Since we’re talking about History here, perhaps it would be interesting to know that Yale’s CS Department was started by Alan Perlis, the world’s first Turing Award winner and a former president of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). Famous people in CS from Yale include Ronald Rivest (Creator of the RSA algorithm and another Turing Award Winner), Vladimir Rokhlin (inventor of the Fast Multipole Method Algorithm), Dan Spielman (Polya Prize Winner and MacArthur Fellow), Charles Leiserson (professor at MIT, co-author of CLRS), Joel Spolsky (Stack Overflow), Mitch Kapor (Lotus Notes), Kevin Ryan (MongoDB, Gilt Groupe), Eric Fossum (digital camera sensors), Avi Silberschatz (ACM fellow, author of the standard book on Operating Systems and Databases) and a whole host of other people.
My point is that blanket statements about the nature of either departments based on a few anecdotes or examples don’t help illuminate anything but distort perceptions instead. Both Yale’s EE and CS departments have grown by about 20-30% in the last few years, and they are still actively hiring. The last few hires include full professors from Cornell, U Mich, Microsoft Research and others, which shows they obviously have both the gravitas and resources to attract talented people from elsewhere. The CEID (Center for Engineering Innovation and Design) has recently been endowed for life by an alumnus, an underground plaza specifically for CS is almost nearing completion, the Center for High Performance Computing has opened, the Yale Quantum Institute has been in the news recently, funding for the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute has grown, and a number of other changes are on their way.
While there may not be as huge a variety of offerings as some other schools, Yale tends to be among the best at what it chooses to focus on, and there is definitely no shortage of challenges for a motivated student.