Updates on CEA’s Pilot University Program

By Uni Groups Team, Joris P, jessica_mccurdy, Alex Dial @ 2024-10-30T23:20 (+24)

Today, we’re sharing two posts:

• an update on what we have been up to over the past year
• this post, where we zoom in on our pilot university program to give more context and share some future directions

We’re also announcing that we’re hiring a University Groups Strategy Lead to focus on these pilot universities!

As we’ll be attending EAG Boston this weekend, we likely won’t be able to respond to comments as quickly, but we will try our best!

TLDR

• CEA’s University Groups Team has made good progress on offering sustainable and cost-effective scalable support to principles-first EA groups. Examples are our Organizer Support Program (OSP), Groups Support Funding, University Group Organizer Retreats, and the Groups Resource Center.
• With a select number of universities, we are now piloting more involved support to see if we can take principles-first EA groups to a new level.
• Our vision is that by 2027, each of these university groups will have 8+ highly engaged members graduating per year who are taking significant actions motivated by EA principles, with talented and ambitious community builders developing programming that can benefit university group organizers globally.
• Our pilot programming this year, which we call Early OSP, includes mentorship starting earlier in the semester, a semester planning retreat, and a workshop around EAG Boston, among others.
• There is a lot more innovation possible in the space, and we are looking for a University Groups Strategy Lead to spearhead these efforts!

Background: our scalable group support

CEA's University Groups Team has developed a foundation of scalable support for EA university groups worldwide. Some of the programming we run includes:

• Our flagship Organizer Support Program (OSP), a three-week mentorship program for EA university group organizers (with many organizers receiving mentorship for a full semester). Applications are open now!
• The Groups Resource Center, the go-to place for questions and templates about group organizing
• Funding for group expenses
• Organizer retreats, a monthly newsletter, and shared resources like the EA Groups Canva

This ecosystem of support has reached hundreds of organizers across every populated continent, maintaining consistently high satisfaction ratings from participants. In 2024 alone, OSP has engaged 189 organizers from 34 countries, with participants consistently rating the program highly (average likelihood to recommend of 9.1^[1]).

Building on these scalable programs and incorporating lessons learned from previous initiatives like the Campus Specialist Program (which concluded in 2022), we are now looking to trial more involved support with a pilot cohort of university groups. We believe this initiative marks the beginning of an exciting new phase for EA university groups!

Taking principles-first EA groups to a new level

Vision

We are excited for the new Strategy Lead to own working out a full vision, but below, we describe our working vision. Within the next two academic years, by June 2027, we aim to have at least 10 EA groups at top universities operating at an exceptional level. We want talented and ambitious community builders to reliably help 8+ highly engaged people per graduating class take significant actions motivated by EA principles. These groups will match or exceed the impact of previous standout groups like Stanford EA in 2020 and Cambridge EA in 2021, with graduates regularly moving into competitive high-impact roles across a range of cause areas, from AI safety to animal welfare to global development.

When we use the phrase "top universities," we're referring to institutions that consistently graduate a high concentration of students who become influential leaders, thinkers, and philanthropists—places like Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, and similar institutions worldwide. These universities represent one important piece of our broader mission: alongside our scalable support for hundreds of EA groups globally, we're excited to pilot more intensive support at these institutions, given their track record of producing graduates who go on to tackle pressing global challenges at scale.

We're specifically focused on nurturing principles-first EA groups that emphasize core ideas like scope sensitivity, scout mindset, impartiality, and recognition of tradeoffs. Because principle-first university groups are not attached to any specific cause, they empower people to engage in honest exploration of important causes at a very valuable stage in their careers. While cause-specific groups are flourishing at many universities, we believe there's unique value in spaces where students can pressure-test their ideas, change their minds, and benefit from cross-pollination between different approaches to doing good. Our vision is that at every top university, you find groups of deeply thoughtful students asking ambitious questions about how they can help others most effectively, supporting each other in acting on their conclusions, and building the skills and knowledge to tackle the world's most pressing problems.

The path to this vision involves distinct phases. For 2024-2025, we're providing enhanced support to help these organizers excel at core activities: running impactful intro fellowships, conducting one-on-ones with their most engaged members, and supporting members in finding exciting opportunities and attending EA conferences. By 2025-2026, with continued intensive support, we expect these groups to develop stronger programming and potentially explore new approaches to community building—whether in how we introduce EA ideas, support career development, or foster truth-seeking discussions—that can then be shared for implementation by groups worldwide. Through this investment in pilot university groups, we aim to create the next generation of people dedicated to tackling the world's most pressing problems.

Goals

While we have developed initial goals for our pilot university program, we expect these to evolve, particularly as we hire someone to help lead these efforts. The following targets represent our current thinking on what success could look like:

• Strengthening the leadership pipeline: For 2025-2026, help at least 7 of our 10 pilot universities develop:
  • Strong succession plans with identified incoming organizers who are excited about accomplishing our ambitious targets

  • At least two groups demonstrating exemplary practices in both community building and fostering good epistemics^[2], that can serve as models for incoming organizers

• Building group impact: By 2026-2027, work toward each group consistently achieving^[3]:

  • 8+ new highly engaged people taking significant actions motivated by EA principles per academic year

  • 50+ students completing intro fellowships

  • 15-20 members attending EAG(x) conferences

  • Documented handover processes for sustainable leadership transitions

• Fostering innovation: By 2025-2026, support groups in developing and testing new approaches to:
  • Post-intro fellowship engagement
  • Collaborations with cause-specific groups
  • Career development support
  • Community building best practices that can benefit EA groups globally

Our programming this year: Early OSP (EOSP)

Following our planning over the summer, we launched Early OSP in July 2024. The program combines enhanced features from our regular OSP with additional support tailored for pilot universities. Current participants include 15 organizers from 10 groups across the following universities: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, UC Berkeley, UChicago, UPenn, Oxford, and Cambridge.

Early OSP has several key components:

• We started mentorship earlier and made it more intensive. Unlike regular OSP, which starts in late August, Early OSP began in July to help organizers thoroughly prepare for the academic year. Each organizer is paired with a dedicated mentor from the CEA University Groups Team or other experienced community builders.
• We hosted a semester planning retreat in Boston this August that brought together organizers from our pilot universities. The event achieved a likelihood to recommend rating of 9.6 out of 10 and led to significant increases in organizer motivation, with participants' reported motivation to engage with community building increasing from 7.2 to 8.4 out of 10.
• We're hosting a post-intro fellowship workshop following EAG Boston in November, focused on helping organizers at pilot universities develop effective post-fellowship engagement strategies. This event will bring together Early OSP participants to share best practices, coordinate on programming, and set concrete goals for the spring semester.

Initial results of EOSP have been promising. We’re still finalizing our data collection, but it seems like intro fellowship signups for most groups are up from last year (with almost all pilot university groups having 20+ signups), organizers are prioritizing one-on-one chats earlier in the semester, and EOSP participants are happy with our support: in a September pulse survey, organizers rated EOSP as a whole with an LTR of 9.6.

Some possible future ideas we’re excited about

In addition to our core programming, we're continuing to test and refine new forms of support that could benefit these groups. We think there is a lot of scope for innovation and are excited about the new Strategy Lead focused on pilot universities taking this on! While these ideas are still in early stages, here are some possible directions we're excited about:

• We want to strengthen how groups engage with students after their intro fellowship. This period often determines whether students remain engaged with EA ideas and take concrete actions. Building on our upcoming workshop, we're interested in testing new formats for advanced discussion groups, career planning support, and project incubation.
• Several successful EA groups have shown the value of having dedicated spaces on campus. These spaces can significantly boost group cohesion and engagement, especially when shared with aligned cause-specific groups. We're exploring ways to help more groups establish and make the most of physical meeting locations and co-working areas.
• We're also interested in developing resources that could significantly reduce overhead for organizers—things like testing alternatives to the traditional fellowship format, creating tools for easier event management, and expanding career development support for organizers themselves.
• We’re exploring expanding our grantmaking efforts, allowing organizers to have more resources in pursuit of their goals.
• Looking further ahead, we see the potential to extend more involved support to additional universities. While we're currently focused on building strong foundations with our pilot groups, we'll carefully consider expansion based on what we learn and the resources available.
• Other possibilities include exploring how to help launch speaker tours with influential thinkers, creating more robust career development programming for organizers, and finding ways to make organizing an even more salient and rewarding career option long-term.

Hiring

We've made encouraging progress with Early OSP while maintaining our broader support for EA university groups. To help take this work to the next level, we're looking for someone passionate about principles-first EA to join our team and drive our work supporting pilot universities!

If you're interested in helping shape the future of EA university groups at top universities, increasing the number of talented people working on pressing global problems, and building sustainable communities of thoughtful and dedicated students, we encourage you to apply!

For anonymous feedback about this post, the pilot university program, or for questions about the role, please feel free to fill out this form.

1. ^{^}

    LTR is not the only metric we use in evaluating programs. We hope to share more of our M&E processes in the future, but opted to release this update before those are ready to be widely shared.

2. ^{^}

    In the past there have been failure modes where organizers are too hyped/ overly zealous. We are just pretty far from that world right now. We definitely still want to emphasize critical thinking, humility, and good epistemics!

3. ^{^}

    These are just some of the things we care about in a good EA group. We don’t want organizers to naively optimize for these goals, and can also imagine ourselves changing the main metrics we track!