As someone who organized at the University of Mississippi—a school of loosely 20K undergrads—I can say that I understand this sentiment and there probably is some merit to it, but I am also somewhat skeptical.

Tl;dr: Outreach capabilities presumably do not linearly scale with university size, and I suspect higher-prestige universities probably attract a substantially greater proportion (5x-20x?) of engagement-adjusted EA-inclined students than most middle-tier universities, which may offset the bigger pool at larger universities. But there are probably some mid- to high-tier universities with large populations worth targeting, and there may be other meaningful benefits (e.g., diversity)

TBC, I agree that there are probably a variety of >30K undergrad schools that might be good places to organize at, in part due to the larger population. Additionally, there are probably meaningful benefits from having a more socioeconomically and/or educationally diverse population (even if only so that EA doesn’t seem as elitist).

However, I found that despite Ole Miss’ population being larger by a sizable factor than many ivy schools, organizing at Ole Miss was far less effective relative to the experiences I’ve heard from many Ivy League schools.

With the caveats that I may have simply not been a good organizer (in part due to personality and in part due to the fact that I only had 3 semesters left and became busy with my thesis in the last two), the person who said they’d co-organize with me ended up flaking (and I wasn’t able to find another co-organizer), and COVID hit the semester after it was created: I probably put in some ~5-10 hours a week on average for most of the semester when I began the org, and still struggled to get people interested.

I put up fliers, blasted groupmes, told people in clubs (especially debate, which probably made up about 50% of regular attendance), tabled at the fresher fair, invited friends, ran informational sessions in welcome week, asked faculty to send emails to departments, got the org included in the honors college newsletter, gave brief presentations in a few classes totaling some 150–200 students (e.g., philosophy and ethics classes), got school funding for free pizza, and at one point even submitted an unrelated article to a student publication on the condition that the editor would attend a discussion meeting (his idea, not mine)—but still failed to attract a co-organizer or maintain sufficient attendance into the second semester.

(At the time, I was not aware of retreats and fellowships, and probably wouldn’t have had the capacity; they also might have been fairly new/limited in 2019)

In contrast, the stories I’ve heard and seen at more prestigious universities tend to be that even with a significantly smaller student population, a number of students happily dive into EA events with relatively little hand-holding or encouragement, and some even happily volunteer to help out with organizing.

In summary, some of my thoughts have been:

1. I think that ivy leagues just attract a significantly greater proportion of EA-inclined people. In contrast, I think that many high-impact/proto-EA/EA-inclined people just don’t choose to attend most middle-tier universities like Ole Miss. Personally, I was a proto-EA through most of high school and college, and the reasons that I attended Ole Miss are complicated/uncommon (probably including: I was homeschooled, a bit lazy about college choices, simplistically settled on a career path I figured was high-impact without doing much research, that career path was intelligence analysis which isn’t a common minor/major, and Ole Miss had fantastic scholarships). At the risk of sounding very pretentious, I’ll say I often felt out of place among my peers at Ole Miss—and retrospectively think I was especially out of place now that I’ve interacted with more EAs (and other people) from higher-prestige universities. If an Ivy League population is ~1/5th that of a large university but the prevalence of Proto-EAs is >5x that at middle-tier large universities (it might be more like 10–20x), then it’s worth prioritizing Ivies, ceteris paribus.
2. Your reach does not linearly correlate with the size of the university: you shouldn’t expect to reach 5x as many people at a university 5x the size, in part due to attention competition with other organizations (especially Greek). Additionally, it’s probably easier to attract people you know rather than total randos, and you can’t just know proportionally more people at larger universities.

As someone who's been to a <5% acceptance rate school and a school that no one outside my city knows exists, I agree with this assessment.

To ground this discussion, I'll be using stats from the 2020 EA demographics survey.

Specifically, this chart of EA's alma maters.

As you can see, that's a huge overrepresentation from elite universities. Over 1/3 of respondents come from Oxbridge or T20 universities. The top-heaviness is even wilder if you dig into EA's funding sources. By 80k's own estimates, 80% of EA's funding essentially comes from the work of Dustin Moskovitz from Harvard and Sam Bankman-Fried from MIT.^[1]

There's arguably some justification for this:

1. Impact has a top-heavy distribution. I forget which post I saw, but the basic premise was that in the same way EA charities can be 1,000 times more impactful than the average charity, the work of a few influential EAs can be 1,000 times more impactful than the average EA. Some examples cited were AI research and policy. Personally, I agree. Do I want to think of myself as a temporarily embarrassed billionaire philanthropist? Sure. But realistically, why the hell would I have a problem with someone doing a lot of good? Go nuts.
2. On the wealth front, you could argue that's just a reflection of existing systemic inequality. Global and societal wealth is largely concentrated in the top 10% or top 1%, and any nonprofit seeking funds would essentially mirror that distribution. And in any case, unless EA prioritises wealth redistribution as a nonnegotiable movement goal/cause area, isn't it a good thing that there are billionaires using their wealth, privilege and influence to fund solutions instead of demanding normal people donate? I try to donate, but I'm thankful the movement doesn't have to live or die based on whether a thousand EAs buy slightly more expensive ergonomic chairs or nice meals every Friday.

However, I think the argument for diversity remains compelling:

1. In terms of neglectedness, this early in the movement, it's just logical to reach out to underrepresented demographics. A worldwide movement of a few thousand people should be evolving and adapting, and the 99% of institutions that are underrepresented present a compelling case. If this were a cause area exploration, it would be really weird to settle for engaging the top 1% just because they responded first.
2. EA is ultimately about using evidence and reason to do the most good. Compared to other goals like making a lot of money, this goal benefits from diversity of perspective. If EA wants to solve humanity's problems, you'd think it would be beneficial to have more perspectives that are closer to explored cause areas, or perspectives that can make a case for a currently-neglected cause area.

Overall, I agree. And for certain EAs reading this who remain unconvinced, I doubt EA would have grown to what it is today if Will Macaskill had decided that American EAs weren't worth the trouble of reaching out to, or that certain initially-unpopular cause areas weren't worth acknowledging.

1. ^{^}

   Yes, I know FTX has a very EA-aligned team and is not just SBF. However, if you attempt to break down the actual alma maters of the FTX leadership, you'll find it only strengthens my point.

I also agree that an EA priority in the next decade is to become more diverse, and applaud this for being a tractable first step, not a full solution.

This feels very related to the recent post Most Ivy-smart students aren't at Ivy-tier schools, which notes near the beginning: 

I don't address/argue the normative claim that EA should focus less on college rank at the individual (e.g., hiring) and/or community (e.g., which schools' EA groups to invest more resources in developing) levels, but that would indeed be a non-crazy takeaway if the post makes you update in the direction I expect it to, on average!