I do worry that the focus on “top” universities is creating a stronger national bias among engaged EAs than we would like.
In particular, because the bar to going to university internationally is higher than attending a domestic university, it means there’s a stringency bias in our filters for top talent – it’s much more difficult for a German or French person to attend one of these top universities than for a Brit or an American, and so CEA has de facto higher requirements for spending money on community building for people with those nationalities.
I’m not sure what metrics CEA is using to select their top universities – but commonly cited world rankings have a pretty well-known Anglosphere bias, meaning that excellent universities in other countries are underrated relative to their US/UK counterparts. (To be clear, I think that the very top US/UK universities are in fact the best in the world, but I don’t think that a larger “objective” list of top universities would be as Anglosphere-dominated as current world rankings are in practice.)
Even among the Anglosphere, the lack of any universities in Australia, Singapore, Canada, or New Zealand worries me. And the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland (to name a few) all have world-class universities with very high levels of English fluency among their student base. I’d be super happy to see Campus Centres at any of these!
That said, I don’t have a really great in-depth sense of how CEA’s list of top schools were chosen. I hope it was done very carefully and that there were good reasons for picking those particular schools. And this is only the first step – hopefully, if the Campus Specialist program goes well, it will expand! It’s reasonable to test out an ambitious (and expensive!) program like this at the very most promising schools.
Why do you think there is a pro-UK/US bias? In data-driven rankings in AI (Shanghairankings, CSrankings, some academic studies), I haven’t noticed any. Rather, UK, US, & Can rank higher than ANZ+elsewhere, as they should. Maybe you are just talking about poor rating systems like Times/QS?
I have the Shanghai ranking cached as less biased than the rankings that are standardly used in the UK. That said, looking at its rankings now, it is (a) more US/UK dominated than I remembered and (b) not obviously any less so than other world rankings, so I mostly retract that particular statement until/unless I get the chance to dig into it more later.
I still think there are a number of non-US/UK universities that regularly rank very highly, and given the aforementioned bias imposed by domestic vs international university attendance I’d be particularly excited about hitting at least some of those (e.g. ETH, Toronto, NUS, Copenhagen, Melbourne, Karolinska, UBC).
Yeah. Can and Aus are pretty similar to UK/USA, culturally, ethnically, linguistically, geopolitically, I think. But ETH, NUS and similar would make sense to me.
Australia doesn’t really have elite universities (at least in terms of undergraduate admissions) in the same sense as the US. There’s no university in Australia where you can tell people that you went to it and they will be impressed. There’s no university that is hard to get into if, for example, you just want to do a basic arts degree.
That said, I suspect Sydney University would be a pretty good university to target at some point because it’s one of the best universities, if not the best, in terms of (English-language) debating in the world.
Interesting. Good to know. Germany has a similarly weak university hierarchy, with the exception of certain subjects (e.g. Bonn for maths).
Whether or not this is a good thing in other respects (I can see arguments both ways), it seems like it should make EA recruiting harder, in that (a) the most promising students are spread out across a larger number of universities (b) you have less of the “world class university attracting top talent from across the world” effect you do at e.g. Oxford or Harvard.
Which might be an argument for deprioritising university outreach in those countries relative to others. On the other hand both Germany and (especially) Australia seem to be doing very well in terms of EAs-per-capita, so maybe this isn’t that strong an effect.
I do worry that the focus on “top” universities is creating a stronger national bias among engaged EAs than we would like.
In particular, because the bar to going to university internationally is higher than attending a domestic university, it means there’s a stringency bias in our filters for top talent – it’s much more difficult for a German or French person to attend one of these top universities than for a Brit or an American, and so CEA has de facto higher requirements for spending money on community building for people with those nationalities.
I’m not sure what metrics CEA is using to select their top universities – but commonly cited world rankings have a pretty well-known Anglosphere bias, meaning that excellent universities in other countries are underrated relative to their US/UK counterparts. (To be clear, I think that the very top US/UK universities are in fact the best in the world, but I don’t think that a larger “objective” list of top universities would be as Anglosphere-dominated as current world rankings are in practice.)
Even among the Anglosphere, the lack of any universities in Australia, Singapore, Canada, or New Zealand worries me. And the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland (to name a few) all have world-class universities with very high levels of English fluency among their student base. I’d be super happy to see Campus Centres at any of these!
That said, I don’t have a really great in-depth sense of how CEA’s list of top schools were chosen. I hope it was done very carefully and that there were good reasons for picking those particular schools. And this is only the first step – hopefully, if the Campus Specialist program goes well, it will expand! It’s reasonable to test out an ambitious (and expensive!) program like this at the very most promising schools.
Why do you think there is a pro-UK/US bias? In data-driven rankings in AI (Shanghairankings, CSrankings, some academic studies), I haven’t noticed any. Rather, UK, US, & Can rank higher than ANZ+elsewhere, as they should. Maybe you are just talking about poor rating systems like Times/QS?
I have the Shanghai ranking cached as less biased than the rankings that are standardly used in the UK. That said, looking at its rankings now, it is (a) more US/UK dominated than I remembered and (b) not obviously any less so than other world rankings, so I mostly retract that particular statement until/unless I get the chance to dig into it more later.
I still think there are a number of non-US/UK universities that regularly rank very highly, and given the aforementioned bias imposed by domestic vs international university attendance I’d be particularly excited about hitting at least some of those (e.g. ETH, Toronto, NUS, Copenhagen, Melbourne, Karolinska, UBC).
Yeah. Can and Aus are pretty similar to UK/USA, culturally, ethnically, linguistically, geopolitically, I think. But ETH, NUS and similar would make sense to me.
Australia doesn’t really have elite universities (at least in terms of undergraduate admissions) in the same sense as the US. There’s no university in Australia where you can tell people that you went to it and they will be impressed. There’s no university that is hard to get into if, for example, you just want to do a basic arts degree.
That said, I suspect Sydney University would be a pretty good university to target at some point because it’s one of the best universities, if not the best, in terms of (English-language) debating in the world.
Interesting. Good to know. Germany has a similarly weak university hierarchy, with the exception of certain subjects (e.g. Bonn for maths).
Whether or not this is a good thing in other respects (I can see arguments both ways), it seems like it should make EA recruiting harder, in that (a) the most promising students are spread out across a larger number of universities (b) you have less of the “world class university attracting top talent from across the world” effect you do at e.g. Oxford or Harvard.
Which might be an argument for deprioritising university outreach in those countries relative to others. On the other hand both Germany and (especially) Australia seem to be doing very well in terms of EAs-per-capita, so maybe this isn’t that strong an effect.