior respondents “very satisfied” or “generally satisfied” with Arts and Humanities instruction in 2012: 97% (on par with Amherst’s 2012 results and above Carleton’s results for all years on Carleton 's record)</p>
<p>Satisfaction with Social Sciences: 90% (slightly below Carleton’s 2010 percentage, likely above the percentage I’ve seen for Amherst too)</p>
<p>Natural sciences and math: 55%
Engineering: 67%</p>
<p>(Far below Carleton’s results, but I suspect that Yalies’ satisfaction with natural science and engineering instruction has improved slightly since 2012.)</p>
<p>% of 2012 respondents who would recommend Yale to high school students like them: 86% (higher than Carleton, Swarthmore, and likely Dartmouth)</p>
<p>Yale graduates far more seniors per year than Amherst and Carleton together, so I’d expect it to do worse than them.</p>
<p>I don’t see a reason for Yalies to be unhappier today than they were in 2012.</p>
<p>I compare Yale’s data to Amherst and Carleton’s because they are often considered first-rate LACs, and I cannot think of any other colleges that have released data I can compare to Yale’s.</p>
<p>P.S. I am not apologising for Yale. The dearth of Computer Science faculty is a travesty. (I wonder if many of the “top” LACs are better-off though.)</p>
<p>My kid is a probable CS major at Swarthmore, and I will say that the average age of the faculty there is pretty young (implying that they’ve been hiring lately). PhDs in 1994, 2010, 2006, 1999, 2011, 2013, 2002 + three visiting professors. Clearly the department has been actively expanding. What are the year-of-dissertation in Yale’s CS department? Not that I’m saying that older professors are inferior, but if they are ALL way past their dissertation, I’d say there’s a problem. </p>
<p>I checked the CS faculty rosters at all the Ivy League colleges. Yale, with the second largest endowment, is the only one that does not have a single faculty member (assistant professor and above) hired in the past 10 years. The year-since-dissertation statistic must be quite awful (post #53). Maybe things are just as bad at Comp Lit, but that’s not the topic here. We are here to compare Yale’s CS against its peers, not Yale CS vs Yale Comp Lit.</p>
<p>Couple that with this article already referenced in an earlier post:</p>
<p>@Exodius MIT, being one of the few schools around with a shred of transparency, has published a bit of 2012 and 2014 COFHE Senior Survey data; you might be right.</p>
<p>YALE:</p>
<p>58% response rate (51% of the invited students, or 88% of the respondents, finished the surveys) – 737 responses</p>
<p>Overall satisfaction with undergraduate education (Very satisfied/generally satisfied/total satisfied):</p>
<p>@4thfloor that’s a straw man. Re-read my post. I didn’t say the department didn’t hire for 10 years - I said even if that’s the case, it hasn’t really needed serious expansion until the last couple. This conversation began with discussing tension over practical v theoretical courses - the 10 years of non-hiring doesn’t speak much to this.</p>
<p>@darkEyes and @4thfloor: You guys are beating the same drum over and over again. What’s the point? If you think Yale’s CS Department is in the toilet because the university refuses to hire more CS faculty, apply somewhere else. If you think Yale’s CS Department is more theoretical than practical, apply somewhere else. It’s that easy! It’s pointless to continually flog the dead horse. I’m sure HS or M would love to have you on their campus!</p>
<p>@gibby not clear on how you got that sentiment from anything I’ve said. I also think 4thfloor and I have been holding rather different positions - not sure why you’re lumping us together.</p>
<p>Yale’s CS department has a great curriculum and <em>should</em> continue emphasizing the theoretical foundations. Feel free to re-read my posts (first one in particular) because apparently I lost you somewhere.</p>