Hi Nathan, I’m one of the co-organizers along with Juliana and I’ve thought a lot about quantitatively measuring attrition rates and the types of people more interested in EA.
We found it hard—at least on the level of one club—to measure things like attrition rate for a few different reasons:
First, there are so many factors that may cause someone to attrit from a club, ranging from them not being a good fit to them simply not having the time (as @DavidNash mentioned).
These factors also are so variable: as Juliana mentioned, if she didn’t like interacting with her group (me especially) as much, she probably wouldn’t have continued engaging in EA. One bad session or rude person in your group may make the difference between a person continuing to engage or leaving.
These factors all also have such small effect sizes and also intersect with each other, to the point that it becomes very hard to suss out any sort of causality or clear picture from quantitative data.
This is where (in my experience) these more qualitative approaches become more useful, as we are naturally attuned to gathering peoples’ impressions.
Second, there’s going to be a lot of selection bias: most people (at least I would suspect) in most universities aren’t interested in EA (again, for many factors) and so any confusion matrix of people ‘interested/not-interested in EA’ and ‘whether they join’ is going to be very heavily weighted towards ‘not-interested x not join’. And so the vast majority of people who come to an information night or express some sort of interest are not leaving for any particular reason, but rather because they just aren’t interested in EA [enough].
But as you mentioned, there may be a lot of value in sort-of qualitatively-quantitatively measuring attrition rates on the scale of CEA—instead of trying to find reasons as for why people are not staying on a group-level, the CEA Groups team could survey reasons for why group organizers think people leave, and perhaps use that to create helpful resources.
Hi David, I think that is actually quite a big factor! I noticed in particular that there are people in our group we think are particularly well-suited for EA but don’t have the time and/or energy to engage. These sorts of people agree with the ideas, are motivated to make an impact, and also have sufficient work ethic to do so, but can’t make it to the meetings precisely because they’re too busy making an impact. I personally think these people are the ones we want to expose to EA ideas, but it is difficult to engage them.
We have a couple different ideas for engaging these sorts of people more:
First, having a strong community and friend-group associated with our group creates a social obligation (for lack of a better word) to attend, and also makes it more fun to attend. The people in this community will also have lots of EA-adjacent people in their network and/or other friend-groups, who would also be exposed to EA ideas.
Second, having low-commitment events at non-busy times of the year (e.g., a social event early in the semester) means that those sorts of people are more likely to attend. This also introduces them to the ‘community’ I mentioned earlier, which allows them to be more engaged.
Third, as you mentioned, we also find a lot of value in having a more ‘wide’ network of EA-affiliated people on our campus, rather than just having a tight-knit community and encouraging people to join. Not everyone is looking for an EA-style community, but may still want to engage with the ideas, or want career advice (we’ve noticed a few people like that). This also allows people to move in and out of the wider ‘network’ and tight-knit group with ease, (hopefully) reducing attrition.