Some non-CEA people have made estimates that we sometimes refer to. I’m not sure I have permission to share them, but they suggest significant value. Based in part on these figures, I think that the value of a counterfactual high-performing EA is in the tens of millions of dollars.
I think we should also expect higher willingness to pay than private firms because of the general money/people balance in the community, and because we care about their whole career (whereas BCG will in expectation only get about 4 years of their career (number made up)).
I’ll let Jessica answer with more specifics if she wants to, but we’re currently spending much less than $1m/school.
Yes, it’s obviously important that figures are counterfactually discounted. But groups seem have historically been counterfactually important to people (see OP’s survey), and we think it’s likely that they will be in the future too. Given the high value of additional top people, I think spending like this still looks pretty good.
Fwiw, I personally would be excited about CEA spending much more on this at their current level of certainty if there were ways to mitigate optics, community health, and tail risk issues.
I see from Max below, though, that Open Phil is assuming a lot of this spending, so sorry for throwing a grenade at CEA if you’re not actually going to be behind a really ‘move the needle’ amount of campus spending.
Some non-CEA people have made estimates that we sometimes refer to. I’m not sure I have permission to share them, but they suggest significant value. Based in part on these figures, I think that the value of a counterfactual high-performing EA is in the tens of millions of dollars.
I think we should also expect higher willingness to pay than private firms because of the general money/people balance in the community, and because we care about their whole career (whereas BCG will in expectation only get about 4 years of their career (number made up)).
I’ll let Jessica answer with more specifics if she wants to, but we’re currently spending much less than $1m/school.
Yes, it’s obviously important that figures are counterfactually discounted. But groups seem have historically been counterfactually important to people (see OP’s survey), and we think it’s likely that they will be in the future too. Given the high value of additional top people, I think spending like this still looks pretty good.
Overall, CEA is planning to spend ~$1.5mil on uni group support in 2022 across ~75 campuses, which is a lot less than $1mil/campus. :)
Fwiw, I personally would be excited about CEA spending much more on this at their current level of certainty if there were ways to mitigate optics, community health, and tail risk issues.
Indeed :-) I had understood from this post (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FjDpyJNnzK8teSu4J/) that this was the destination, though, so the current rate of spending would be less relevant than having good heuristics before we get to that scale.
I see from Max below, though, that Open Phil is assuming a lot of this spending, so sorry for throwing a grenade at CEA if you’re not actually going to be behind a really ‘move the needle’ amount of campus spending.