@thecshero, funny that you mentioned 223. My son is currently taking it, and although he’s been coding for a while, I think he had many “aha” moments in 223 which should serve him well down the road.
This won’t add anything new to people in this forum, but it does put the story out in the “mass media” (if you can consider Bloomberg to be “mass media”) …
Thanks for linking to this, @4thfloor. Wow—this makes it sound like any prospective computer science major would be crazy to choose Yale. Very depressing—Yale seems so great in every other way.
Bloomberg runs businessweek.
Well at least the article mentions an announcement coming in late March on the status of CS - hopefully that will materialize. Ideally some wealthy benefactor out there will do something like what Steve Ballmer did for CS at Harvard.
Yes, that would be good news, especially because, as @Planner says, Yale has so much else going for it.
I believe universities generally have a great deal of influence in directing donors’ interest to particular projects. Gates and Ballmer did donate to CS at Harvard, but surely Harvard welcomed that. On the other hand, when Griffin donated $150M to Harvard for financial aid, or Feeney donated $350M to Cornell for the Roosevelt Island Campus, I bet the respective colleges had a hand in shaping those donations.
So unless Yale no longer gets any donations, it is up to Salovey whether Yale CS gets donation money or not. And of course there is nothing to say that Yale has to wait for a donation to grow CS. Princeton, Cornell, Penn, Dartmouth, Chicago, even Swarthmore, have added CS faculty without waiting for a large donation (Princeton made 15 offers last year), and Yale acquired West Campus for $109M without any donations.
In sum, I believe the donation issue as raised by the Yale administration is a red herring.
A $24 B endowment and they can’t afford to fund some CS hiring? If Yale ends up seeing CS as a priority, I believe the hiring / facilities will happen, regardless of whether or not a major gift occurs. In fact, regarding that announcement in March, I would not be surprised at all if Yale is working on the problem right now and the announcement will outline its plan to increase focus on CS.
From the article ( http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-06/want-a-job-in-silicon-valley-after-yale-good-luck-with-that?cmpid=yhoo ), it looks like we can expect good news in late March. But some of the quotes in the article can be misleading.
It may be true that Hong did not meet any other Yale students in Silicon Valley, but it not true there are no other Yale students in Silicon Valley in the same summer. My S1 interned at Google last summer and had orientation at its headquarter. Out of curiosity, I asked him if he saw any Yale students at orientation and he said yes. This is besides the one Yale lady I mentioned in my previous post who also interned at Google. The young lady did not go Google’s headquarter for orientation as she was working at Google’s New York campus. It’s easy to list where the CS students went last summer since there are only handful CS students at Yale.
Wow!
Well, here’s some “hard data”. From the Class list of class '14 (which is not a full account of all graduates), I counted 19 computer science majors who ended up in tech companies in the west coast including 7 in Google, 5 in Microsoft and 2 in Oracle (there are more non CS majors ended up in these companies). Don’t know if it’s good or bad (guess it depends on the size of the graduating class, which I have no idea about).
DS has not formally decided on CS as a major, and I don’t know if this is common at other schools or in other majors, but he wants to take CS 365 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms). It’s only offered once a year, in the spring. I could understand if it was an esoteric course, but it’s part of the core CS curriculum, and would be of interest even to a non-CS major.
Good data @Benley . It tells that Yale CS students are actually well prepared for working in silicon valley. What needed is more CS students to have a mass effect. So yes, Yale should still enhance it’s CS department so that it can take more CS students.
I suspect that one aspect the administration is trying to figure out is, to what extent is the increased interest in CS, both the number of CS majors (which went from 12 degrees in 2005-06 to 39 in 2013-14 and I assume more today), and demand for CS classes by students in other majors, a long term trend versus a product of a strong technology market right now.
I haven’t seen long term trend numbers for Yale but I know at Stanford, the number of CS majors has gone up and down pretty dramatically as a function of the fortunes of the industry - the number of CS majors dropped over 50% after the dot-com crash in the early 2000s and in recent years has been up strongly. If the same kind of volatility has existed at Yale, it’s something to think about given that tenured professors are around a long time.
That said, I certainly agree that it’s important to make sure CS has the resources it needs to be a top department in the field.
^^ CS majors are up sharply at Harvard and every other major university that I know of. Even the LACs are seeing a huge increase because the last time I spoke with an admistrator in Swarthmore’s CS dept. they were on the prowl for more faculty. When Yale starts adding the 800 more students, I think the CS situation will be past critical if they don’t start addressing the situation soon.
Right, certainly the numbers are up in recent years. My point is this has happened at least once in the past, followed by a big dropoff . . . not saying that will happen this time, just that the sustainability of the student demand for CS is something the administration is likely trying to understand, since hiring a young tenured professor is a 30-40 year commitment. And good point about the 800 new students.
And, I also see quite a few CS graduates joining prestigious firms on WS. They might’ve been able to get a job in SV if they chose to. So potentially there are more CS graduates from Yale that are prepared for SV.
@IxnayBob: Algorithms is a core course but even schools with sufficient faculty, like Princeton, Cornell, and MIT, do not offer it more than once a year. Harvard now offers two versions of Algorithms, one for Math 55 types and one for mere mortals, but that’s still one offering per version each year.
Thanks for the information, @4thfloor. DS is a Math 230 type, but he’ll just have to take the one Algorithms course Yale offers 
We have taken the opportunity during spring break to discuss this more, and although he has a year before he needs to declare, he’s starting to be more invested in CS.
A different data point
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/1/1/e1400005.full.pdf
http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~aaronc/facultyhiring/ComputerScience_vertexlist.txt
Yale is one of the top group in CS. The academic advisors gives huge influence on Graduate programs. I observed lots of Yale undergrads ended Top 10 graduate CS related programs in the last few years.
Interesting—thanks for posting this!