Yale Stepping Up Computer Science After Students Demand Better Tech Training | Hacker News Reader

Yale Stepping Up Computer Science After Students Demand Better Tech Training

bloomberg.com

31 pointsca98am7922 comments

"The college’s computer-science faculty is about the same size as it was three decades ago, yet it has 181 undergraduate majors -- about four times as many as in 2010, Bloomberg reported earlier this month."

Sometimes I forget exactly how small some of these major schools are. (For comparison, UT Austin Computer Sciences has 41 faculty and about 2000 undergraduates.[1])

[1] https://cns.utexas.edu/about/departments/computer-science

Huh, I thought exactly the opposite. I graduated in classes of 17 and 7 from my CS and physics departments, respectively. The divide between sizes of schools is amazing.

50:1 is an appalling ratio.

50:1 is an appalling ratio.

We really do need to encourage gender diversity in our field!

True, but it may look worse than it is. The 41 seems to be tenured and tenure-track professors; there are about 10 adjuncts and 10 lecturers listed by the department.

At the time I went through it, there were fewer faculty, but the only class actually taught by a grad student was the giant introduction to CS; almost all of the upper-division classes were taught by professors. Class sizes for the required classes did get a little out of hand, but it wasn't as bad as you might think.

>>This fall Yale will import Harvard’s most popular course, an introductory programming class called CS50 -- a move the department called innovative while students have characterized it as humiliating.

Oh, tell me more...

I think it's incredible smart. More universities should do this. Harvard has produced a terrific course with a very good professor. Instead of trying to compete against it, why not utilize it into the classroom.

Although if I was a Yale student I would probably think it was humiliating.

The concept of an Ivy League institution not having at least a good computer-science department should be humiliating. Imagine a university saying that students shouldn't bother with mathematics because pre-law or accountancy are what are really important!

If you speak with actual Yale CS grads who are now programmers, I think you will find a very different story. Yale's CS curriculum is quite the opposite of weak, but the department is certainly stretched thin on people to teach it because the administration hadn't given the department the budget to hire more professors.

I was a Yale CS undergrad and the curriculum taught me quite well. The classes never taught me Rails or Node.js (trending when I graduated), but I did have a rigorous education in algorithms, systems, networks, firsthand practice with a variety of paradigms and concepts (functional, multi-threaded, continuations, etc.), plus the discrete math and graph theory to think about the concepts analytically. By all accounts that is a very thorough though somewhat classical approach to CS, but it certainly sets you up for long term success as a programmer.

If anything, the department's philosophy is actually "you don't need pre-law to become a good lawyer, we'd rather teach you logic and make you a strong writer first." Having enough people to execute on it is a different story.

Note that this article is about the high demand for pre-programming, not theoretical computer science.

Harvard and Yale have a rivalry going, so the students are uncomfortable with the fact that Harvard has a great computer science course and Yale has to borrow from them.

It makes way more sense than creating a new one from scratch, so props to Yale's faculty for taking this approach. There are places where experimenting and working on different teaching methods is a great idea, but I don't think this is one of them.

Ahh, I read it to mean they thought the coursework itself was humiliating, hence my confusion.

I'm honestly just guessing at the meaning (I live in New Haven but have very little association with Yale). There's definitely some history between them.

Like the time a group of Yale students dressed up as "Harvard Pep Squad" and got Harvard to do this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Harvard%E2%80%93Yale_prank

I took at look at the syllabus[1] and it sure seems to throw students in the deep end! The first week's lecture includes threads and event handling. Later on they cover all kinds of domains such as TCP/IP, tries, and MVC.

Those who survive the pace and workload seem like they will have a broad introduction to just about every area of CS.

Program By Design[2] used by a bunch of other great CS schools feels gentle by comparison.

[1]: https://cdn.cs50.net/2015/spring/lectures/0/w/syllabus/sylla... [2]: http://www.programbydesign.org/

CS50 was famously changed from "deep end" to "shallow end" several years ago, to make it more accessible to actual newcomers, not just kids who were experts in high school.

"Threads and events" are covered very very lightly in lecture 0.

Students characterizing that as humiliating? Sounds a lot like sensationalism. Certainly a Yalie won't want to admit that Harvard got it right, but a good curriculum is a good curriculum.

Yale historically has had a very strong CS program. They just haven't been as progressive in expanding their curriculum as Harvard has. In fact, they haven't changed their curriculum or even expanded their department in a decade or so. Whereas Harvard offers an intro to CS class that's the most popular undergrad class even for non-CS majors. It's time for Yale to catch up now.

This pretty much irrelevant to the industry. 181 undergrads means about 50 CS degrees a year. If they double the department over the next 10 year's that's about 250 more degrees...half the Fortune 500 can't get one.

Yale is a great school, but it's not where the important changes in education are happening. What it (or another Ivey) does doesn't scale out to the Land Grant's in the US or technical universities around the world. It's like the doings of the UK 's Crown Prince...highbrow celebrity gossip.

For more responsible reporting, see here:

http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2015/04/10/up-close-tech-life-...

Reminds me of 2003 when I told a Georgetown rep at a college fair I wanted to major in Computer Science. She chuckled a bit and said "we don't have that" as if somehow I was the idiot...

anyone know the size of Stanford's CS faculty and number of undergrad majors? For comparison's sake, it'd be interesting to find out.

http://www-cs.stanford.edu/faculty lists 55 regular faculty members.

http://www-cs.stanford.edu/undergraduate_students lists 808 students.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com