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.
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-...
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.
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.
Notable that in one night during midterms over 10% of the undergraduate body signed.
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.
To be fair: f*ck Yale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush#Early_life_and_e...
As someone that doesn't go to a school that's Yale by any means, this petition is kind of hilarious.
"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.