If I were a student applying I might want to know if I were going to get funding before going through a complex applications process in another country. Is there anything that could be said to someone who feels like this—success chance, some kind of prescreening etc etc?
That’s a good point. Unfortunately, it’s difficult for me to say anything particularly informative to address this, given that most of the criteria we have in mind are qualitative in nature and don’t really lend themselves to being operationalised in a way that would allow candidates to better assess their odds of success.
A couple of things I can say that may or may not still be somewhat helpful:
There is neither a maximum nor a minimum number of applications we intend to fund. Instead, we intend to fund all of the applications that are above a certain bar in terms of our funding criteria. Given my current (very uncertain) assumptions about the program’s reach and the likely composition of the candidate pool, my best guess is that we will only end up awarding a handful of grants, but in principle, there is nothing preventing us from giving out a significantly greater number of scholarships if the candidate pool ends up being correspondingly larger and/or stronger than anticipated.
If an applicant’s academic record is comparable to that of other folks who get admitted to these universities, they are unusually thoughtful about the topic of how to do good in the world, and all of this comes through in their application materials, their chances of success should be favourable. (I appreciate that the second criterion in particular is somewhat unhelpfully vague!)
One way to address this issue would be to open the program for applications earlier in the year and to evaluate applicants well ahead of the university application deadlines, so that candidates already have their scholarship offers in hand before they need to decide whether to apply to the relevant universities, which should make this decision easy for those who did end up receiving scholarship offers. (As BrianTan notes in another comment, we do plan to inform successful applicants for scholarships in the US before the relevant university application deadlines in order to allow them to include information about the scholarships they have been awarded in their university applications. However, as noted in my post, they will have to get started with the required advance preparation—in terms of taking the required standardised tests, collecting references, etc. - much earlier than this.)
Given the timing of when we started working on launching this program, the fact that we will need some time to process applications, and the fact that applications to the relevant universities require advance preparation, this sort of format wasn’t really an available option for us this year, but it is something we may or may not consider doing next time around (assuming we decide to run another iteration of the program).
Another thing I’ll note is that obviously, folks with sufficiently strong academic backgrounds who apply to these universities generally also have a non-zero chance of getting admitted to and receiving funding from the universities themselves (even if for one reason or another they don’t end up receiving a scholarship from us), and they should factor this into their decisions about whether to apply.
I strongly agree. My impression (not based on research, but merely on unfounded hypothesizing) is that either an non-US applicant must have a finances arranged for a US university prior to applying. I would recommend providing the approval of the scholarship in advance of being admitted to the school. This way the applicant could apply and honestly list his/her method of funding the degree. The funds would be released only after the applicant is admitted to the school.
I believe OpenPhil plans on providing the scholarship decision before being admitted to the school for those applying to the listed U.S. universities, based on this line:
We plan to inform successful candidates by mid- to late October, in order to allow them to include information about the scholarship they have been awarded in their early decision/early action applications.
That’s good. I’m glad that they thought of this. I can’t imagine the difficulties in attempting to apply for a US university (and visa) as a non-US citizen without documentation of funding.
Also, what about people who “ought” to apply but don’t know it yet? Could there be an EA scholarship program for developing nations? 1 page application, a short test, then then anyone above a certain bar gets supported in a full funding application and if successful helped applying to a university.
If I had to guess I’d think there were many barriers in the way of students applying to foreign universities.
I think something along those lines could be pretty promising. I’m not sure it’d be the best fit for Open Phil in particular (given that we generally focus on somewhat larger-scale types of grantmaking), but I know of some other folks active in this space who have expressed an interest in this idea/closely related ideas.
Another thing which I think could potentially be really valuable would be for someone to pull together in one place the most important information regarding the practicalities of applying to these and other universities as an international student (including e.g. information about how likely one is to get admitted to such-and-such a university with such-and-such an academic background, which was mentioned in another comment). My sense from skimming some of the existing resources is that they often aren’t great, although I haven’t tried very hard to look for better ones and it’s possible that something like what I have in mind here already exists—in which case just sharing a pointer to this could be equally valuable.
If I were a student applying I might want to know if I were going to get funding before going through a complex applications process in another country. Is there anything that could be said to someone who feels like this—success chance, some kind of prescreening etc etc?
That’s a good point. Unfortunately, it’s difficult for me to say anything particularly informative to address this, given that most of the criteria we have in mind are qualitative in nature and don’t really lend themselves to being operationalised in a way that would allow candidates to better assess their odds of success.
A couple of things I can say that may or may not still be somewhat helpful:
There is neither a maximum nor a minimum number of applications we intend to fund. Instead, we intend to fund all of the applications that are above a certain bar in terms of our funding criteria. Given my current (very uncertain) assumptions about the program’s reach and the likely composition of the candidate pool, my best guess is that we will only end up awarding a handful of grants, but in principle, there is nothing preventing us from giving out a significantly greater number of scholarships if the candidate pool ends up being correspondingly larger and/or stronger than anticipated.
If an applicant’s academic record is comparable to that of other folks who get admitted to these universities, they are unusually thoughtful about the topic of how to do good in the world, and all of this comes through in their application materials, their chances of success should be favourable. (I appreciate that the second criterion in particular is somewhat unhelpfully vague!)
One way to address this issue would be to open the program for applications earlier in the year and to evaluate applicants well ahead of the university application deadlines, so that candidates already have their scholarship offers in hand before they need to decide whether to apply to the relevant universities, which should make this decision easy for those who did end up receiving scholarship offers. (As BrianTan notes in another comment, we do plan to inform successful applicants for scholarships in the US before the relevant university application deadlines in order to allow them to include information about the scholarships they have been awarded in their university applications. However, as noted in my post, they will have to get started with the required advance preparation—in terms of taking the required standardised tests, collecting references, etc. - much earlier than this.)
Given the timing of when we started working on launching this program, the fact that we will need some time to process applications, and the fact that applications to the relevant universities require advance preparation, this sort of format wasn’t really an available option for us this year, but it is something we may or may not consider doing next time around (assuming we decide to run another iteration of the program).
Another thing I’ll note is that obviously, folks with sufficiently strong academic backgrounds who apply to these universities generally also have a non-zero chance of getting admitted to and receiving funding from the universities themselves (even if for one reason or another they don’t end up receiving a scholarship from us), and they should factor this into their decisions about whether to apply.
I strongly agree. My impression (not based on research, but merely on unfounded hypothesizing) is that either an non-US applicant must have a finances arranged for a US university prior to applying. I would recommend providing the approval of the scholarship in advance of being admitted to the school. This way the applicant could apply and honestly list his/her method of funding the degree. The funds would be released only after the applicant is admitted to the school.
I believe OpenPhil plans on providing the scholarship decision before being admitted to the school for those applying to the listed U.S. universities, based on this line:
That’s good. I’m glad that they thought of this. I can’t imagine the difficulties in attempting to apply for a US university (and visa) as a non-US citizen without documentation of funding.
Also, what about people who “ought” to apply but don’t know it yet? Could there be an EA scholarship program for developing nations? 1 page application, a short test, then then anyone above a certain bar gets supported in a full funding application and if successful helped applying to a university.
If I had to guess I’d think there were many barriers in the way of students applying to foreign universities.
I think something along those lines could be pretty promising. I’m not sure it’d be the best fit for Open Phil in particular (given that we generally focus on somewhat larger-scale types of grantmaking), but I know of some other folks active in this space who have expressed an interest in this idea/closely related ideas.
Another thing which I think could potentially be really valuable would be for someone to pull together in one place the most important information regarding the practicalities of applying to these and other universities as an international student (including e.g. information about how likely one is to get admitted to such-and-such a university with such-and-such an academic background, which was mentioned in another comment). My sense from skimming some of the existing resources is that they often aren’t great, although I haven’t tried very hard to look for better ones and it’s possible that something like what I have in mind here already exists—in which case just sharing a pointer to this could be equally valuable.