I think movement building is great and support this article entirely. However, I’m not sure about this focus on TOP universities. Maybe this is a German thing where the difference between universities isn’t as large as in other countries but even then I find it hard to believe that an EA chapter at a top uni is clearly more impactful than one at a mediocre university.
If you have limited resources I find it fair to prioritize universities in some way but I’m not sure our ability to predict this very well. Is there any data on this or has somebody thought about this longer?
A point against the strong prioritization of top universities would be that there is often high variance between departments. A university might, for example, be top tier in computer science but mediocre in everything else. Aggregate statistics might not capture this but it might be relevant from an EA perspective.
For what it’s worth, the US higher education system is pretty stratified in terms of intelligence. The best universities are maybe a standard deviation above the 50th best university in SAT scores, and would probably be even higher if the SAT max wasn’t 1600; plus, a lot of the most ambitious and potentially successful students go to them. Moreover, top universities generally attract those students from every field; while, for example, UIUC is probably better than most Ivies at CS, the Ivies will still poach a lot of those students largely because of prestige/reputational effects. Those factors combine to make it pretty likely that the kind of people that can have the most impact in these fields are disproportionately concentrated at top universities.
I am skeptical and would like to see the math on standard deviations. For the US, according to this, about one third of Nobel prizes were awarded to people who did their undergraduate at a non top 100 global university (and I’m pretty sure it would be the majority outside the global top 20 that are in the US). And you don’t have to win a Nobel Prize in order to become an EA! So I think there is lots of potential talent for EA outside the global top 100, at least at the undergraduate level. A key factor here is size—many of the most elite schools are not very big. For instance, the honors college at Penn State has similar SAT scores to Princeton, and it has about half as many undergrads as Princeton. At the graduate level, I think the talent tends to concentrate more, but I still think there is significant talent outside the global top 100.
(Edit: Penn State honors college is larger than Swarthmore.)
I mean sure, but what’s important here isn’t really the absolute number of intelligent/ambitious people, but the relative concentration of them. One third of Nobel prizes going to people who didn’t complete their undergrad at a top 100 global university means that 2⁄3 of the Nobel prizes did. Out of ~30K global universities, 2⁄3 of Nobels are concentrated in the top 100. The talent exists outside top universities, but focusing on them with limited resources seems more tractable than spreading thin with lower average intelligence/ambition.
Of course we need to prioritize. The Nobel example we have data for, but I think that is too high a bar. My point is that there are probably a similar number of potential EAs at the big relatively high ranking state schools like University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign or University of Texas at Austin as there are at Princeton. The state school students may have lower wealth and political connections, but I think the capability is there (and perhaps less entitlement). (Disclosure: I went to Penn State, Princeton, and University of Colorado at Boulder.)
I agree that size is a really important consideration that could substantially upend the math here. As long as a Campus Centre at a big-and-good-but-not-stellar school could find decent methods to filter for potential EAs (I think they could, but think this is the weakest point in the argument) they could easily achieve comparable impact to a small top-flight school.
I’d be excited to see someone have a crack at generating an alternative priority list for Campus Centres taking this into account, to see if it actually differs from CEA’s list. (I think taking into account “the track record of its group, and the quality of the group’s current plans”, which seem like good factors for prioritising the initial round, will probably make the two lists more similar, though.)
Agree that honors college students are an attractive organizing opportunity. One could look at U.S. public flagships that reel in a disproportionate share of National Merit Scholars (UF, University of Minnesota, etc.) for their honors programs as starting points. These, and other talent-dense schools like Penn State, are very promising. To your point here:
I think the capability is there (and perhaps less entitlement).
EA might gain more mindshare at public honors colleges. Students at those schools strike me as a bit scrappier/more focused than students at stereotypical private universities where I and many EAs studied. Private university students may have more sirens of influence calling their names, in terms of:
Constant recruiting events by Goldman Sachs, consultancies, and other firms not-so-subtly offering large bonuses and potential channels to OECD country influence
The current Campus Specialist plan (including the set of first-wave campuses!) makes total sense to me. At the same time I’m rooting for target-rich public honors colleges and universities topping this list to comprise a good share of Wave 2!
Goldman’s own data-driven recruiters have taken this approach. From a 2017 article:
Goldman Sachs is embracing top students from outside the hallowed halls of the Ivy League… Lloyd Blankfein hosted a fireside chat in September for 250 students from Macaulay Honors College, a New York-based public school, during which he outlined the firm’s new outlook on recruiting talent. He told students the firm is no longer “trapping” itself by “recruiting from the same 30 or 40 schools.”
The firm has been deepening its relationship with the college, which is considered a high-caliber public school. On November 3, Goldman hosted a resume and interview workshop for 75 Macaulay students....
[Blankfein]: “It wasn’t an act of kindness on my part, or generosity, or trying to create diversity; it was pure selfish, naked self-interest. We wanted to really extend our net further because everybody’s involved pretty much in a war for talent...”
I’m not sure you’d need to filter significantly more than at other universities. That implies you think students at non top universities would as a proportion be less interested in EA, which seems far from obvious. Could just have a really big group.
I think the math is going to be roughly that if 1⁄3 of the prizes go to schools 1-10, 1⁄3 to schools 11-100, and 1⁄3 to schools 101-onwards, then the hit rate (in terms of prizewinners) goes up by an order of magnitude each time you narrow your target audience. So if you’re going to target non-elite schools, and you can’t fully support hundreds of schools, you’d want to do that outreach at least somewhat more cheaply—making books available or something.
I don’t think this is a good answer, especially for the large amount of karma it has.
I don’t think intelligence is a complete, “gearsy” explanation for the higher value of these campuses.
I think this issue will come up again. I think the canonization of this answer will give the wrong impression to onlookers, creating the very issues the answer tries to respond to.
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.
Thanks for this comment and the discussion it’s generated! I’m afraid I don’t have time to give as detailed response as I would like, but here are some key considerations:
In terms of selecting focus universities, we mentioned our methodology here (which includes more than just university rankings, such as looking at alumni outcomes like number of politicians, high net worth individuals, and prize winners).
We are supporting other university groups—see my response to Elliot below for more detail on CEA’s work outside Focus universities.
You can view our two programmes as a ‘high touch’ programme and a ‘medium touch’ programme. We’re currently analysing which programme creates the most highly-engaged EAs per full-time equivalent staff member (FTE) (our org-wide metric).
In the medium term, this is the main model that will likely inform strategic decisions, such as whether to expand the focus university list.
However, we don’t think this is particularly decision-relevant for us in the short term. This is because:
At the moment, most of our Focus universities don’t have Campus Specialists.
You don’t need to have gone to a Focus university to be a Campus Specialist.
So we think qualified Campus Specialists won’t be limited by the number of opportunities available.
If you have limited resources I find it fair to prioritize universities
As I see, there is no reason CEA should have limited resources to tackle the extremely tractable, low hanging fruit, that is community building. However, there seems to be a trend whereby smart, well educated people in EA:
Step 1) Overcomplicate a simple problem
Step 2) Use this over-complication to justify further complications, slowing plans or quitting in general
If you think there’s a simple problem here which is being overcomplicated, I encourage you to explain what you mean in a post (or comment). I don’t understand what the problem is here, or the sense in which anything is being represented as more complicated than it is.
This is also a post about a real thing that CEA is doing right now, so I’m confused about the “slowing plans or quitting in general” remark.
My understanding is that CEA is limited by the time of their employees. Because hiring rounds and all the support rolled out to focus groups as listed above take time
If that was the main constraint, then why limit this opportunity to 17 focus universities – 16 of which are in the UK or US? Of course, some qualified candidates might be willing to move but others may be unable or unwilling to do so.
Yeah, I think that if CEA has enough funds (which I believe is the case), it would make sense for CEA to say that they can hire Campus Specialists for non-focus universities on a case-by-case basis, instead of limiting the position exclusively to focus universities.
I think movement building is great and support this article entirely. However, I’m not sure about this focus on TOP universities. Maybe this is a German thing where the difference between universities isn’t as large as in other countries but even then I find it hard to believe that an EA chapter at a top uni is clearly more impactful than one at a mediocre university.
If you have limited resources I find it fair to prioritize universities in some way but I’m not sure our ability to predict this very well. Is there any data on this or has somebody thought about this longer?
A point against the strong prioritization of top universities would be that there is often high variance between departments. A university might, for example, be top tier in computer science but mediocre in everything else. Aggregate statistics might not capture this but it might be relevant from an EA perspective.
For what it’s worth, the US higher education system is pretty stratified in terms of intelligence. The best universities are maybe a standard deviation above the 50th best university in SAT scores, and would probably be even higher if the SAT max wasn’t 1600; plus, a lot of the most ambitious and potentially successful students go to them. Moreover, top universities generally attract those students from every field; while, for example, UIUC is probably better than most Ivies at CS, the Ivies will still poach a lot of those students largely because of prestige/reputational effects. Those factors combine to make it pretty likely that the kind of people that can have the most impact in these fields are disproportionately concentrated at top universities.
I am skeptical and would like to see the math on standard deviations. For the US, according to this, about one third of Nobel prizes were awarded to people who did their undergraduate at a non top 100 global university (and I’m pretty sure it would be the majority outside the global top 20 that are in the US). And you don’t have to win a Nobel Prize in order to become an EA! So I think there is lots of potential talent for EA outside the global top 100, at least at the undergraduate level. A key factor here is size—many of the most elite schools are not very big. For instance, the honors college at Penn State has similar SAT scores to Princeton, and it has about half as many undergrads as Princeton. At the graduate level, I think the talent tends to concentrate more, but I still think there is significant talent outside the global top 100.
(Edit: Penn State honors college is larger than Swarthmore.)
I mean sure, but what’s important here isn’t really the absolute number of intelligent/ambitious people, but the relative concentration of them. One third of Nobel prizes going to people who didn’t complete their undergrad at a top 100 global university means that 2⁄3 of the Nobel prizes did. Out of ~30K global universities, 2⁄3 of Nobels are concentrated in the top 100. The talent exists outside top universities, but focusing on them with limited resources seems more tractable than spreading thin with lower average intelligence/ambition.
Of course we need to prioritize. The Nobel example we have data for, but I think that is too high a bar. My point is that there are probably a similar number of potential EAs at the big relatively high ranking state schools like University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign or University of Texas at Austin as there are at Princeton. The state school students may have lower wealth and political connections, but I think the capability is there (and perhaps less entitlement). (Disclosure: I went to Penn State, Princeton, and University of Colorado at Boulder.)
I agree that size is a really important consideration that could substantially upend the math here. As long as a Campus Centre at a big-and-good-but-not-stellar school could find decent methods to filter for potential EAs (I think they could, but think this is the weakest point in the argument) they could easily achieve comparable impact to a small top-flight school.
I’d be excited to see someone have a crack at generating an alternative priority list for Campus Centres taking this into account, to see if it actually differs from CEA’s list. (I think taking into account “the track record of its group, and the quality of the group’s current plans”, which seem like good factors for prioritising the initial round, will probably make the two lists more similar, though.)
I agree that filtering is important—the easy thing to do is target the honors colleges (or whatever they call them) within the universities.
Agree that honors college students are an attractive organizing opportunity. One could look at U.S. public flagships that reel in a disproportionate share of National Merit Scholars (UF, University of Minnesota, etc.) for their honors programs as starting points. These, and other talent-dense schools like Penn State, are very promising. To your point here:
EA might gain more mindshare at public honors colleges. Students at those schools strike me as a bit scrappier/more focused than students at stereotypical private universities where I and many EAs studied. Private university students may have more sirens of influence calling their names, in terms of:
Constant recruiting events by Goldman Sachs, consultancies, and other firms not-so-subtly offering large bonuses and potential channels to OECD country influence
Unusual faculty mentorship opportunities from former heads of state, prominent writers, etc.
Time-consuming groups with a history of producing influential leaders and writers
The current Campus Specialist plan (including the set of first-wave campuses!) makes total sense to me. At the same time I’m rooting for target-rich public honors colleges and universities topping this list to comprise a good share of Wave 2!
Goldman’s own data-driven recruiters have taken this approach. From a 2017 article:
I’m not sure you’d need to filter significantly more than at other universities. That implies you think students at non top universities would as a proportion be less interested in EA, which seems far from obvious. Could just have a really big group.
I think the math is going to be roughly that if 1⁄3 of the prizes go to schools 1-10, 1⁄3 to schools 11-100, and 1⁄3 to schools 101-onwards, then the hit rate (in terms of prizewinners) goes up by an order of magnitude each time you narrow your target audience. So if you’re going to target non-elite schools, and you can’t fully support hundreds of schools, you’d want to do that outreach at least somewhat more cheaply—making books available or something.
Please see my reply to devanshpandey. Also, I edited that I was interested in seeing the math on standard deviations between universities.
I don’t think this is a good answer, especially for the large amount of karma it has.
I don’t think intelligence is a complete, “gearsy” explanation for the higher value of these campuses.
I think this issue will come up again. I think the canonization of this answer will give the wrong impression to onlookers, creating the very issues the answer tries to respond to.
Thanks for the explanation. I didn’t know it was this stratified.
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.
This isn’t a full response to this comment and its threads, but just so people are aware, we also
Provide enhanced support to a broader set of universities,
Make grants to many city and national groups
Provide basic funding, advice, and resources to all EA groups.
Additionally, if this program is successful, we will likely expand it to more universities over time.
This post was on one part of our groups work, not all of our groups work. You can see a more complete overview here.
Thanks for this comment and the discussion it’s generated! I’m afraid I don’t have time to give as detailed response as I would like, but here are some key considerations:
In terms of selecting focus universities, we mentioned our methodology here (which includes more than just university rankings, such as looking at alumni outcomes like number of politicians, high net worth individuals, and prize winners).
We are supporting other university groups—see my response to Elliot below for more detail on CEA’s work outside Focus universities.
You can view our two programmes as a ‘high touch’ programme and a ‘medium touch’ programme. We’re currently analysing which programme creates the most highly-engaged EAs per full-time equivalent staff member (FTE) (our org-wide metric).
In the medium term, this is the main model that will likely inform strategic decisions, such as whether to expand the focus university list.
However, we don’t think this is particularly decision-relevant for us in the short term. This is because:
At the moment, most of our Focus universities don’t have Campus Specialists.
You don’t need to have gone to a Focus university to be a Campus Specialist.
So we think qualified Campus Specialists won’t be limited by the number of opportunities available.
I strongly share these concerns, in particular:
As I see, there is no reason CEA should have limited resources to tackle the extremely tractable, low hanging fruit, that is community building. However, there seems to be a trend whereby smart, well educated people in EA:
Step 1) Overcomplicate a simple problem
Step 2) Use this over-complication to justify further complications, slowing plans or quitting in general
If you think there’s a simple problem here which is being overcomplicated, I encourage you to explain what you mean in a post (or comment). I don’t understand what the problem is here, or the sense in which anything is being represented as more complicated than it is.
This is also a post about a real thing that CEA is doing right now, so I’m confused about the “slowing plans or quitting in general” remark.
My understanding is that CEA is constrained by the number of qualified candidates interested in full-time community-building.
My understanding is that CEA is limited by the time of their employees. Because hiring rounds and all the support rolled out to focus groups as listed above take time
If that was the main constraint, then why limit this opportunity to 17 focus universities – 16 of which are in the UK or US?
Of course, some qualified candidates might be willing to move but others may be unable or unwilling to do so.
Yeah, I think that if CEA has enough funds (which I believe is the case), it would make sense for CEA to say that they can hire Campus Specialists for non-focus universities on a case-by-case basis, instead of limiting the position exclusively to focus universities.