Yale has become a overwhelming Humanities and liberal arts college. The days it was known for engineering are long past. I was on a tour of Yale last August and the tour guide had graduated with a political science degree and had not found a job in the time since they had graduated. They sounded a bit overwhelmed at not finding a job. They were asking all the people on the tour if they knew someone or some employer. Liberal Arts degrees are a dime a dozen at this point and not getting offered the kind of salaries and jobs they once did.
I have heard many attend Yale look for the easiest degree and then wear their Y and expect everyone to fight to hire them. With the economy changing and employers expecting more skills and real life degrees I have thought despite the rankings Yale is slowly falling behind Columbia, maybe soon Brown and Dartmouth.
Schools often keep ranking years after they should be lowered by their past reputations.
I’m not affiliated with Yale in any way, but as a to-be student at a LAC I feel like I have to defend the value of a liberal arts education.
First, I feel like there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what a liberal arts education is. The term encompasses subjects like economics, math, and natural sciences in addition to humanities. Additionally, elite liberal arts students can do pretty well for themselves. Bio and chem are good prep for med school while humanities subjects like English are good prep for law school. Math and econ are very lucrative majors in general. A lot of LACs and universities actually also consider computer science to be a liberal art.
Liberal arts also teaches you a lot of soft skills that are more useful than they seem. While an engineering degree may get you a starting job that’s relatively high-paying, the soft skills that you develop at an elite liberal arts institution yield great returns later in one’s career path.
The use of terms such as “real skills” and “real life degrees” don’t sit as well with me for many reasons. First, a liberal arts student double-majoring in, say, math and philosophy has most likely gained a deep and broad understanding of their world that’ll serve them for their entire life. Their degree is most certainly a “real life” one. Secondly, it’s actually soft skills that matter the most in our changing economy. A person who knows only how to code will be out of luck if/when their job is outsourced, while a person with an education in the liberal arts can leverage those skills to climb up the career ladder quicker.
I’m not trying to say that job prospects are great for all liberal arts students. A person with only a BA in classics may not fare as well. But I just felt like there were a lot of misconceptions in the original post.
Respectfully, I suspect some posters on this thread are either not serious or haven’t been to New Haven in the past decade or so. With the enormous investment and partnership with the University, the area has only become safer and more beautiful over the past decade or so. And the surest way to know if Yale is in decline is to check the cross-admit data. The only three schools who currently win the majority of cross admits with Yale are Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, and even then, not by a substantial margin.
“For New Haven, we found that the violent crime rate is one of the highest in the nation, across communities of all sizes (both large and small). Violent offenses tracked included rape, murder and non-negligent manslaughter, armed robbery, and aggravated assault, including assault with a deadly weapon. According to NeighborhoodScout’s analysis of FBI reported crime data, your chance of becoming a victim of one of these crimes in New Haven is one in 119.”
As for Yale, it has been dropping steadily in the rankings of multiple international ranking entities for years - ARWU, QS and Times Higher Education - just to name a few.
If you look at that map you posted, @Defensor, and if you have any knowledge of New Haven, you’ll note that the areas around campus, or where students actually go, are in the safer half of the scale. Just like the area around UChicago isn’t Chi-raq, UPenn isn’t in the roughest part of Philly and Columbia isn’t in a dangerous part of Harlem. If you compare Department of Education statistics, you’ll find that Yale’s crime rate is in line with its urban university peer group.
Yale stands very high in most educational rankings, including the ones you name, and your statement that Yale has been “dropping steadily in the rankings” is inaccurate. In the ARWU ranking, for example, the first one you cite (apparently the most popular university ranking in Shanghai), Yale was 14 years straight in the #11 spot until it dropped last year - to #12. It’s been #15 or so for the past four years in the QS ranking, below the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and two universities in Singapore, which tells me all I need to know. In the Times Higher Education World University rankings, Yale rose from #12 in 2018 to #8 in 2019. I’m not alarmed.
"NEW HAVEN — Three slayings that took place over an 18½-year span beginning in the early 90s shattered the notion that an Ivy League university in the center of a city then known for crime was immune to violence that occasionally erupted outside its doorstep.
The media storm that resulted after the slayings of Yale University students Christian Prince in 1991, Suzanne Jovin in 1998 and Annie Le in 2009 brought issues of class and privilege front and center.
New Haven has had years with high levels of violence that terrorized neighborhoods and devastated families and communities. But the media covered the Yale incidents more intently, because, despite evidence to the contrary, people still interpret colleges as a place where nothing bad happens, said Richard Hanley, associate professor of Journalism at Quinnipiac University in Hamden.
“As we see with sexual assaults and hazing incidents, etc., colleges don’t deserve that part of mythology. They are just as susceptible to social ills as anywhere else,” Hanley said."
While I’m hardly a big fan of the Ivies, I would say that Yale is no better or worse than it has been for the bast 50 years. It is however, far more popular than it ever was. Application rates for Yale have continuously risen for the past 20 years, and the increase seems to be accelerating.
So I have no idea what data you are using to come to the conclusion that Yale is “fading”.
“It’s been #15 or so for the past four years in the QS ranking”
QS ranked Yale at #3 in the world in 2010. Yale has noticeably declined in the QS rankings in less than a decade, dropping from 3rd to 15th. A drop of more than one place per year, and probably the sharpest drop of any elite university in the world in that time period.
@Defensor, if you read further in the article you posted, you’ll find the following, which makes my point for me:
Again, have a look at the Department of Education statistics; they tell the same story.
You can pick on the QS rankings if you like (which, as I note, no one I’ve ever encountered outside of College Confidential ever cites or cares about), but since none of the other rankings you cited show anything like the trend you’re talking about, I’m going to assume there was a change in their methodology.
If you’re one of the very fortunate few who get into Yale, you have access to resources, including faculty, fellow students, alumni network and employment opportunities, with few peers in the world. Since we’re on the subject of rankings, feel free to Google “most beautiful college campuses” and “happiest college students”; you’ll find that Yale generally ranks pretty high there too, which is one reason applications have been soaring (https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2019/01/25/yale-receives-record-number-of-applications/). That isn’t changing anytime soon, whatever they say in Shanghai, Singapore or on the UChicago or Penn boards of College Confidential.
Depends on who you compare it to, fading against Harvard and Stanford, yes, but not against the rest. I would say that New Haven is not a destination city and bragging that your only 90 minutes from NYC, well that does give Columbia a bump.
I had a look at the ARWU rankings (which I have never heard of before). Some of the rankings are truly bizarre. The University of Washington at #14 (ahead of Hopkins and Penn)? The University of California, SF at #21 (ahead of NW and Duke)? Brown, UVA, Dartmouth, Georgetown, and Tufts not even in the top 100? I wouldn’t put a lot of stock in those rankings.
The discussion sounds to me a bit like an old anecdote from the Soviet dominated Eastern Europe.
The official propaganda kept talking about “the rotten West.”
The skeptics, however, were saying: “It may be rotting but it smells so nicely.”
Wow, Yale is fading because it’s focusing on critical thinking skills. Because everybody needs to be an engineer.
It’s also fading becuase it has a high acceptance rate of 6%. A school on the way down, for sure.