Yale among the Ivies

posterX
Sat, 26 Jan 2008 02:50:19 +0000

A lot of the above isn’t accurate at all.

One of the most inaccurate statements is that Yale ranks low for student happiness. Yale has the happiest students of any school I have ever spent a significant amount of time visiting, which is a list that would include almost all the top 50 univs and colleges in the country and several dozen around the world. The school has the strongest focus on undergraduates in the United States (even surpassing all of the small LACs), the greatest academic programs and the most vibrant student life “scene” of any top university by a wide margin. The area of undergraduate dorms is significantly denser than any other campus, meaning that everything to do and everyone’s friends are accessible within a 2-3 minute walk, which, in my opinion is the main reason why the place is buzzing with activity 24/7.

Also, New Haven has become one of the top 4 or 5 college towns in the United States. See my posts at http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/yale-university/449186-yale-s-location.html and the other links I posted there for very detailed descriptions of what it is like now. In terms of location, the other Ivies don’t measure up.

Finally, in terms of overall undergraduate quality of science and engineering, Yale is easily the best in the Ivies – only Caltech and MIT can compare. Obviously, Yale isn’t a huge engineering school like Purdue, Michigan, Stanford, Minnesota or Georgia Tech, but in terms of educational quality, research quality and research per student, it is on the level of Caltech. For other sciences, Yale is a world leader in both quality terms and quantity terms. Yale’s recent acquisition, from Bayer World Research of Germany, of a massive new science campus a couple miles away from the main campus – which just by itself, is larger than MIT’s entire campus and is already completely built out in terms of cutting-edge laboratory space – will only accelerate this university’s world leadership in the sciences. This acquisition comes on the heels of $1B in new science buildings on the existing central campus.