To solve pressing global problems — like existential risk, global poverty, and factory farming - we need more talented, ambitious, altruistic people to focus full-time on these issues.
Hundreds of thousands of these people are clustered at the world's top universities.
University is often a time when people are thinking deeply about their priorities: what they care about most, and how they want the world to be. It’s also the last time most people will seriously consider so many possible career paths. This makes university a uniquely important time to help them learn about effective altruism and get their careers off to an impactful start.
Open Philanthropy’s data supports this: when they surveyed 217 people who they believed were likely to have careers with particularly high expected altruistic value from a longtermist perspective, their respondents on average first heard of EA/EA-adjacent ideas when they were college-aged. They also asked their respondents what had been most important for them to have a positive impact. Answers were split broadly across different areas, but local groups were most frequently on respondents’ list of the biggest contributors, and within local groups, most of the impact came from university groups. (Additionally, within university groups, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, and Harvard’s groups alone were responsible for between 40-55% of all impact from groups of any kind, according to the impact points metric used in the survey analysis.)
One rough estimate from 80,000 Hours is that someone working in one of the most impactful roles creates millions of dollars of value per year. We think that the best Campus Specialists will contribute to creating around ten of these people each year (albeit with some delay before they start doing their most impactful work, and an adjustment for counterfactuals which would reduce the impact several-fold)[1]. That would mean a Campus Specialist could create tens of millions of dollars of net present value per year[2].
Claire Zabel, who’s made tens of millions of dollars of grants in the EA meta space, told us that, speaking from a longtermist perspective:
I generally recommend strong community-builders pursue movement-building activities rather than earn-to-give, even when they would be giving >$500k/year
[...]
I think top universities may be the single best overall situation for EA outreach/recruitment that exists in the world. As far as I know, nowhere/no-when else is there such a density of extremely gifted people (and people who will become very influential), for an extended period of time, during what seems to me to be the critical age for taking on new values and career plans.
There are massive opportunities for impact here, and CEA wants to help people to take them.
This means that in your early twenties you can immediately help several other people transition to higher-impact career paths — creating several lifetimes of counterfactual impact, even given that some of those people might have discovered EA at some point anyway.
We aren’t the only ones who believe that this is among the top options for students and recent graduates. From a memo by Buck Shlegeris, a manager of the EA Infrastructure Fund and CTO of Redwood Research:
My current guess is that if you are able to do student group organizing [...] don’t hate that kind of work, and are at a suitable school [...] whose student group has less than two full-time equivalents (FTEs) working on it, there’s an 80% chance that an optimal allocation of your time over the course of your undergraduate degree would involve spending at least one FTE year on student group organizing. [...] It is quite rare for someone to make a contribution to EA that impresses me as much as people who run good student groups.