^ Interesting! So according to this, Yale is still top-10.
If I am reading it correctly, the CS “prestige hierarchy” is:
Stanford
Berkeley
MIT
Caltech
Harvard
Cornell
CMU
Princeton
Yale
Washington
This ranking puts Yale in better light than other rankings. Another surprise is Caltech, whose CS department is rumored to have collapsed recently. (Wonder if Harvard and Cornell will switch places now that Morrisett is returning from Harvard to Cornell. Of course not, but still a loss for Harvard and a gain for Cornell.)
Notably losing out in this ranking are Princeton and UIUC.
GREAT Yale CS news in today’s Yale Daily News—$20 million donation, plus 5 new faculty members over the next few years. CS will also now be part of SEAS. Though there will still be gaps in the CS offerings, this is a big step in the right direction! (And perfect timing for this year’s prospective CS majors!) Here’s a link to the article:
That is great news. DS, who loves being at Yale and whose “natural” major probably is CS, will be less discouraged about the mixed reviews for Yale’s CS department.
The snarky side of me can’t resist pointing out that the donation, while wonderful and much more than I could even think of contributing, is equivalent to less than 0.1% of Yale’s endowment. I understand that one can’t dip into the endowment for every perceived need, but I think it would have been money well spent and painful delays could have been avoIded. Just my opinion.
@IxnayBob Agreed—but at least they’re finally taking action! Hopefully hiring those 5 faculty members won’t take more than a couple of years. And hopefully the requirements for the degree/CS major won’t change now that the department is in SEAS.
It wouldn’t really be fair to change requirements in any way that makes life difficult for current students. I guess I’ll research later, but do you know off-hand what the changes would be if they go 100% to SEAS overnight?
ETA: a quick Googling makes it appear that distributional requirements don’t change. DS would probably select CS in a heartbeat if it removed the foreign language requirement
I don’t know, but I’m guessing that current students—and maybe even students entering Yale this fall—would be grandfathered in if the requirements changed. I hope so, anyway! My son isn’t a big fan of physics, for example, and he’s hoping never to take another physics course again (though more math would be fine).
I’m the parent of a Junior CS/Math double major at Yale. It’s been a long while since I’ve posted on CC, but upon reading this thread in its entirety, I felt the need to set the record straight on a few things:
@gibby It’s time to put your personal crusade against Stan Eisenstat to rest. I’m sorry your son found computer science to be too difficult to continue (let’s be frank - every parent knows that “too boring” is a euphemism for “too hard”) and that you took it so badly. But my son IS a Yale CS major and he and his peers consider Stan to be brilliant. It wasn’t Eisenstat’s fault your son chose to move to the humanities - STEM students quit all the time. CS is hard. It’s theoretical. And it’s not for everyone. Get over it already and stop smearing an excellent professor (who, btw, isn’t even the DUS anymore!)
To the broader CC community that is considering Yale or wondering about it’s CS dept: My son’s experience has been outstanding at Yale. His opportunities there have been nothing short of amazing and his respect for the faculty is absolute. He is fully aware of the challenges the lack of faculty has put on the dept and has, in fact, helped lead the recent petition for expansion. We have seen very encouraging results in recent days with the addition of 6 new professors and a move to SEAS where they will have additional resources available to the dept. As for CS50, my son was initially against bringing it to campus for a very simple reason: the already highly strained faculty had no one to spare to teach an intro course to students who would most likely never become CS majors. It made no sense to take Scasselatti away from teaching a much needed upper level course to serve the masses when there was no one to take his place and no known plan for more faculty. As it turns out, my son will be a TF for CS50 in the fall. Furthermore, the heavy theoretical core of the CS dept has served him very well. He will be interning for Microsoft this summer, and has been recruited by Palantir and Facebook as well. The questions he received during his interviews absolutely tapped into some of his most difficult and abstract learning. He’s been a grader, a peer tutor, he works for HackYale, he’s done research with Spielman and on top of all this, he is in the midst of doing his own original research, submitting papers to conferences for publication.
So, is Yale a good choice for CS? Yes, I think my son would say absolutely - warts and all. Challenges remain, but the opportunities he’s had from being in a small dept with outstanding professors (with more on the way) and the entirety of the Yale Experience as an undergrad (which he would say is second-to-none) combine to make Yale an outstanding choice.
Thank you so much, @robotmom1414! This is great to hear, and I’m glad that your son has been so happy in CS at Yale, despite the department’s challenges. My son is a likely CS major and has been accepted to Yale (early action) and Stanford and is torn between the two. They seem like very different places, and although excellence and reputation in CS is one important factor, there are others as well. He does not want a super-charged, highly competitive, 24/7 CS major experience—he has strong outside interests that are very time-consuming and wants to be around people who can interact well with other people socially (in fact, that’s one reason why he didn’t apply to MIT or other tech schools). Any insights you have on this score would be much appreciated—thanks again!
Seconding @robotmom1414–the opportunities both my S’s had as a result of Yale CS have been fantastic. Both were CS majors. @Planner, both sons were highly involved in extracurriculars and one son was a double major, if that helps answer your concerns as well.
@Planner: if you PM me, I’ll give you my son’s email address and your son can contact him directly. He’s extremely busy right now, but he’s always happy to talk with prospective CS majors.
And thanks, too, @robotmom1414—my son is out of town at the moment, but I’ll talk to him about this when he returns. Maybe he can talk to your son at Bulldog Days (not too far off now!).
Very happy to hear that the Yale Administration is now doing the right thing re: its CS department. The graduate and undergraduate students who put together the public campaign should be pleased with this outcome.
@robotmom1414: Actually my son will be graduating Yale with a job in computer science at a very well known tech company as a CS Data Analyst – even though he switched out of Yale’s CS Department and will be graduating with a degree in Psychology. He was truly bored with the material Yale’s CS department was teaching and pursued what he loved and was passionate about on his own. So, his boredom was not a euphemism, nor did I take it badly.
And FWIW: My son didn’t write the article in post #18 about Stan Eisenstat, he just agreed with it.
@foilist Thanks—he’s not 100% sure at this point, and I actually could see him going into finance or some other field in which CS is used. It’s hard to know—and many students change their minds after they arrive in college and take a course or two. (When I was in college, a good percentage of the students in my dorm were premed when they arrived; by the end of the year, only a few remained!)
That said, it would be really important that he have good teachers and good experiences in at least the beginning CS courses. His high school tries, but the students have literally had to teach themselves, and he wants more than that out of college CS classes.
