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.
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.