I never said that Penn secret societies or senior societies were not the same as Yale’s; in fact I know very little about Penn’s society life. I was replying to a previous poster about the point that Yale’s secret societies fulfill the role of a larger Greek life on campus, which it doesn’t. Secret societies play a very minimal role on Yale’s campus (contrary to popular stereotypes), and a far less obvious role than Penn’s Greek life does on its campus based on obvious raw % of students involved.
There are some significant differences between Penn and Yale in this area.
In terms of Electrical Engineering (EE and Computer Engineering)
ABET is the industry accrediting agency for engineering. On Yale’s EE web page, they say the more rigorous ABET program “is appropriate for highly motivated students”. (Apparently the typical Yale student is not motivated enough to handle it - after all, as @prezbucky says, “Yale is Yale” :-)) Quite frankly, I have never seen such a warning before. There is no such warning on Penn’s web site. Yale graduated a total of 4 EE’s last year. Penn graduated 16. Penn also graduated 7 Computer Engineers (which is a combination of EE and CS) while Yale does not offer a Computer Engineering degree. For context, Tufts is considered a small program graduating 25 EE’s and 11 Computer Engineers while MIT graduated around 47 EE’s and 295 EE/CS majors. I would call Penn a small but strong program. I really can’t say that about Yale.
If one looks at Yale’s EE department’s objectives the first one listed is a path into academia (not industry). Nowhere in their objectives do they list a direct path into industry as a practicing engineer. Presumably this is because direct entry into a profession from undergrad is not part of the “classical liberal arts model”. In that model, professional training is the role of grad school (i.e. like an MBA, JD or MD degree). There is nothing inherently wrong with a two tier model, but the optimal balance between the tiers is different for engineering than other professions because most people would like to have the option of going into a technical role straight out of undergrad and/or keeping grad school to one or two years. Historically, Yale has struggled with engineering, because they tended to view it as a “trade” (which is considered unworthy of a Yale degree) rather than a “profession” - partly because it did not fit their traditional educational model and partly because it was viewed as a career path for the middle rather than the upper class. Their strongest suit has been preparing students for either an academic career path or a career path outside of engineering. When it comes to this aspect of culture (or any other for that matter) one cannot paint all the Ivy League schools with the same brush. Penn (which has other undergraduate pre-professional majors) exhibits much less of this tendency and Cornell, which was actually founded as a private/state land grant college, does not exhibit it at all. Note that in Massachusetts the land grant charter was split between UMass and MIT, so MIT is a private land grant institution as well.
http://catalog.yale.edu/ycps/subjects-of-instruction/electrical-engineering/
In terms of CS
Yale’s CS program is not ABET accredited and Penn’s is. ABET accreditation is targeted toward ensuring that one can program in an engineering environment (which may or may not be necessary depending on the chosen career path) but it also specifies a level of coursework beyond that of a traditional liberal arts CS major. The storied CS programs (MIT, Stanford, UCB and CMU) are either accredited to both the ABET CS and Computer Engineering criteria or structured in a similar way. The intent of this structure is to produce computer professionals that can program at the system level (which requires a deeper level of understanding of the hardware) or application level as well as design systems and make architectural trade offs at the hardware-software boundary.
CS started as an applied math discipline and migrated into engineering. Stanford’s CS department migrated to engineering in 1985 (one of the first) and Yale’s CS department migrated to engineering in 2015 (one of the last). At the time of the migration Yale announced that this was one of the steps that they were starting to take to prepare their graduates for the 21st century. Another step was to outsource their introductory computer science course to Harvard because they were too far behind to develop their own. Now Yale students just watch the Harvard lectures over the Internet. Apparently Yale did not notice that the 21st century had started 15 years earlier and that most computer scientists started preparing for the 21st century shortly after the Personal Computer went mainstream in 1981.
http://news.yale.edu/2015/11/16/computer-science-department-21st-century
Penn, on the other hand is credited with building the first fully digital computer just after WW2 and has been keeping in touch with what is going on in the computer industry since then.
Yale graduated about 75 CS majors last year while Tufts graduated about 100 CS majors (about a third of which are ABET majors) plus about 12 Human/Computer Interface designers, Penn graduated about 135 CS majors and MIT graduated the 295 EE/CS majors listed above.
The Yale CS program is fine as the basis for an academic career path (this is what the US News rankings tend to measure) or for most traditional application level programming tasks in industry. Graduates should have no problem finding a job. The Penn program should provide better preparation for a wider range of programming tasks (depending on the mix of courses you take) especially if one is interested in engineering environments or programming “closer to the hardware”. The difference between the two schools will be less on the CS side than the engineering side, but still noticeable - especially for an industry based career path
Since the OP mentioned engineering I am assuming that his/her interests are skewed toward the computer engineering side which makes the difference between the schools much greater.
Number of graduates per year for each major
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=yale&s=all&id=130794#programs
If Yale graduates so few Engineering majors, imagine the intimate learning environment and personal attention they enjoy. hehe
There are so many lazy generalizations and false assertions in Mastodon’s post that I feel compelled to reply.
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Penn has about 2,600 students in each class, Yale has about 1800. Obviously there are going to be more engineering majors at Penn. Whether this will be an advantage (more like-minded peers) or a disadvantage (less individual attention from faculty) is debatable.
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Undergrad Engineering at Yale is unique in that it is flexible in terms of course choices for students with different academic priorities. The standard ABET accredited major is chosen by most EE majors, while the Engineering B.A. is chosen mostly by students hoping to double major (anything from Music to CS to History), or those with more diverse academic interests. I highly doubt any of these students “are not motivated enough to handle it”, especially considering Yale students have some of the highest average incoming GPAs and SAT scores (incidentally, about 30-40 points higher than those of Penn students).
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From Stanford’s website: http://csmajor.stanford.edu/Considering.shtml
“Like the CS department, the EE department is no longer ABET accredited. While such accreditation is useful in certain disciplines such as civil engineering, it has no practical significance whatsoever in computer science.” Neither is Harvard’s, CMU’s and a dozen other famed schools for CS. Unlike Mech Eng or Civil Eng, ABET accreditation is pretty unnecessary for EE/CS careers. -
From that same Yale website paragraph you quoted: “An academic path qualifies graduates to enter a top-tier graduate program conducting research with broad applications or significant consequences”. I’m highly skeptical that an education that equips grads to tackle cutting edge research questions would be insufficient for industry jobs like you’re suggesting. Either way, a student at both schools should be able to assemble an equally rigorous curriculum.
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Yale might have been slightly late to the Engineering game, but it has definitely plowed in its huge resources to make up for it. http://news.yale.edu/2013/06/10/20-ways-yale-was-transformed-during-levin-s-20-years . What Yale was like in the 70s is pretty irrelevant to the discussion now (Fun Fact: Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School was one of the foremost Engineering and Applied Science Schools in the 1800s and early 1900s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_Scientific_School)
Yale had only about 1300-1350 students each year. Starting the class of 2021, the student size will increase to about 1550.
FYI,
For all the talk about Yale’s CS program being really weak, my nephew, who graduated with a CS degree from Yale a few years ago, landed a job in Silicon Valley and started at just over six figures (salary + bonus).
Since we’re talking about History here, perhaps it would be interesting to know that Yale’s CS Department was started by Alan Perlis, the world’s first Turing Award winner and a former president of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). Famous people in CS from Yale include Ronald Rivest (Creator of the RSA algorithm and another Turing Award Winner), Vladimir Rokhlin (inventor of the Fast Multipole Method Algorithm), Dan Spielman (Polya Prize Winner and MacArthur Fellow), Charles Leiserson (professor at MIT, co-author of CLRS), Joel Spolsky (Stack Overflow), Mitch Kapor (Lotus Notes), Kevin Ryan (MongoDB, Gilt Groupe), Eric Fossum (digital camera sensors), Avi Silberschatz (ACM fellow, author of the standard book on Operating Systems and Databases) and a whole host of other people.
My point is that blanket statements about the nature of either departments based on a few anecdotes or examples don’t help illuminate anything but distort perceptions instead. Both Yale’s EE and CS departments have grown by about 20-30% in the last few years, and they are still actively hiring. The last few hires include full professors from Cornell, U Mich, Microsoft Research and others, which shows they obviously have both the gravitas and resources to attract talented people from elsewhere. The CEID (Center for Engineering Innovation and Design) has recently been endowed for life by an alumnus, an underground plaza specifically for CS is almost nearing completion, the Center for High Performance Computing has opened, the Yale Quantum Institute has been in the news recently, funding for the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute has grown, and a number of other changes are on their way.
While there may not be as huge a variety of offerings as some other schools, Yale tends to be among the best at what it chooses to focus on, and there is definitely no shortage of challenges for a motivated student.
@finolex1 Penn has 2400-2450 students per class. Starting this year Yale will have about 1550.
@J3172722126 what did u guys end up choosing?
Yes. He choose Penn. Thanks.
congrats on Penn! for engineering the no brainer choice. good luck!