My son was admitted to both Yale and Cornell for the class of 2020. Cornell’s computer science department is ranked #6 and Yale’s is ranked #20 (US News & World Report rankings). But in general he is more attracted to Yale more than Cornell and is leaning toward going there.
As his Dad, I’m concerned that maybe, given his hope to go to an absolute top computer science grad school such as MIT, he’d be better off going to the school with the higher-ranked computer science department now. So, I’m wondering if anyone here would have insight about this. Would he have a significantly better chance at getting into an absolute top comp sci grad school if he goes to Cornell?? Or would either school be equally good for that?
This is a huge decision for my son so I thought I’d see if I can get any extra insight here!
I think in fields such as CS rankings may be more relevant.
Yale has a very small faculty in CS, about 20. Cornell has 85. In an expensive major to conduct, scale may confer many benefits to the students.
Why don’t you see how many students major in CS at each and what they do after graduation.
Assuming $$ are not a question, let him go where he wants to go. Neither place will hinder him in getting in to a top-tier CS grad program- if that’s what he still wants in 3 years time (c’mon, we’re talking Yale & Cornell here, not Podunk & Star U!)
Same as high school: let college be college. Trust your kid. Let him own this decision. To quote my collegedad (who said this at just the right moment for me/us): “there is no decision here that [kid] can make that would be worse than us deciding for [kid]”.
And even putting your thumb on the scale with USNWR rankings counts 
(Also, college is always about more than the major. And you may think that he is 100% stay with CS- and he might!- but…look at how many kids change majors once they get to college).
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Keep in mind the vast majority of CS graduates do not go on to grad school depending on their specialty.
The benefit of Cornell CS is the size and scope, but honestly, the factors that will take him to grad school are what he does in college, not which of these outstanding schools he goes to. He needs to do quality research with a well known professor and get 3 academic letters of recommendation and publish along with getting top grades. Top CS schools expect applicants to have publications. Unbelievable isn’t it.
CS course offerings:
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courseinfo/listofcscourses
http://catalog.yale.edu/ycps/subjects-of-instruction/computer-science/#coursestext
Yale’s small CS department seems to have most typical core CS courses, except compilers. Cornell does have more elective CS courses.
If he does decide to go to work instead of graduate school, Cornell’s larger size may attract more non-Wall-Street-or-consulting employers to recruit.
Class schedules are here:
https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/FA16
https://students.yale.edu/oci/search.jsp
Neither specifically lists class sizes, but you can probably guess that Cornell’s class sizes can be pretty large, based on the number of discussion sections associated with some of the lectures.
@ucbalumnus
What percentage of CS students enter the work force vs going on to graduate school in your estimation? I can’t find a source for the actual numbers but it seems the majority do not go on to graduate school.
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http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/upload/2014-Computer-Science.pdf indicates that Cornell CS graduates’ destinations were 78% employment and 19% graduate school.
http://ocs.yale.edu/content/statistics-1 has Yale career surveys, but does not break them out by major (and CS may be too small to get meaningful sample sizes). For 2015 (at http://ocs.yale.edu/sites/default/files/Final%20Class%20of%202015%20Report%20%286%20months%29%20-%20FINAL.pdf ), 76% of all responding graduates went to employment versus 20% to graduate school, and the biggest employment destinations were consulting and finance, at 15.7% each of employed graduates.
Because of what US Students can make working right now, there is a definite lull in CS graduate school applications from Americans. Many are “getting while the getting is good”.