Math and economics at Yale

JHS
Wed, 17 Jun 2015 15:43:49 +0000

Not that this is definitive by any means, but it’s interesting to compare the size of the undergraduate math community at Yale with that of some of its peers. In 2014, Yale awarded a grand total of 37 primary bachelor’s degrees in math or math-related majors (including statistics, econ & math, math & physics, math & philosophy, CS & math), out of a class of about 1,300. So about 2.8% of the students.

Harvard, with about 1,700 students, awarded 130 math degrees (7.6%). Columbia had 81 math or statistics primary degrees and 87 primary degrees in operations research (a very math-y major in its engineering program), representing over 8% of its class. The University of Chicago, which is about the same size as Yale, awarded 116 math or statistics primary degrees (8.6%). (Chicago, unlike the other colleges, makes public a quarterly census of its students’ declared majors. At the end of winter quarter 2015, there were 320 students with declared math or math-related majors, out of a total of just over 3,400 students with declared majors.) Princeton, also about the same size as Yale, awarded 55 primary math degrees, and also 52 primary degrees in operations research . Williams, whose student body is 40% the size of Yale’s, had twice as many straight math majors – 26-13. (And of course I am not even talking about MIT, Mudd, or Caltech.)

The point being that Yale is apparently not a place where people who are really into math at the undergraduate level tend to congregate. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go there, or that it shouldn’t be a high choice, or that you can’t get a good math education there, but it does mean that to get the wonderful things Yale offers you give up something in terms of critical mass and math community vibrancy. There’s a lot more math in the air at some other, otherwise pretty similar colleges.