Agree. I wasted several years doing dead-end minimum wage jobs to pay for my degrees, chose a less prestigious university to do them at due to their lower fees, and still had to take a leave of absence halfway through my master’s partly for financial reasons. Even a regular loan with a reasonable rate of interest would have been fine—the fees in the UK aren’t that high for domestic students (~£5-16k for a whole master’s course) - but at the time the UK government wasn’t giving postgrad loans, and even now they are capped at about 10k so you have to find most of your living costs from elsewhere. A loan of 3-10k would have added a couple of counterfactual years of EA-focused work to my career.
There really doesn’t seem to be much awareness within EA of the basic financial challenges that some people face. When I mentioned my situation, the response was often a confused ‘Why don’t you just borrow the money from your friends/family/bank?’, as if that were an option for everyone. Relatedly, when I mentioned at an EA meetup that I was on the dole because I couldn’t find work, someone asked how much I got (~£65 per week), and said “Oh, is that all? It’s not really worth bothering to claim then, is it?” Someone else was baffled why I took a 24-hour bus trip for $20 rather than pay $80 for a two-hour flight. It’s no wonder EAs are seen as elitist and out of touch.
Agree. I wasted several years doing dead-end minimum wage jobs to pay for my degrees, chose a less prestigious university to do them at due to their lower fees, and still had to take a leave of absence halfway through my master’s partly for financial reasons. Even a regular loan with a reasonable rate of interest would have been fine—the fees in the UK aren’t that high for domestic students (~£5-16k for a whole master’s course) - but at the time the UK government wasn’t giving postgrad loans, and even now they are capped at about 10k so you have to find most of your living costs from elsewhere. A loan of 3-10k would have added a couple of counterfactual years of EA-focused work to my career.
There really doesn’t seem to be much awareness within EA of the basic financial challenges that some people face. When I mentioned my situation, the response was often a confused ‘Why don’t you just borrow the money from your friends/family/bank?’, as if that were an option for everyone. Relatedly, when I mentioned at an EA meetup that I was on the dole because I couldn’t find work, someone asked how much I got (~£65 per week), and said “Oh, is that all? It’s not really worth bothering to claim then, is it?” Someone else was baffled why I took a 24-hour bus trip for $20 rather than pay $80 for a two-hour flight. It’s no wonder EAs are seen as elitist and out of touch.