I think elitism is overrated, even for senior-level positions and co-founders.
Not coincidentally, I didn’t go to an elite university.
I think people screening on elitism is a lazy heuristic that sometimes works but often times we can do much better.
And after screening potentially 10,000 applicants for over 50 positions at Rethink Priorities—including multiple senior level roles—I don’t notice that traditional markers of elite background (e.g., going to Harvard/Oxford) have any correlation with whether people do well on our test tasks, get hired, and ultimately be successful at Rethink Priorities.
Also with regard to class and social selection, we aim to always pay people enough to afford an American middle class lifestyle regardless of their prior socioeconomic resources. (Our pay is ~$67K/yr USD for entry level, ~$111K for senior level, and ~$122K for director level.)
I don’t notice that traditional markers of elite background (e.g., going to Harvard/Oxford) have any correlation with whether people do well on our test tasks, get hired, and ultimately be successful at Rethink Priorities.
Have you run data analysis on this? I’m a bit surprised given the hiring rounds I’ve actually seen, though we do have a lot of people with non-elite backgrounds in senior positions. For example, on our website, we have 12 people (including temporary fellows) in Longtermism, and 5 of them come from what I’d consider “elite” universities (2 Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, UChicago), plus two edge cases. So for traditional markers of elite background to have no correlation with how people do on our test tasks, we’d need our pool of job applicants to have ~50% people from elite colleges.
Which isn’t impossible, given the demographics of EA and relevant self-selection of who might want to apply to research EA jobs, but would be surprising to me.
I do think RP is better for people with backgrounds that aren’t traditionally prestigious than many other institutions, possibly due to founder effects.
No specific analysis as we don’t collect this data for our applicants and we don’t judge applicants based on it.
Looking now at this list of top 25 global universities and looking at the backgrounds of our research and executive teams, we are 13⁄41 (32%) for “people attended a top 25 university for any of their education or post-doc work” (5/12 or 42% for people with people management responsibilities).
Maybe that’s actually undercutting my point. But I don’t think say trying to target our recruiting to elite universities or trying to give bonus points to people with elite backgrounds would be better for getting us better hires.
Also I picked my “top 25” cutoff before I saw what data we had on EA as a whole, but it looks like per EA Survey 2019 data we had 22% of EAs as attending a top 20 university (among those for which we gave data for which university they attended).
I think elitism is overrated, even for senior-level positions and co-founders.
Not coincidentally, I didn’t go to an elite university.
I think people screening on elitism is a lazy heuristic that sometimes works but often times we can do much better.
And after screening potentially 10,000 applicants for over 50 positions at Rethink Priorities—including multiple senior level roles—I don’t notice that traditional markers of elite background (e.g., going to Harvard/Oxford) have any correlation with whether people do well on our test tasks, get hired, and ultimately be successful at Rethink Priorities.
Also with regard to class and social selection, we aim to always pay people enough to afford an American middle class lifestyle regardless of their prior socioeconomic resources. (Our pay is ~$67K/yr USD for entry level, ~$111K for senior level, and ~$122K for director level.)
Have you run data analysis on this? I’m a bit surprised given the hiring rounds I’ve actually seen, though we do have a lot of people with non-elite backgrounds in senior positions. For example, on our website, we have 12 people (including temporary fellows) in Longtermism, and 5 of them come from what I’d consider “elite” universities (2 Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, UChicago), plus two edge cases. So for traditional markers of elite background to have no correlation with how people do on our test tasks, we’d need our pool of job applicants to have ~50% people from elite colleges.
Which isn’t impossible, given the demographics of EA and relevant self-selection of who might want to apply to research EA jobs, but would be surprising to me.
I do think RP is better for people with backgrounds that aren’t traditionally prestigious than many other institutions, possibly due to founder effects.
No specific analysis as we don’t collect this data for our applicants and we don’t judge applicants based on it.
Looking now at this list of top 25 global universities and looking at the backgrounds of our research and executive teams, we are 13⁄41 (32%) for “people attended a top 25 university for any of their education or post-doc work” (5/12 or 42% for people with people management responsibilities).
Maybe that’s actually undercutting my point. But I don’t think say trying to target our recruiting to elite universities or trying to give bonus points to people with elite backgrounds would be better for getting us better hires.
Also I picked my “top 25” cutoff before I saw what data we had on EA as a whole, but it looks like per EA Survey 2019 data we had 22% of EAs as attending a top 20 university (among those for which we gave data for which university they attended).