[tsuyoshi]

This is not really my area of expertise, but is the Harvard CS department actually in the same league as Stanford? When I think of top CS schools, I think of MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Berkeley. Neither Harvard nor Yale come to mind. Maybe they are trying to play up the HYS rivalry for people that know even less about this than I do.

[vilhelm_s]

They are not in the same league yet, but in the last decade Harvard has been trying to improve. And they continue to do so, last November they announced that they will increase faculty size by 50% [0]. At the same time, computer science is becoming a more and more popular, in 2014 the intro to CS course surpassed economics as the most taken course at Harvard [1].

I think the bigger picture is that computer science as a subject is becoming more important. Both Harvard and Yale have historically been considered among the "best" US universities despite being weak in CS. I guess the concern is that because CS is becoming more valued, they need to become strong there as well in order to stay on top.

[0] http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2014/11/ballmer-to-support-... [1] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/9/11/cs50-breaks-enro...

[Turing_Machine]

UIUC, Washington, and Georgia Tech also rank well above Harvard and Yale in my mind (and, I suspect, most others).