Yale vs Penn

[Mastadon]

There are some concerns associated with Yale relating your major

1.Yale does not offer a major in Computer Engineering.

1. Yale does not have a good reputation for Engineering within the industry due to a seeming lack of interest and investment. Its EE program was so weak that it lost its ABET accreditation from 1965-1973 (right when the computer hardware industry was ramping up).

When one looks at the Dodge Report one finds that they never recommended doing away with separate programs in the different branches of engineering, or giving up accreditation, but at the time no one bothered to take note of that part of the report. In fact, undergraduate education was so much neglected that I myself was never asked to teach any undergraduate courses during the first 13 years of my time at Yale.

http://seas.yale.edu/i-am/alumnus/yale-history-blog/post-world-war-ii-era

1. Yale does not have a good reputation for Computer Science within the industry due to a seeming lack of interest and investment. Its CS program was stagnant for the 30 years that the Internet was ramping up.

Yale, one of the world’s top universities in most respects, has fallen behind in computer science. It doesn’t crack the highest tier of schools measured by the number of graduates in software companies or by salaries for majors in the discipline; it’s struggling to educate throngs of students with a faculty about the same size as three decades ago; top students in the field are opting to enroll elsewhere; the head of its computer science department is publicly complaining; and undergraduates are circulating a petition in protest.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-06/want-a-job-in-silicon-valley-after-yale-good-luck-with-that

4.Yale’s less than good reputation for engineering dates back almost 200 years. Four years after America’s first Engineering School (RPI) was created, at a time when the country was trying to ramp up the work force to support the Industrial Revolution, Yale issued the influential “Yale Report of 1928”. It recommended that colleges implement a “Classical Curriculum” centered around the “dead languages” and that Engineering related courses be excluded from the undergraduate curriculum.

Professional studies are designedly excluded from the course of instruction at college, to leave room for those literary and scientific acquisitions which, if not commenced there, will, in most cases, never be made

.http://collegiateway.org/reading/yale-report-1828/

Thirty four years after the Yale Report (1862) the Morrill Act was passed to support the establishment of “land grant” institutions in each state for teaching the agircultural and mechanic arts (i.e.Engineering). Yale was appointed Connecticut’s land grant instutution in 1863 and awarded the land grant funds. Thirty years later Yale’s land grant status was revoked due to unsatisfactory performance and awarded to Storrs Agricultural College (now UConn). Yale sued for breach of contract and won an additional $155,000.

J.H. Hale of Glastonbury gave his fellow Grangers statistics showing that, in its first 24 years as the state’s land grant institution, Yale had graduated only seven students in the agricultural course, at a cost of $180,000, or $25,700 per student. Hale questioned the spending, the strict entrance exam, and the curriculum.

Nationally, the Grange movement was following a similar campaign against “classical” education. Stemmons notes in his history that the fight in Connecticut “was anti-Yale, not pro-Storrs. The same phenomenon was repeated in other states where the Land Grant Act had been grafted on to privately endowed ‘classical’ institutions. Dartmouth apparently gave up willingly, Brown not so willingly. In its larger implications the feud might be reported as ‘The National Grange vs. Classical Colleges.’ In Connecticut, however, it was and is known as the Yale-Storrs Controversy.”

http://advance.uconn.edu/1997/971124/112497hs.htm

If you were looking for a classical liberal arts education (which does not include computers or engineering) then Yale would be a viable choice.

But, for a major in Computer Engineering, or if you are looking for a more liberal liberal arts education, I would suggest that your best choice is Penn.