I think this article draws some interesting contrasts between Stanford and Harvard.
Stanford's introductory CS course uses Javascript; Harvard's uses primarily C.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs101/https://www.edx.org/course/harvardx/harvardx-cs50x-introduction-computer-1022#.U4eDyvldVHUhttp://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/education/americas-it-school-look-west-harvard.htmlAmerica’s ‘It’ School? Look West, Harvard:
Riding Technology Wave, Stanford Rises to Top of Some Measures
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
New York Times
MAY 29, 2014
But for students more attuned to technology, “there’s a sense that they have a direct pipeline to Silicon Valley and money that doesn’t exist here,” said Nicholas P. Fandos, the managing editor of The Harvard Crimson, who just finished his junior year.
About 5 percent of Harvard’s undergraduate degrees are awarded in computer science or engineering, compared with about 27 percent at Stanford. At Stanford, about 90 percent of undergraduate students take at least one computer programming class, compared with about half at Harvard.
The disparity has deep cultural roots at many liberal arts institutions: Anything that looked like practical career preparation was seen as something less than real undergraduate education. Stanford, which established an engineering school in the 1920s, was never like that. In fact, it has become one of many universities that worry about how far the pendulum has swung away from the humanities.
Harvard administrators have worked for years to expand offerings in computer science and engineering, but the going has been slow. Harvard created its School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in 2007, and it is planning a new campus across the Charles River, in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, largely for those studies.
