

Yale CS students say the school has 'ceded the battle' to Harvard and Stanford - dhatch387
http://www.businessinsider.com/yale-computer-science-petition-2015-3

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_benedict
"With so few professors, Yale's department has no choice but to ignore entire
areas of computer science."

This is true of most disciplines at most schools, when it comes to research at
least.

~~~
hga
Indeed. The specifics include a comparison to "Harvard, Stanford, MIT,
Princeton, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell"

Stanford, UCBerkely, CMU and MIT are the _world 's_ top CS schools, everyone
else including Yale has difficulty competing with them. Yale's CS department
has always been small, if not idiosyncratic (I'm thinking of their AI
professor who said everything else in the field was bunk). In the areas I'm
most interested in, their development of T, the first production level
implementation of a Scheme, was the biggest thing to come out of it, and that
was 3 decades ago.

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army
If those numbers about grad students are right, that's pretty weird - it
sounds like they're being overly picky about who they admit and only admitting
the people who were accepted at other, more prestigious, places.

Edit: I've seen exactly the same thing happen with faculty hiring, it's a bit
stranger that it would happen with grad students since it's easier to move the
bar year-to-year there.

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zhte415
Squeezed out, indeed. The text of the article took up less than 1/4 of the
full page width until half way down the content, mainly accompanied by a
picture of a football team training and a 'see also' section.

BusinessInsider clearly know where their loyalties lie.

Footnote of the article: "The 10 most useless graduate degrees"
[http://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-most-useless-
graduate-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-most-useless-graduate-
degrees-2015-2)

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tsuyoshi
This is not really my area of expertise, but is the Harvard CS department
actually in the same league as Stanford? When I think of top CS schools, I
think of MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Berkeley. Neither Harvard nor
Yale come to mind. Maybe they are trying to play up the HYS rivalry for people
that know even less about this than I do.

~~~
vilhelm_s
They are not in the same league yet, but in the last decade Harvard has been
trying to improve. And they continue to do so, last November they announced
that they will increase faculty size by 50% [0]. At the same time, computer
science is becoming a more and more popular, in 2014 the intro to CS course
surpassed economics as the most taken course at Harvard [1].

I think the bigger picture is that computer science as a subject is becoming
more important. Both Harvard and Yale have historically been considered among
the "best" US universities despite being weak in CS. I guess the concern is
that because CS is becoming more valued, they need to become strong there as
well in order to stay on top.

[0] [http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2014/11/ballmer-to-
support-...](http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2014/11/ballmer-to-support-
computer-science-expansion) [1]
[http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/9/11/cs50-breaks-
enro...](http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/9/11/cs50-breaks-enrollment-
records/)

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anocendi
Even if Yale has a comparable CS department, it is still hard to compete
against Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU and Princeton: it is a matter of
New Heaven vs. Boston, Bay Area, Pitt and NYC.

Boston, Bay Area, Pitt and NYC are crawling with major sites for Tech Giants
(Google and Microsoft for obvious ones) as well as hot start-ups, whereas New
Heaven does not have much to enjoy regarding thriving tech scene within a
reasonable radius (< 2 hours commute).

And to chime in my personal preference, if I were to invest about 6 years of
my life at a place, I would take Boston or Bay Area any day: there is
something refreshing about Boston or Bay Area which I do not find in New
Heaven (I have had extended stays in all three places).

So any perceptive and shrewd student who got admissions from Yale as well as
one of Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU or Princeton would choose not to
go to Yale after admitted students visit day.

~~~
gdubs
Disagree. Yale is known for having one of the best painting programs, for
instance. If it were location, the kids would go to any school in NYC, because
that's where the art-scene action is.

If a program is top-notch, then the location is secondary -- most of the
socializing is going to be with peers on and around campus, anyway.

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marcusrussi
Notable that in one night during midterms over 10% of the undergraduate body
signed.

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verylongname
Perhaps when it comes to undergraduate work, there is a problem. But Rokhlin,
Coifman and Spielman are all members of that department. I would be pleased to
have any one of them as a thesis adviser. There are no doubt other faculty
members whose work I am not familiar with.

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akhilcacharya
As someone that doesn't go to a school that's Yale by any means, this petition
is kind of hilarious.

