<p>Hello,</p>
<p>I will be applying to colleges this year and was looking at Yale.</p>
<p>I will most probably major in Computer Science/Engineering. I wanted to know if Yale is good in these fields.</p>
<p>I am also interested in economics. Is Yale good for economics?</p>
<p>Also, is aid for international students at Yale very limited (I know it's need blind)? If you could tell me how many internationals got aid last year it'll be really helpful.</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>Computer Science and Engineering--- sounds Stanfordy. </p>
<p>Economics-- PRINCETON.</p>
<p>The "Big Five" in economics are Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Chicago, and Stanford.</p>
<p>If you want Cs/Engineering or economics, then MIT or Stanford are probably better. </p>
<p>However, I wouldn't worry about it too much. The fact is, most people end up switching majors from what they thought they were going to do anyway. And even of those people who complete a major in a certain field, a lot of them don't really like it, but just completed it for a "safety career" or because by the time they found out they didn't like it, they had completed so much coursework in it that they figured that they might as well finish it, or many other reasons. This is why you see so many people at MIT and Stanford who complete engineering degrees but don't really want to be engineers, and instead, after graduation, run off to jobs in consulting or banking, or go to law school or medical school.</p>
<p>eh, yale may not be the best in comp sci... but... they aren't bad.</p>
<p>you really cant find a bad major at all the top colleges.</p>
<p>I agree with bingo... Yale might not be the absolute best at the fields you're interested in, but they're definitely not that shabby at all. And besides, the prestige of the department doesn't really matter at the undergraduate level ~ the important thing is to go to a school that gives you the best overally experience, and the other things will come as they should. And besides, majoring in a smaller department can often mean that you have a lot more personal contact with the profs, wich is almost always a good thing :p</p>
<p>Yale's engineering program is small, but when ranked for quality, it's the best program (just above Caltech, Stanford and UCSB):</p>
<p>See this ranking, by ISI (the world's leading warehouse for scientific data):</p>
<p>The ranking is complete bogus. MIT and Berkeley aren't even on the list, which makes absolutely no sense. What exactly is "relative impact"?</p>
<p>Read the study before you call it "bogus". The parameters are clearly explained. Furthermore, Sciencewatch/ISI is probably the most respected scientific organization in the world. </p>
<p>Given that Caltech, Stanford, Yale, Cornell, Harvard, UC Santa Barbara, etc are all in the top ten, I would imagine that MIT and Berkeley would be in the top 20 if the complete ranking were displayed.</p>
<p>I'm sorry, but I doubt that many people would actually take such a ranking seriously. Yale #1, UCSB and UCLA both ranked above Berkeley, and MIT does not even appear in the top 10? The methodology, however great it may seem to you, is utter crap.</p>
<p>The methodology is obviously based on research quality. A ranking based on the size/recognizability of engineering programs would have MIT and Berkeley near the top. But for undergraduate studies, I would say that research quality is more important than just the overall size of a program. </p>
<p>In fact, big programs might be more prestigious but competing in classroom/lab against all those other 1000s of students is a definite negative.</p>
<p>It's kind of like taking McDonald's versus In-N-Out Burger. McDonald's has a good burger, and is the most well known. But In-N-Out wins hands-down for the best fast food burger.</p>
<p>First of all, are you sure that this is an undergraduate ranking? It seems like a graduate ranking to me. And also, the methodology of using "relative impact" seems very skeptical. If a university publishes 1 paper and it's cited 5 times, that university will get ranked higher than one that publishes 1000 papers but is cited 4 times per paper, right? This ranking doesn't take into account a school's reputation and resources (physical and human), just the percentage of citations per paper. That doesn't seem like an effective way to rank engineering programs.</p>
<p>It's a ranking of departments, which in my opinion makes it even more valid than someone trying to rank one "program" or another based on subjective criteria.</p>
<p>Your comparison is sort of out of touch, I think, because there is a minimum number of papers required that have to be published for the university to even show up in the ranking at all. In this case, it's hundreds.</p>
<p>It doesn't matter if it's hundreds. The fault still remains. Don't you realize that a ranking based on citations per paper is completely bogus? The ranking should reflect total impact, based on the # of papers with respect to relative impact. The way it's currently ranked, the total # of papers doesn't affect the ranking at all. And besides, the quality of engineering programs is about more than the number of citations a paper gets. USNEWS, despite all its flaws, is a much more accurate and composite ranking than this.</p>
<p>Among scientists, this is the most respected ranking. It's the only ranking based on objective, rather than subjective, criteria. In fact, faculty are often hired (and fired) based on their contribution to the ISI citation impact.</p>
<p>So you're saying that among engineers, Yale is considered the best school for engineering, that BU is considered better than MIT? I highly doubt that.</p>
<p>There are many factors that make a school a "best school." It's up to each individual person and what they want from a school. </p>
<p>In terms of engineer-scientists, they look at which universities have the best research in their field of work or which professors have the most productive/best research groups, not which "school" is the "most prestigious."</p>
<p>All I'm saying is that if you measure research quality, Yale, UCSB, Stanford and Caltech appear to come out at the top when measuring research from 1997-2001 (the latest ISI ranking). That's important to scientists. And that this is perhaps a more important indicator of a good undergraduate program than just which school has the biggest name or the largest number of students.</p>
<p>But that's my point. The methodology for this ranking is severly flawed in that it only takes into account citations per paper. If we could hypothetically extend this methology to include individual people, one could say that a single engineer who is cited 3 times for 1 paper (giving him/her a relative impact of 300%), is better at engineering than every university in the US. Do you not realize the severe fallacy of that kind of methodology? One simple way to improve the ranking would be to base it on the # of papers with respect to relative impact. And once again, I highly doubt that this ranking of engineering programs is regarded as accurate. Show any engineer this ranking; he/she will roll on the ground laughing. To claim that Yale is the best engineering school, and that MIT and Berkeley are not even in the top 10 will never be highly regarded in any setting.</p>
<p>Yale #1 in engineering?!? lol. i like Yale a lot, but that's absolute ....</p>
<p>haha tru dat</p>