Up & To The Right — The Growth of Computer Science at Yale 📈

Some things about computer science at Yale haven’t changed in a very long time. Here’s StackOverflow CEO Joel Spolsky (Yale ’91) talking about what CS 323 was like 30 years ago,

“The third was this little gut called CS 322, which you know of as CS 323. Back in my day, CS 322 took so much work that it was a 1½ credit classw… After years of students’ complaining, the course was adjusted to be a 1 credit class, it was renumbered CS 323, and still had weekly 40 hour problem sets. Other than that, it’s pretty much the same thing. I loved it, because I love programming.”

We still have 323. It’s still hard. Students (like me) still complain about it. But in other ways, Yale CS is undergoing a profound transition. CS50 came to campus. New clubs like CodeHaven, Yale Computer Society, and Code4Good, have been created. The job recruiting landscape has changed. And of course, there’s the largest change of all — the explosive and unprecedented growth of the CS major.

1. The CS major has grown 8.29x (!) in the last 10 years

Note: Yale has a computer science major and 4 other combined majors (CS & Psychology, CS & Mathematics, Electrical Engineering &…