Thank you for the post and for clarifying the current situation.
I have mixed feelings about the results of the upcoming changes, particularly about stopping funding for part-time group organizers, as I feel this may lead to excluding many students from engaging in organizing groups. This particularly applies to:
students with a difficult financial situation
students who must cover high costs of living (e.g. due to living in an expensive city or region)
students who must pay their university fees or pay back their student loan
I myself am a group organizer to whom none of the above applies, and still one of my main worries about setting up a university EA group was that I would have to start working at some point to cover my costs of living (combining studies, work and organizing a group does not seem possible). In fact, this scenario seemed more likely to happen than not. Thankfully, I received a grant from Open Philantropy to work on the group part-time and this was a game changer. This was the single most important thing that allowed me to set up the group and focus on it fully, which is critical, as I am the only organizer.
I am afraid that not providing funding may stop many students from setting up new groups, lower the capacity of current group organizers and even lead to some groups ceasing to exist. Furthermore, leading a group may essencially become an exclusive activity, available only to financially privileged students.
Having said that, I appreciate the transparency of both your, and Open Phil’s post about the changes. Thank you for sharing that!
I would be interested to see what proportion of group organizer request funding primarily due to difficult financial situations. My guess would be that this number is fairly small, but I could be wrong.
The bar should not be at ‘difficult financial situation’, and this is also something there are often incentives against explicitly mentioning when applying for funding. Getting paid employment while studying (even fulltime degrees) is normal.
My 5 minute Google search to put some numbers on this:
Why are students taking on paid work?
UK: “Three-quarters of those in work said they did so to meet their living costs, while 23% also said they worked to give financial support for friends or family.” From the Guardian article linked above.
Cannot find a recent US statistic quickly, but given the system (e.g. https://www.collegeave.com/articles/how-to-pay-for-college/) I expect working rather than taking out (as much in) loans is a big one.
On the other hand, spending time on committees is also very normal as an undergraduate and those are not paid. However in comparison the time people spend on this is much more limited (say ~2-5 hrs/week), there is rarely a single organiser, and I’ve seen a lot of people drop off committees—some as they are less keen, but some for time commitment reasons (which I expect will sometimes/often be doing paid work).
I don’t disagree. I was simply airing my suspicion that most group organizers who applied for the OP fellowship did so because they thought something akin to “I will be organizing for 8-20 hours a week and I want to be incentivized for doing so” — which is perfectly a-ok and a valid reason — rather than “I am applying to the fellowship as I will not be able to sustain myself without the funding.”
In cases where people need to make trade-offs between taking some random university job vs. organizing part time, assuming that they are genuinely interested in organizing and that the university has potential, I think it would be valuable for them to get funding.
My guess is that the downsides of paid organizing would be diminished to the extent that the structure and compensation somewhat closely tracked typical university-student employment. I didn’t see anything in the UK report about what typical rates might be, but at least back in my day most students were at fairly low hourly rates. Also, paying people for fewer than (say) 8-10 hours per week would not come across to me as roughly replacement income for foregone typical university-student employment because I don’t think such employment is typically available in smaller amounts. [Confidence: low, I am somewhat older by EA standards.]
I believe an important piece of information here is that Open Phil did not provide funding for organizers spending less than 10 h/week organizing their groups (or at least that was the case when I was applying for funding), so I suppose most of the funded students were probably working on the topic a bit more than that (this is a guess, though)
It looks like they do, or at least did, allow funding for <10 hr/week:
“Group leaders may ask for funding for organizers working less than 10 hours per week using either form above, rather than having those organizers fill out a separate application.”
Hi Weronika, thank you for sharing your story and reflections so openly! I basically think you are right in there probably being organizers for whom the stipends are the difference between organizing their EA group and not doing so, and I really want to make sure we take this point into account as my team dives into considerations around part-time stipends in the new year. As @satpathyakash notes, I think an imporant question here is the scale, and I hope to make some progress on this point!
I also wanted to flag explicitly that we are tracking the diversity concern you note.
I expect that as part of our research in the new year, we’ll set up various ways of asking stakeholders, including current, former, and potential organizers, for input. I would be keen to include you in this process, if you’re happy to keep sharing your thoughts! And as always: thanks for organizing your group :)
Hi Joris and Lin, thank you for your responses. Just as mentioned, it is quite interesting, for how many student receiving funding is the factor that decides about them setting up / taking over leading a group or not doing so.
Joris, I will be more than happy to share my thoughts with you in the future. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me at weronikamzurek@gmail.com or via slack anytime :) thank you for your work on that and I wish you all best in the process!
Thank you for the post and for clarifying the current situation.
I have mixed feelings about the results of the upcoming changes, particularly about stopping funding for part-time group organizers, as I feel this may lead to excluding many students from engaging in organizing groups. This particularly applies to:
students with a difficult financial situation
students who must cover high costs of living (e.g. due to living in an expensive city or region)
students who must pay their university fees or pay back their student loan
I myself am a group organizer to whom none of the above applies, and still one of my main worries about setting up a university EA group was that I would have to start working at some point to cover my costs of living (combining studies, work and organizing a group does not seem possible). In fact, this scenario seemed more likely to happen than not. Thankfully, I received a grant from Open Philantropy to work on the group part-time and this was a game changer. This was the single most important thing that allowed me to set up the group and focus on it fully, which is critical, as I am the only organizer.
I am afraid that not providing funding may stop many students from setting up new groups, lower the capacity of current group organizers and even lead to some groups ceasing to exist. Furthermore, leading a group may essencially become an exclusive activity, available only to financially privileged students.
Having said that, I appreciate the transparency of both your, and Open Phil’s post about the changes. Thank you for sharing that!
I would be interested to see what proportion of group organizer request funding primarily due to difficult financial situations. My guess would be that this number is fairly small, but I could be wrong.
The bar should not be at ‘difficult financial situation’, and this is also something there are often incentives against explicitly mentioning when applying for funding. Getting paid employment while studying (even fulltime degrees) is normal.
My 5 minute Google search to put some numbers on this:
Proportion of students who are employed while studying: UK: survey of 10,000 students showed that 56% of full-time UK undergraduates had paid employment (14.5 hours/week average) - June 2024 Guardian article https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/jun/13/more-than-half-of-uk-students-working-long-hours-in-paid-jobs USA: 43% of full-time students work while enrolled in college—January 2023 Fortune article https://fortune.com/2023/01/11/college-students-with-jobs-20-percent-less-likely-to-graduate-than-privileged-peers-study-side-hustle/
Why are students taking on paid work? UK: “Three-quarters of those in work said they did so to meet their living costs, while 23% also said they worked to give financial support for friends or family.” From the Guardian article linked above. Cannot find a recent US statistic quickly, but given the system (e.g. https://www.collegeave.com/articles/how-to-pay-for-college/) I expect working rather than taking out (as much in) loans is a big one.
On the other hand, spending time on committees is also very normal as an undergraduate and those are not paid. However in comparison the time people spend on this is much more limited (say ~2-5 hrs/week), there is rarely a single organiser, and I’ve seen a lot of people drop off committees—some as they are less keen, but some for time commitment reasons (which I expect will sometimes/often be doing paid work).
I don’t disagree. I was simply airing my suspicion that most group organizers who applied for the OP fellowship did so because they thought something akin to “I will be organizing for 8-20 hours a week and I want to be incentivized for doing so” — which is perfectly a-ok and a valid reason — rather than “I am applying to the fellowship as I will not be able to sustain myself without the funding.”
In cases where people need to make trade-offs between taking some random university job vs. organizing part time, assuming that they are genuinely interested in organizing and that the university has potential, I think it would be valuable for them to get funding.
My guess is that the downsides of paid organizing would be diminished to the extent that the structure and compensation somewhat closely tracked typical university-student employment. I didn’t see anything in the UK report about what typical rates might be, but at least back in my day most students were at fairly low hourly rates. Also, paying people for fewer than (say) 8-10 hours per week would not come across to me as roughly replacement income for foregone typical university-student employment because I don’t think such employment is typically available in smaller amounts. [Confidence: low, I am somewhat older by EA standards.]
I believe an important piece of information here is that Open Phil did not provide funding for organizers spending less than 10 h/week organizing their groups (or at least that was the case when I was applying for funding), so I suppose most of the funded students were probably working on the topic a bit more than that (this is a guess, though)
It looks like they do, or at least did, allow funding for <10 hr/week:
“Group leaders may ask for funding for organizers working less than 10 hours per week using either form above, rather than having those organizers fill out a separate application.”
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/open-philanthropy-university-organizer-fellowship/
Hi Weronika, thank you for sharing your story and reflections so openly! I basically think you are right in there probably being organizers for whom the stipends are the difference between organizing their EA group and not doing so, and I really want to make sure we take this point into account as my team dives into considerations around part-time stipends in the new year. As @satpathyakash notes, I think an imporant question here is the scale, and I hope to make some progress on this point!
I also wanted to flag explicitly that we are tracking the diversity concern you note.
I expect that as part of our research in the new year, we’ll set up various ways of asking stakeholders, including current, former, and potential organizers, for input. I would be keen to include you in this process, if you’re happy to keep sharing your thoughts! And as always: thanks for organizing your group :)
Hi Joris and Lin, thank you for your responses. Just as mentioned, it is quite interesting, for how many student receiving funding is the factor that decides about them setting up / taking over leading a group or not doing so.
Joris, I will be more than happy to share my thoughts with you in the future. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me at weronikamzurek@gmail.com or via slack anytime :) thank you for your work on that and I wish you all best in the process!