> Higher ranked schools are often better at research as well, you can get more bang for your buck than lesser ranked schools.

Just to be clear, Princeton ranks close to 15-20th in CS. Many state schools do out rank Princeton in CS and they do not have such labs yet.

I can understand if IAS or the Math department was the main reason to open a lab there. But, if it was quality of CS faculty that exclusively factored into the decision, then there would be other state schools in the line ahead of Princeton.

Princeton is a tiny school which still has Tarjan and Appel. And it's a half hour ride from NYC.

I'd be very interested to know the route you are taking to get to/from NYC then.

Woops hour twelve by train.

Not that its perfect but US News and World Report puts the grad CS program at #8.

> Higher ranked schools are often better at research as well, you can get more bang for your buck than lesser ranked schools.

Note that this depends on what you want for "bang". At less well-heeled schools, a far more modest donation can steer departments etc.

They want collaboration and access to great minds, not influence. Also, every if they did want influence, the ivy pay would make even more sense bc the ivy tail wags the academic dog. Better to influence a generation of future faculty than one Dept of current ones...

"Collaboration and access to great minds" comes from influence. As does the opportunity to shape postdocs and graduate students - the generation of future faculty you're talking about.

The influence is no good if the research isn't high quality. There are other initiatives besides labs by Google.

You make the huge assumption that only elite institutions produce high quality research. Especially for narrow specialties, this isn't necessarily true either.