Summary

We propose starting up EA clubs in Chinese international high schools to help promote EA ideas and to raise money for EA charities. To attract students, we plan on giving networking opportunities and leadership roles which they can use for college application purposes. We discuss our next steps to take for working on this initiative and potential issues that might arise and our thoughts on them.

Problem

Many Chinese international high school students need extracurriculars to have a better chance at successfully applying for universities, and are willing to pay a large sum to do so due to the competitiveness of US college admissions. Many universities are especially keen on extracurriculars that demonstrate leadership and community service, but most high school students fulfil these requirements with activities that are not particularly effective. We noticed that charity events in international high schools fall into the category of “performative altruism”. If they were redirected to EA charities, causes, and projects, and were exposed to ideas such as utilitarianism, long termism, and the ITN framework, we could be able to redirect charitable actions to more effective projects. Based on our own observations, the demand for activities to pad college applications is extremely high, with an estimated 80% of affluent international students hiring a private admissions counsellor for over 1 million CNY over the course of their high school career. Many students resort to paying for extracurricular activities.

For example, one common activity that international students do (such as my own school) is to go to a rural area and stay there for a few days, teaching kids in a local school English or some other subject. Although it’s nice and well-intended, it doesn’t lead to any meaningful change to the lives of the people who live there, and is even extremely exploitative (known as “voluntourism”).

Solution

A curriculum and plan to help students start an EA club in high school, which might include activities such as:

Charity elections/Giving game
Pastcasting tournaments
Estimation game
Forecasting competitions
Fundraising events for effective, impactful charities
Finding internships for high school students at EA-related charities and allowing them to conduct projects there
Discussion related to EA

Some charities in China target international students for funds, offering students some charity-related work and soliciting donations in exchange for a neat, official certificate, which shows that perhaps EA can also do this type of outreach.

We agree that this type of fundraising work is not likely to be as effective as convincing students to switch their career direction or work on a neglected issue, but we feel that these messages wouldn’t resonate with many international students and that they’ll much prefer legible actions which can be used as a credential.

We have considered helping to create university clubs but decided against it because university clubs are more heavily scrutinised by the government and don’t allow for as much freedom as high school clubs.

Potential impact

According to Statista, around 350 thousand Chinese students went abroad to study in foreign universities in 2020, a great drop from 700 thousand before the pandemic (https://www.statista.com/statistics/227240/number-of-chinese-students-that-study-abroad/)

We will assume that 100 thousand of them are from international schools. If the parents of these students each donate ¥100 (around $14) to an EA-affiliated charity, then EA can raise $1.4 million from them per year, which is enough to support 1-2 additional grants from Open Philanthropy, or save 250 lives a year.

If we expanded our audience to all 3 years of high-schoolers and not just those going to international universities, then we can raise 3x the amount of money, around $4 million per year.

Next steps

We should first gather feedback from other international high school students about their interest in a potential EA club, including:

Current opportunities for fulfilling their community service and leadership requirements
Familiarity with EA
Interest in EA in general
Interest in an EA-themed charity fundraising event
Willingness to organise an EA club

to recognize areas in where we should offer our services and ways to tweak it to more appeal to our target demographic.

It’s unclear about what the day-to-day meetings of an EA club would look like, though the EA Groups Resource Center has many good resources on the topic. For example, they have a calendar for new groups and a list of workshops that new organisers might do, but the calendar simply highlights meeting sessions for such groups, but not including specific events. We could potentially plan a several-week curriculum with content for each week which facilitators can go through at their own pace.

We should try to set up our own EA club in a high school to better learn about how clubs are run, to help stress-test our own curriculum, and to practise important skills necessary to run a club. Trying out our ideas in the real world is the most useful method of getting feedback on our ideas.

It’s also potentially valuable to find EA organisations that specifically aim to provide EA clubs (such as groups@centreforeffectivealtruism.org) and ask them for advice on how to run a club and what you should plan for in general.

Potential issues

We might brainwash people

EA clubs can potentially fall into unhealthy epistemics. We don’t want to encourage people to blindly support the top cause on 80,000 Hours. Deferring to majority EA opinions on important issues instead of reading the relevant literature further insulates the EA community from alternate opinions and narrows the range of EA perspectives available. It’s also important to grow big-tent EA, as even people who disagree about AI risk or animal welfare can do much more good if they take note of which charities are the most effective at operating in their preferred cause area.

Potential solutions: Hosting cause prioritisation sessions, where organisers work to help new members think about which causes should be prioritised.

Not pressuring people to adopt all EA stances, and be genuinely interested in the perspectives of others who don’t agree.

We might portray EA badly

The risk of this is greater with our intervention, as we would operate in a politically sensitive country and we are among the first ones doing outreach to our audience. If we misrepresent EA ideas, market them poorly, or imprint a bad impression of EA overall, then we might actively cause harm by pushing back the development of EA for years. Why not to rush to translate effective altruism into other languages specifically advises people to not translate EA documents into Chinese for these reasons. A counterargument to this is that people are already trying to spread EA-related philosophies in China, so if we don’t market/spread it, someone else will, and we won’t have any control of how that is perceived.

However, we feel that the risk is slightly lower with international high schools, as they have less oversight from the government compared to university clubs, and the students there are already familiar with English, so less translation is necessary and they’re more likely to have a more Western perspective on issues, which reduces the risk of misinterpreting our positions or the impact of “lock in”.

Potential solutions: Get feedback on our curriculum and club activities from EA organisations that operate in China, such as Charity Box (They actually suggested this idea to us given our comparative advantage, and said that they were already thinking about doing something similar. They also would be willing to support this project.) Another is to be as specific as possible with our goals and aims (better be wrong than be vague) so as to not mislead our audiences, and run our ideas past more people.

Students may not be interested in EA

Effective altruism is a complex movement, and many views in it may seem weird (given our sometimes unconventional epistemics) or off-putting to most people. Also, we might not provide attractive enough opportunities for potential members to receive legible certifications for performing charitable work. We would need to find ways for EA to be helpful for our audience.

Potential solutions: Conduct surveys of students as previously mentioned in Next steps

Engaging international high school students in China into EA clubs